Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
ethanzuckerman.com
Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
#2If I understand it right, gobo uses twitter's and facebook's APIs using user's access token to fetch the results and applies filter to it.
What if the feeds from the APIs are already conditioned/personalized for the user ? I didn't sign up for gobo because I don't have a twitter or facebook anymore. I left these social medias for the very reasons that Gobo is trying to solve.
Re: Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
#3The nice thing about Reddit is that content is strongly encouraged to group into subreddits making it easy to filter. My only problem is the opt-in model. I'd rather it be an opt-out model, show me r/all minus the blacklisted subreddits. They added a filter to r/all recently but it is limited to only 100 subreddits and is a pain to manage on mobile. So I wrote a script that periodically signs in as me and hides posts from subreddits I've blacklisted. It was initially getting the list from a google sheet but I've recently done something smarter. I have the script auto-subscribe to all new subreddits it sees on the front page and then monitor whether I stay subscribed. If it notices that I manually unsubscribed from a subreddit it takes that as a sign to blacklist that subreddit. It works amazingly.
Re: Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
#4Gobo's a very interesting experiment in social media and news aggregation.
I think the premise for the service is very insightful -- we're inundated with information and we want to filter it. FB, Twitter etc. give us very few tools to do that -- why? Because we're the product, not the customer. They want to customize us. They don't want us customizing them. They want to make our attention as saleable to advertisers as possible.
So Gobo turns that on its head and gives you the power to filter as you like. I think the filters Gobo has chosen to implement, such as "only show me posts from a certain gender or race," are stupid beyond belief and I hope they never become popular.
This post nails the problem statement though.
Re: Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
#5If I understand it right, gobo uses twitter's and facebook's APIs using user's access token to fetch the results and applies filter to it. What if the feeds from the APIs are already conditioned/personalized for the user ? I didn't sign up for gobo because I don't have a twitter or facebook anymore. I left these social medias for the very reasons that Gobo is trying to solve.
Wait, facebook doesn't provide your full friends feed stream. How do they get it?
Re: Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
#6If I understand it right, gobo uses twitter's and facebook's APIs using user's access token to fetch the results and applies filter to it. What if the feeds from the APIs are already conditioned/personalized for the user ? I didn't sign up for gobo because I don't have a twitter or facebook anymore. I left these social medias for the very reasons that Gobo is trying to solve.
Wait, facebook doesn't provide your full friends feed stream. How do they get it?
They don't.
From la poast
> You’ll also notice that there’s probably a lot less content from Facebook than from Twitter. Facebook allows us to show you posts from public pages, but not from your friends’ individual pages. We’re exploring ways you might be able to feed your whole, unedited Facebook news feed through Gobo, but we’re not there yet.
Re: Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
#7It's amazing how much of the past we ignore. We already learned years ago that the best filtering is one you manage yourself. kill-files, procmail rules, spam-filters, etc all work better when the user has control. I don't see why you would use a system that lets anyone send anything to you without that personal level of filtering available.
Re: Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
#8I'm glad the minds over at MIT are working on this issue, as I think it will be the most trying problem of our time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...
It's the reason propaganda works: people can only stand against the flow for so long before their will is broken down. If you are assaulted every day by messages, without any possibility of verifying their veracity, you will either shutdown completely, or become influenced by lies. Trust is a huge part of the human experience, and the internet has eroded that.
Re: Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
#9Apparently google and the traditional media ( nytimes, wapo in collusion with the government/cia ).
Re: Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social
#10“What is Gobo?” Is buried deep in the article:
To use Gobo, you link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to Gobo and choose a set of news publications that most closely resembles the news you follow online. Gobo retrieves recent posts from these social networks and lets you decide which ones you want to see.