Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The political effects of X's feed algorithm

werd.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 107 posts

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#41

Post by tokyobreakfast »

SecretDreams wrote: post #10
Aurornis wrote: post #7

I don’t know if I buy the explanation that this was due to the feed algorithm. It looks like an artifact of being exposed to X’s current user base instead of their old followers. When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. So changing your fee…

Is this the result of a feedback loop from musk joining or did they just accelerate the overall decline of the platform with him joining? Some might say it was going this way even before he picked it up, but it was certainly an inflection point when he joined either way. All modern social media is pretty toxic to society, so I don't participate. Even HN/Reddit is borderline. Nothing is quite as good as the irc and fo…

> Even HN/Reddit is borderline.

It's the proliferation of downvoting. It disincentivizes speaking your honest opinion and artificially boosts mass-appeal ragebait.

It's detrimental to having organic conversations.

"But the trolls" they say.

In practice it's widely abused.

Using HN as an example, there are legitimate textbook opinions that will boost your comment to the top, and ones that will quickly sink to the bottom and often be flagged away for disagreement. Ignoring obvious spam which is noise, there is no correlation to "right" or "wrong".

That's one advantage old-school discussion forums and imageboards have. Everyone there and all comments therein are equally shit. No voting with the tribe to reinforce your opinion.

What's worse is social media allowed the mentally ill to congregate and reinforce their own insane opinions with plenty of upvotes, which reinforces their delusions as a form of positive feedback. When we wonder aloud how things have become more radicalized in the last 20 years — that's why. Why blame the users when you built the tools?

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#43

Post by 0ckpuppet »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #8
rbanffy wrote: post #2

And this is why the price for Twitter was, in the end, remarkably low.

Yeah, this was always the play looking back in hindsight. Like, I didn't get it, "why would you pay that kind of money for a web forum?!" It wasn't the forum that was important, Twitter (for better or worse) has wormed it's way into the fabric of American discourse. He was basically buying the ideological thermostat for the country and turning the dial to the right.

as opposed to the government funding turning it to the reality bending left? There was direct communication from Senators and members of Congress directing twitter to block and ban based on certain topics. And Twitter obliged.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#44

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #7

I don’t know if I buy the explanation that this was due to the feed algorithm. It looks like an artifact of being exposed to X’s current user base instead of their old followers. When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. So changing your fee…

[deleted]

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#45

Post by spankalee »

Herring wrote: post #29
spankalee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. The CEO is opening posting white supremacist content like it's Stormfront. If you don't support that, you should get out.

I don’t know which country you’re in, but in the US Trump won the popular vote. Plenty of people here are perfectly happy with Stormfront.

I think the idea that if you don't support white supremacy you should get off the site owned and run by a clear white supremacist applies regardless of how elections go.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#46

Post by apparent »

What does it mean to have someone on a chronological feed, versus the algorithmic one? Does that mean a chronological feed of the accounts they follow? I hardly ever use that, since I don't follow many people, and some people I follow post about lots of stuff I don't care about

from the study:

> We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#47

Post by stetrain »

cyrusradfar wrote: post #23

Lovely thought Ben. Good to hear from you! I spent a lot of my life and money thinking about building better algorithms (over five years). We have a bit of a chicken / egg problem. Is it the algorithm or is it the preference of the Users which is the problem. I'd argue the latter. What I learned which was counter-intuitive was that the vast majority of people aren't interested in thinking hard. This community, in lar…

> Is it the algorithm or is it the preference of the Users which is the problem. I'd argue the latter.

> Algorithms serve what Users engage with

User engagement isn't actually the same thing as user preference, even though I think many people and companies take the shortcut of equating the two.

People often engage more with things they actually don't like, and which create negative feelings.

These users might score higher on engagement metrics when fed this content, but actually end up leaving the platform or spending less time there, or would at least answer in a survey question that they don't like some or most of the content they are seeing.

This is a major reason I stopped using Threads many months ago. Their algorithm is great at surfacing posts that make me want to chime in with a correction, or click to see the rest of the truncated story. But that doesn't mean I actually liked that experience.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#48

Post by dylan604 »

RetpolineDrama wrote: post #35
piloto_ciego wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this was always the play looking back in hindsight. Like, I didn't get it, "why would you pay that kind of money for a web forum?!" It wasn't the forum that was important, Twitter (for better or worse) has wormed it's way into the fabric of American discourse. He was basically buying the ideological thermostat for the country and turning the dial to the right.

Or from the other perspective: Meta and Google have had their finger on the scale for more than a decade (along with old twitter). In twitters case, you had regime officials directing censorship illegally through open emails and meetings. It's no surprise that the needle moves right when you dial back the suppression of free expression even a little bit (X still censors plenty)

How is it illegal? It is their platform to do what they want with it. You can disagree and not use it, but it is theirs to do with as they see fit. If this was a government run operation paid for with tax dollars, then it would be an issue.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#49

Post by kypro »

jmugan wrote: post #17

Oddly enough, X is the only platform i've been able to teach to not show me culture war stuff, from either side. It just shows me AI in the "For You."

The uncomfortable truth to most "the algorithm is biased" takes is that we humans are far more politically biased than the algorithms and we're probably 90% to blame.

I'm not saying there is no algorithmic bias, and I tend to agree the X algorithm has a slight conservative bias, but for the most part the owners of these sites care more about keeping your attention than trying to get you to vote a certain way. Therefore if you're naturally susceptible to cultural war stuff, and this is what grabs your attention, it's likely the algorithm will feed it.

But this is far more broad problem. These are the types of people who might have watched political biased cable news in the past, or read politically biased newspapers before that.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#50

Post by PaulHoule »

jmugan wrote: post #17

Oddly enough, X is the only platform i've been able to teach to not show me culture war stuff, from either side. It just shows me AI in the "For You."

I've been pretty consistent about telling Bluesky I want to see less of anything political and also disciplined about not following anybody who talks about Trump or gender or how anybody else is causing their problems. I see very little trash.
Post reply on HN