Comment by AlexandrB

Comment by AlexandrB 5 days ago

15 replies

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What matters is not the diversity of the overall userbase but the diversity of what gets shown to you. From my (limited) experience TikTok is hyper-targeted and will narrow in on your interests/biases quickly and keep you in that bubble.

HN (and reddit) generally lacks this hyper-targeting. Obviously, just the act of going to HN is selecting for a certain cross-section of opinions, but once you're there what you see is determined by the community and not by your own personal preferences.

gcr 5 days ago

It sounds like you’re saying that personalized feeds are the key problem?

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  • AlexandrB 4 days ago

    Absolutely. In two specific ways:

    1. There's often little or no visibility on how this personalization happens. People with often try to guess and steer the algorithm but the reality is you don't know. This means that unpopular opinions can be quietly suppressed with no detectable censorship. On the poster/creator side this presents as constant paranoia about "shadow banning" and the like.

    2. The personalized feeds are effectively endless. This allows for repetition that really amplifies any biases/fears. For example, suppose you're worried that the roads are getting more dangerous and you go on Instagram and start looking at car crash reels. Instagram will happily feed you as much of these as you can stomach and it starts to affect your perception of reality. Never mind that you're looking at incidents captured over a period of years from all over the world, seeing them all back to back will probably give you anxiety the next time you go to cross the street. Now apply this same logic to any political topic...

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suraci 5 days ago

Tiktok(or other algorithm-suggesting platforms) provides echo chambers for each user

HN/subreddit provides a single echo chamber for everyone

that's why I like HN more, I don't want to be in my echo chamber, I perfer visiting your chamber

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  • dang 4 days ago

    You're welcome here, and you're welcome to express contrarian views—that's an important part of an intellectually curious community, which is our goal with HN. However, we need you to do it while sticking to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You've unfortunately been breaking them in various places already.

    I know how hard it is to be in the minority on a contentious topic without getting provoked (and then becoming provocative oneself), but that's what we need commenters with minority views to do. Otherwise we end up having to moderate the accounts, not because we want to suppress minority views but because we have to enforce HN's rules.

    I've written about this extensively because it's such a consistent phenomenon. Here's one post if you (or anyone) wants a fuller explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722. There are plenty more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

    It's in your interest to do this, because then you maximize the persuasive power of your comments. Conversely, if you succumb to the pressure to be indignant and/or snarky and/or flamey and so on, that ends up discrediting your views, which is particularly damaging if they happen to be true: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

    (p.s. I'm an admin here in case that wasn't obvious)

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    • suraci 4 days ago

      sorry being snarky, hard to help it, my bad, again

      and there's misunderstanding, I was not provoked, at least in the comment above

      it's not a critique to HN, in fact, isn't it obvious that HN inevitably ends to a echo chamber? unpopular opinions greyed out, popular opinions ranked up, wasn't it design to be this?

      it's not that bad, most communities are echo chambers

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      • nibbles 2 days ago

        You are 100% correct but HN mods will pretend this is not the case. This site is heavily moderated just like all major subreddits. Dissenting opinion will be silenced either by gang-flagging or dang taking action personally. HN is reddit in a tie.

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    • nibbles 2 days ago

      > you're welcome to express contrarian views—that's an important part of an intellectually curious community, which is our goal with HN

      Well, that's a straight out lie! :)

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      • dang 2 days ago

        We don't ban accounts for expressing contrarian views. We do ban accounts for breaking the site guidelines, especially when they do it repeatedly.

        But nobody ever says "I was banned for breaking the site guidelines". What they do instead is make new accounts to claim "I was banned for my contrarian views". How noble that sounds!

        https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

        The tell is that they never supply links (e.g. to their previous account(s) or the place(s) they were banned). If moderation is so bad, why not allow readers to see what actually happened and make up their own minds? And yet these complaints are always linkless...

        https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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