31–40 of 245 posts
This 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."
> "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…
Keep in mind that it is "average" and it is about close friends. Anecdotally, the pandemic was the great cutting of weaker ties. I talk to far fewer people than I did pre-pandemic (and most friends report the same), but I speak to those people more often. I can easily see that ending in a way where some 20% find themselves with nobody. I would say I have 4 close friends. But some 10 weaker ties disappeared from my li…
Weaker ties would include friends that have less in common, and have different ideas. But that fact that they are a friend means that you are aware of their existence and different ideas. In that way, having a broad range of weak friends suggests that you can see things from different perspectives instead of in your own (close) friend bubble.
It's like how people are less likely to know their neighbors now, who can hold different ideas. But you don't have to be close friends with them to have some empathy.
Related:
https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/populism-fast-an...
> "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…
Loneliness is a big topic now due to the pandemic, and the lingering trends from stay/work-at-home mandates.
I favor the theory that polarization is due to decreasing attention spans, effectively preventing us from appropriately considering nuance. Related: https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/populism-fast-an...
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…
I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.
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…
That means there can be a bunch of algorithms/filters out there to choose from (any tech savvy person could make their own as a blend of others that exist) and the end user could basically choose which feed[s] to subscribe to.
The internet has accelerated this.
Understanding other cultures and giving me a chance to experience them has always been the quickest way to get me to become far more stereotypical / bigoted. I am willing to be open and idealistic about most any idea / ethnicity / culture but once I actually face it in real life and question if I want my kids exposed to that, then the rubber hits the road. The internet has accelerated this.