Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
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Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
#2Links are "DOI NOT FOUND". Article does not seem to suggest that the study actual found any relationship between the increase in the two things, just that they both happened around the same time.
Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
#3Links are "DOI NOT FOUND". Article does not seem to suggest that the study actual found any relationship between the increase in the two things, just that they both happened around the same time.
The common demoninator is the rise of social media networks.
Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
#4This always seemed intuitively inevitable if you ever played with a graph layout tool like dot or similar kinetic layout engine. With weak connectivity the nodes don't cluster readily, but with more connections they "snap" into rigid subassemblies. It always seemed to me like a bad thing for society but it could well be a case of "old man yells at moon."
Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
#5Links are "DOI NOT FOUND". Article does not seem to suggest that the study actual found any relationship between the increase in the two things, just that they both happened around the same time.
Unfortunately, even for the most fast-moving journals, that time is typically several hours before the actual articles appear on the journal’s website. So, anyone who’s reading quickly is likely to find that the DOI fails.
But that rule only applies to the fast-moving journals, like Nature and Science. Many other journals can take a few days between when they allow journalists to write about a paper and when it becomes available to the scientific community—PNAS, which is a major source of material for us, falls in that category.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/03/dois-and-their-disco...
Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
#6The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit.
For details see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45515980
The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
Each person should be able to control what they can post and view online, but not what anyone else posts or views. The norms that we use to moderate physical public spaces must not be applied to online public spaces. Until we discard those norms, people will continue to become increasingly polarized, democracy will continue to decline worldwide, and violent conflicts will continue to increase in frequency and scale.
Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
#7"An information flow model for conflict and fission in small groups (1977)" by Wayne W. Zachary [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3629752.pdf]
I know this paper isn't about social networks, but we know this, we knew it in the 70s. The only difference is that we continue to ignore and forget it.
Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
#8The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit. For details see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45515980 The solution is to ban all…
>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
This is such a HN response. A HN reader might think it's fun to spend a weekend on writing/testing a ranking algorithm, but not the average person. They're just going to use whatever the platform recommends.
Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
#9The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit. For details see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45515980 The solution is to ban all…
In practice I don't think this really changes anything at least for moderation. It takes a bunch of time and effort to moderate online communities - under the process outlined by the post you linked most communities are going to have a single effective clientside moderation list you can subscribe to anyway.
Totally unmoderated internet communities would be completely unusable because of spam, and it's also questionable whether you could even stay up with no serverside moderation - you'd have to delete stuff otherwise it just takes one script kiddie with a botnet to flood your disk space with garbage.
(User produced ranking/filtering algos though I can see being viable)
Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
#10The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit. For details see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45515980 The solution is to ban all…
>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots. This is such a HN response. A HN reader might think it's fun to spend a weekend on writing/testing a ranking algorithm, but not the average person. They're just goi…
We need to ban the platform from recommending at all.
It would be like more sophisticated Adblock. There are many providers of Adblock lists, but they can't be provided by the platform itself.