TED
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2012–2025
9:05 · 1.7M views · May 2, 2011
Eli Pariser's TED talk argues that personalized web services trap users in filter bubbles, limiting exposure to challenging information. He says this is bad for individuals and for democracy.
Cited as an early, prescient warning about algorithmic personalization, echo chambers and social media feeds.
7 comments from Hacker News
The Filter Bubble Ted talk is what motivated me to dump social media. this video Gone are my Facebook, G+, Reddit accounts. I have a Twitter which I curate manually with numerous feeds from all over. I generally look at content like links first then read the Twitter discussion if any. I treat posting as a personal catharsis anymore, and use throwaway accounts. IMO my online opinions are going to get lost in the crush so why bother curating an identity. One that just creates a signal trail for advertising and snoopers? I talk to the people in my life more instead. These have been conscious decisions on my part and honestly I think I'm mentally happier and less frustrated "at the world" for it. MMS is good enough for sharing pics with grandma and grandpa. Though I've asked them to keep most off social media. It's too creepy having the world ogle my kids. They don't like it but abide. IMO despite being my mom she's old and has less life left than my kids. Nothing to worry about by posting her life on Facebook My kids on the other hand have their whole lives ahead of them. I would rather it not be broadcast without their consent. If they get older and decide to go all Jayden Smith or Paris Hilton on social media so be it. But these services are not what humanity needs to progress. They are today's fascination. And I am not into it. So fuck em
I did put "vaguely related" in the rant warning, didn't I? :-) Though news.google.com is what I was thinking of with the current affairs example, it generalizes to the whole Google edifice, and to Facebook too. I really suggest having a look at this: this video to see what I'm talking about, with actual examples. Minor quibble: autocomplete isn't to aid in searching common topics, it's to help Google avoid failed searches through misspelt queries. ",)
Clap for Carers during Covid was a national psychological experiment to measure conformity. Brexit was the closest you could get to resurrecting the Nazi party in the UK 60 years later as another conformity experiment. How do you measure conformity across a country? TV Set top boxes being paused at 8pm on Thursday, wifi connected devices seeing a weakening signal, social media posts. The internet is a security services and big businesses surveillance tool wet dream. Whats been interesting since is how various websites and their algorithms are being used to challenge your view point. What Eli Pariser highlighted in his Ted talk 12 years ago ( this video ) has grown to all the major US tech companies because if everyone has their nose in a device connected to some website, the state can control people in deniable spooky hacker ways. Remember intelligence is a cheaper and easier form of nipping problems in the bud before you have to puts boots on the ground, beit military boots or police boots, and at least here in the UK every element of the state is involved in surveillance, including the NHS and the educational system.
If only someone had seen this coming: this video It’s because humans latch onto language as if their map is reality Even here there’s a pretentious filtering to conform to the memory of the group in charge; this syntactic structure is of course the proper and correct format! It’s our biology choosing self which socially is to conserve our own perception Online everyone is being normalized the conserve the perception of mods/platform owners (aka just more normal vain humans, no need to deify them) rather than out in the world normalizing to a more unique creole of sorts The abstracts of STEM are a terrible philosophy for building social life. Created a bored and repetitive culture that depends on taking a knee before some webmaster rando for comments to avoid shadow bans
I think part of the problem is that one benefit of the web is to be exposed to new ideas, and passive users are hardly benefiting from seeing stuff that doesn't challenge them. Centralisation of power is not just a problem in that Facebook tailors content to your preferences, but also that it has the power to choose how it does so. For example, I believe that Facebook said that it might choose to ignore that a user clicked "Show me less of this", because what we say we want isn't always what we actually want. Another example is that when even people who have liked an organisation's page don't see its content, Facebook basically forces them to pay for advertising. Some of these ideas I found in a TED talk: this video