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The political effects of X's feed algorithm

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Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#81

Post by alecco »

What a garbage short and shallow take. They are all like that. And it even started with news networks (90s CNN in particular). BlueSky, reddit, Tik Tok, and even YouTube, they all have horrible userbases and algorithmic tendencies towards doomscrolling. Lots of bot accounts for the past 10 years. And now hyper-powered by AI content.

You can tune some of them by heavily curating what you follow and blocking a lot. But it's an uphill battle.

The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#82

Post by daveguy »

apparent wrote: post #71
daveguy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less than you might think. He didn't win a majority of the vote, just a plurality. And less than 2 of 3 eligible voters actually voted. So he got about 30% of the eligible population to vote for "yay grievance hate politics!" Which is way more than it should be, but a relatively small minority compared to the voter response after all ambiguity about the hate disappeared. This is why there's been a 20+ point swing in…

"If everyone had voted, Trump still would have won" (by an even wider margin) https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...

A 2025 study... Asking people if they "would have" voted for the winner of the election, a corrupt vindictive racist asshat already in power? Well, I guess that's one way to conduct a study. Fortunately the shift in sentiment is clear, growing, and reflected in special elections.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#83

Post by tokyobreakfast »

SecretDreams wrote: post #64
tokyobreakfast wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bott…

I like voting (up and down) but I also agree with your take. Reddit salts the votes, but maybe the solution is to allocate a certain amount of reasonable votes (up or down) total that a user can use weekly. Make it so when you are voting, it's much more meaningful and truely reflect an opinion you either really agree with or really do not agree with. Ultimately, I think it comes back to people value their online pers…

>but maybe the solution is to allocate a certain amount of reasonable votes (up or down) total that a user can use weekly

Slashdot did this back in the day IIRC.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#84

Post by apparent »

daveguy wrote: post #82
apparent wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If everyone had voted, Trump still would have won" (by an even wider margin) https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...

A 2025 study... Asking people if they "would have" voted for the winner of the election, a corrupt vindictive racist asshat already in power ? Well, I guess that's one way to conduct a study. Fortunately the shift in sentiment is clear, growing, and reflected in special elections.

Your theory is that people who didn't care enough to vote are concerned that Donald Trump is going to come after them if they don't say they would have voted for him, when surveyed anonymously?

And then NPR was duped into credulously reporting on this polling?

That is quite a theory.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#85

Post by judahmeek »

cyrusradfar wrote: post #72
stetrain wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Curious about this. Don't have an angle, just trying to survey your perspective. You shared: > People often engage more with things they actually don't like, and which create negative feelings. Do you think this is innate or learned? And, in either case, can it be unlearned.

Not OP, but I think most of us have an instinct to correct things that we think are wrong.

I don't think such instincts can be unlearned, but they can be held in check by the realization that naive attempts to fix things can make things worse, including how we feel about ourselves.

This conscious inhibition, however, requires cognitive effort.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#86

Post by apparent »

timbit42 wrote: post #80
apparent wrote: post #46

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

I don't follow people who post about lots of stuff I don't care about. I follow hashtags instead, which gives me a much higher signal to noise ratio than following those people.

I thought hashtags were dead. Does this surface tweets that just have the word, not the hashtag? Can you follow multiple words using boolean operators?

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#87

Post by iamnothere »

bee_rider wrote: post #31
mikepurvis wrote: post #6

"We need more funding into open protocols that decentralize algorithmic ownership; open platforms that give users a choice of algorithm and platform provider; and algorithmic transparency across our information ecosystem." This sounds like a call to separate the aggregation step from the content. Reasonable enough, but does it really address the root cause? Aren't we just as polarized in a world where there are dozen…

I’d hope people wouldn’t intentionally pick the political extremism feed if they had any other option (although it’s hard to say).

I will note that political extremists can have more interesting content at times, and it’s good to see what they are up to in case it will affect you. They also sometimes surface legitimate stories that are kept out of the mainstream press, or which are heavily editorialized or minimized there. But you definitely have to view all sides to gain an accurate view here, it would be a mistake to read only one group of extremists. And it’s almost always a mistake to engage with any of them.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#88

Post by iamnothere »

dylan604 wrote: post #54
Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feed (UK based) seems to give me the major news stories well before the mainstream (BBC), and I'm taking days if not weeks in some cases. Now it could be that's how the mainstream decides to cover a particular story? What's worrying is when a story is all over X but isn't covered. To give an example, the recent protests in Iran where being covered on X but the BBC was silent for weeks before finally covering the s…

Could it also be that "mainstream" news are actually trying to verify information and/or obtain confirmation from other sources? All of that is done in an attempt to avoid promoting false information. People tweeting do not do any of that

Could be. Of course, the UK press can also be subject to “D-Notices” that prevent publication of certain sensitive stories. In cases where a story may be subject to a D-Notice, your only hope for information is to go to alternative or foreign media.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#89

Post by rl3 »

cyrusradfar wrote: post #69
rl3 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This community, in large part, is an exception where many members pride themselves on intellectually challenging material. That's not the norm. We're not the norm. I recommend against putting HN on a pedestal. It just leads to disappointment.

It's true -- I do enjoy this community even though it's failed to serve my every thought with the love that I surely deserve!

Odd reply, but OK. For what it's worth I largely agree with everything else you said.

>>The problem, to me, is deeper and is rooted in our education system and work systems that demand compliance over creativity. Algorithms serve what Users engage with, if the Users were to no longer be interested in ragebait, clickbait, focused on thoughtful content -- the algorithms would adapt.

Technically that's true. Thing is, the UI/UX isn't built for long-form content. The platform, interface and algorithm when taken as a whole represent more of a dopamine delivery system heavily biased towards short-form content.

That dynamic in turn ends up being deleterious to cognition to the point it ends up fighting any external factors that which could change user behavior for the better.

In other words the algorithm is part of a larger format, and that format is arguably the real drag. Of course, the algorithm being properly transparent and accountable to its users would certainly help.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#90

Post by bigbadfeline »

prometheus76 wrote: post #53
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…

[flagged]

> It's an echo chamber here, too... > Any comment that challenges [ whatever else you dislike ] and leftist politics gets downvoted into oblivion.

It's not. Downvoting here is much less of a conversation-breaking action than shadow banning, outright banning and trash-comment-polution on other soc. med. sites. Downvoting has it's place, the occasional abuse of it should not be a problem, it hurts you so much because you want your views to prevail but that's your personal problem, not a site problem.

I get downvoted quite often here too but these days I usually challenge rightist politics - mostly due to it being used as an excuse for some wrong action or inaction at the moment. However, most of the time I have no idea if what I'm objecting to is leftist or rightist, I have to think separately to figure that out... but I don't do it because it's actually hard.

> most people who hold the worldview that is enforced here often cannot see their own presuppositions.

I suppose you think you can see your own presuppositions and I'm ready to challenge that. I'm also ready to challenge the notion that only leftist worldviews are promoted here. The world "enforced" is quite misleading too, some tradition does exist on this site, but it's different and a lot more nuanced than central "leftist" enforcement.

> nor do they see that their views are political in nature.

So are yours... A lot of views are political in nature, some realize it, some not, that fact has no bearing on the viability of those views and bragging about it helps nobody.

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