31–40 of 256 posts
Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.
The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid mods with a power complex.
Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?
If your complaint is that the right-wing lies of the laptop story weren’t amplified, then you desire propaganda to be spread. We should, as a society, want to stop liars from lying.
There so much misinformation, fabrication and half truths out there. Repeateted over and over again in various forms.
When the full story surfaces two days later, they'll never see that on their cult hub.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN certainly leans one way. X has gone more central. BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.
> BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow. It would be nice if this were true, but I did an experiment where I created a new account on a VM with a new IP not previously connected to me and it almost immediately started serving me right wing slop regardless of who I followed. It seems obvious to me from this anecdote t…
Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works? The article only shows one plot of one specific instance, and there could be more than one explanation for the sudden drop in viewership (especially given the involvement of Twitter's owner).
Funnily enough we should know that, since Elon promised to open source the algorithm in the name of transparency. But what actually happened is they dropped a one-time snapshot onto GitHub two years ago, never updated it, and never acknowledged it again. Many such cases.
We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion that influence is the new capital. And we are replicating the systems that allow for the accumulation of capital in this new digital age.
> Social proof used to reflect crowd wisdom. Now it reflects algorithmic endorsement — triggered not by consensus, but by proximity to influence. A single interaction can distort scale, making selected content appear widely supported. I think this is barking up the right tree with the wrong lesson - these things are the same. Elon Musk, for worse mostly, is a social influencer. You can tell because a lot of people fo…
Elon Musk owns the platform. He directly dictates how it works. He ordered engineers to boost his posts by a factor of 1000.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
Whether some people like EM’s posts is beside the point. It’s manufactured.
It’s hilarious to look back at old threads on the orange site where people made wild claims, like calling Twitter a “public utility” without much thought. But honestly, I always saw the company as vulnerable to these issues. That’s why Masnick’s article “Protocols not Platforms” is still so spot-on. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
Pretty sure people calling it a public utility was always an aspirational claim and not an earnest belief that it had a governance structure that made it immune to such an attack…
>See Marsh v. Alabama for this -- a company town was prohibited from barring picketing and pamphleting on private sidewalks. [user?id=rabite]
Reading that I couldn't help but think there's parallels to HN. At least HN tries to be transparent about "the algorithm", and it's essentially a dumb algorithm compared to what X/FB/etc use.