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Comment by AlexandrB

4 days ago

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.

15 comments

AlexandrB

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gcr  4 days ago

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

  • 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...

suraci  4 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

  • 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://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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

    • 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

      1 reply →

    • 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! :)

      6 replies →