Dear Democrats, Read This If You Do Not Understand Why Trump Won

Uh, does this guy not care about the candidates policies? People who went from sanders to trump don't make sense to me when you consider their positions on many major policies.

When Hillary lost to one of the worst candidates ever in Trump, then its her fault. But from what I seen in social media, Hillary's supporters are just blaming everyone else for the loss rather than finding fault in their candidate.

I have even seen tweets claiming all Trump's voters (60 million people) are sexist, racist etc. It could just be a simple fact that people value other things more than just sexism and racism.

Trump just sold people a better future to this voters than Hillary did. Whether he is going to solve any issues of his voters, is a different thing.

How Trump won is a different question from whether Trump's voters are directly responsible for the harm that will be caused to minority groups in the next 4-8 years. Hillary can be an awful candidate and Trump's supporters can have caused harm towards people on the basis of race and gender - it's not an either/or.

> I have no idea how to fix this.

I think this is the responsibility of "the media". They should be the ones looking at the "truth" from all sides and presenting a equidistant picture.

It's just that we don't have "media" anymore, they're all just tools for delivering advertising.

Media has moved to the Internet - "social media" which doesn't yet have a clearly defined role/goal in society.

It has an impact allright, but not necessarily intended, it just kind of happened by itself.

Now the responsibility is on these Internet companies to implement the proper information dissemination algorithms, otherwise we might end up with civil wars all over the world.

For example, if you follow a "democrat" leader, Facebook should force you to follow a "republican" leader too.

In general, whenever there's something divisive, these tools should "push" opposing views to you as well, in order to avoid the formation of "echo chambers".

>I have no idea how to fix this.

I don't either, but I'd love to get some brainstorming started.

Some naive solutions (and, please, feel free to point out why each of them won't work -- any maybe what you'd change to get closer to a solution!):

1. News "aggregator" sites that pull from both sides of the spectrum -- though people would probably just pick and choose which articles they read and which they raged over (assuming they didn't just revert back to CNN/Fox immediately)

2. Some neutralizing layer on top of all news sites that pulls out glittering generalities, biased phrasing, etc -- though you'd still have the issue of which stories are being reported on, and those "neutered" articles could easily be less interesting to read (and of course this would be difficult to get right, but I don't think difficulty to implement should be a barrier to trying something)

3. Some gamification of understanding and debate, that rewards people for taking the time to read posts from the other side and thoughtfully sharing their opinions on why they agree/disagree, or pairs people up with someone in private to have a discussion over it (just saw something on HN the other day for this), or something else to facilitate seeing things from someone else's POV

4. A more traditional game (as in, actually a game) that mirrors the real world (in the same way the Stock Market Game mirrors stock market prices) in which you play as someone with a different point of view (e.g. you're given a fictional character and role-play as them) and try to make compromises with other players to achieve peace in an evolving fictional world

One other question is this: how do we get people to want to escape their echo chambers? Many people enjoy or are just fine being surrounded by people that agree with them. Lots of people actually go out of their way to remove those who disagree with them (as is popular on e.g. Facebook and G+ right now). How do we convince people that, yes, sometimes it's good to hear dissenting ideas?

I see so many people upset right now, and it's clear there's a myriad of deep-set problems at work that can't be fixed with a simple bandaid solution. It's frustrating when you see a problem like this and have no idea how to fix it.