Comment by suraci
4 days ago
TBO, TikTok and Twitter are far more diverse than HN, which is merely an echo chamber, only slightly better than a subreddit.
Although I like HN more than TikTok, it's so funny
4 days ago
TBO, TikTok and Twitter are far more diverse than HN, which is merely an echo chamber, only slightly better than a subreddit.
Although I like HN more than TikTok, it's so funny
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.
It sounds like you’re saying that personalized feeds are the key problem?
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...
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
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://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
(p.s. I'm an admin here in case that wasn't obvious)
9 replies →
I mean, you're not wrong. I come to HN to see how awful the tech ghouls are being today.
1 reply →
"Echo chamber" is a tautology by this point. What's bad about a narrower focus? It's good to cross pollinate on occasion but you're not going to ever get to deep discussions when you have the same arguments over and over with people who share little common ground. I don't come to HN to read what flat earthers think about that gorgeous photo of the Earth's curve taken by an astronaut, and I can have productive disagreements with other technologists.
> I can have productive disagreements with other technologists
Only for tech topics
Things went ugly(but fun!) for political/geopolitical topics, 'unpopular' opinions will be grayed out, opinions survived coalesced into the essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit