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Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

phys.org

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Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#11

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

In-group dynamics are further ingrained as the group gets bigger. If you have 4 friends in a group, their opinions aren't as strong. If you have 40 friends in a group, not only are their opinions stronger, they'll fight vigorously to defend the group's commonly accepted beliefs. So a growing social circle does reinforce the group dynamic. (this is well established by lots of studies)

But increased polarization around the world isn't because of this. There's the typical environmental factors: an increase in changes (or challenges) to traditional values increases polarization; an influx of migrants increases polarization. But then there's also social media, where mastery of "engagement" by businesses for profit has been adopted by political groups looking to sow division to reap the benefits of polarization (an easier grip on power). The rapid rise of polarization is a combination of both.

It's nothing new of course, political/ideological groups have been doing this forever. We just have far more advanced tools with which to polarize.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#12

Post by kiba »

gruez wrote: post #8
txrx0000 wrote: post #6

The 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…

Most people will use the default algorithm. A minority will choose a different algorithm.

It's only a partial solution. Really, the correct response is regulatory oversight and taxation on remaining economic rent. They are monopolies, and should be regulated as such.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#14

Post by philipkglass »

gruez wrote: post #8
txrx0000 wrote: post #6

The 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…

It's impractical even for tinkerers. YouTube claims to get over 20 million videos uploaded daily and it has well over 10 billion stored videos in its corpus. The metadata alone is tens of terabytes. The usual introduction-to-recommendations approaches out there are going to completely fall over on an item set of this size, even if you have disk space to spare.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#15

Post by crazygringo »

> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.

If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse.

Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#16

Post by txrx0000 »

p1necone wrote: post #9
txrx0000 wrote: post #6

The 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 questionab…

There are multiple providers of Adblock lists. It would be like that, not single-provider.

Regarding banning server-side moderation, we probably can't do it without decentralizing content delivery in a BitTorrent fashion. But even half measures like replacing moderators with client-side filters would be a big improvement.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#17

Post by txrx0000 »

philipkglass wrote: post #14
gruez wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It's impractical even for tinkerers. YouTube claims to get over 20 million videos uploaded daily and it has well over 10 billion stored videos in its corpus. The metadata alone is tens of terabytes. The usual introduction-to-recommendations approaches out there are going to completely fall over on an item set of this size, even if you have disk space to spare.

The server can deliver a sparsely randomly sampled RSS feed of embedding vectors and metadata.

Fetch media after ranking on-device.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#18

Post by zkmon »

Polarization maybe a bit unclear word here. Connectivity creates cohesion, which creates larger creatures. So what we have is, virtual monsters roaming around with huge human groups riding on them. They can organize real protests, polarized opinion and massive impact wherever these monsters go.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#19

Post by tanseydavid »

crazygringo wrote: post #15

> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer. If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse . Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuin…

>> goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse

This seems like a hot-take. IMHO one does not and cannot cure loneliness by having more online friends.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#20

Post by user2722 »

crazygringo wrote: post #15

> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer. If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse . Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuin…

Indeed. Conflicting info.

NOTE: I did NOT read the article.

If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend.

We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?

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