For details see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45515980
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.
Each person should be able to control what they can post and view online, but not what anyone else posts or views. The norms that we use to moderate physical public spaces must not be applied to online public spaces. Until we discard those norms, people will continue to become increasingly polarized, democracy will continue to decline worldwide, and violent conflicts will continue to increase in frequency and scale.
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 going to use whatever the platform recommends.
It would be like more sophisticated Adblock. There are many providers of Adblock lists, but they can't be provided by the platform itself.
It's only a partial solution. Really, the correct response is regulatory oversight and taxation on remaining economic rent. They are monopolies, and should be regulated as such.
Fetch media after ranking on-device.
I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.
I already get analysis paralysis as a software dev enough.
Totally unmoderated internet communities would be completely unusable because of spam, and it's also questionable whether you could even stay up with no serverside moderation - you'd have to delete stuff otherwise it just takes one script kiddie with a botnet to flood your disk space with garbage.
(User produced ranking/filtering algos though I can see being viable)
Regarding banning server-side moderation, we probably can't do it without decentralizing content delivery in a BitTorrent fashion. But even half measures like replacing moderators with client-side filters would be a big improvement.
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.
I know this paper isn't about social networks, but we know this, we knew it in the 70s. The only difference is that we continue to ignore and forget it.
But increased polarization around the world isn't because of this. There's the typical environmental factors: an increase in changes (or challenges) to traditional values increases polarization; an influx of migrants increases polarization. But then there's also social media, where mastery of "engagement" by businesses for profit has been adopted by political groups looking to sow division to reap the benefits of polarization (an easier grip on power). The rapid rise of polarization is a combination of both.
It's nothing new of course, political/ideological groups have been doing this forever. We just have far more advanced tools with which to polarize.
I don't think the social media companies' algorithms are entirely to blame. But more broadly it's centralized moderation of public online spaces.
Moderation of public behavior of physical spaces was only necessary because it wasn't possible to selectively filter people's influences on eachother in public. If someone is doing something you don't want to see in public, covering your eyes is not good enough because you also block out the people you do want to see. Centralized moderation was a practical half-measure rather than an ideal solution for a democratic society that values free expression and self-determination.
That kind of moderation isn't necessary online because all filters can be implemented client-side. We just aren't doing it because people are so used to the old way. But the old way will naturally lead to more and worse conflict when we have infinite connectivity.
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 genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?
This seems like a hot-take. IMHO one does not and cannot cure loneliness by having more online friends.
Having more shallow friends is actually much more isolating than having fewer deep friends.
NOTE: I did NOT read the article.
If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend.
We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?
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 life. Did those 10 also double down on close friends? Or did perhaps some of them not have enough close friends to do that?
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.
That stirkes me as myopic. My closest friends--the ones I trust with all my secrets, with whom have have practically no secrets, the ones I'd hide if it came to that or risk my life to save--are all over the place values and ideas-wise. It's what makes their company fun. It's also what makes their advice useful, because they'll call me out on my bullshit in a way a mirror image of me could not.
And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.
I opted out of the extended family ones and the social ones
I wonder if they’re still doing that, I’d rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
Loneliness is a big topic now due to the pandemic, and the lingering trends from stay/work-at-home mandates.
Loneliness is a big topic now, imo, because people are losing helpful human friends and relying on middling digital friends. Just like how looking at pictures of a forest is nowhere near as healthy as actually going to a forest.
I'll make the counter argument that -- although I value those things and try to provide them to friends in need -- all of those can be addressed by hiring someone.
On the other hand, I've recently received fantastic emotional support from a friend who moved away a few years ago. We've seen each other in person only a handful of times since then, but of all my friends, she happened to be the one with the experience and attitude to help me.
Incidentally, I'll add that I'm the type of person to provide those types of support to others, but the vast majority of my friends are not. That doesn't make them bad friends, it just means that I have a service disposition while they don't. I think there's a vast range of qualities that people seek and experience from friends and you're going to have a hard time objectively rating them on any sort of scale.
I have no data for this, just a gut feeling. I still see so many people on the day-to-day who are completely socially inept. I don't even mean just like, rude or abrasive, I mean people who don't have the emotional intelligence to like, navigate basic conflicts.
Yes. People nowadays spent 8 hours per day chatting to someone online and they call it close friend even if they never met in real life.
Also, people nowadays are notorious for being unable to have friendship that is not a [insert activity here] buddy.
Isn't polarization a good thing? If I was enslaved by tyrants making my life worse everyday, shouldn't I be opposed by their ways?
But now we have huge online mobs that are homogenously polarized that want to kill eachother. It gets violent when the group size reaches the nation-state level because that's where most of the violence and oppression in our society is siloed.
We have to limit group sizes online. Before social media, it was physically limited by the difficulty of meeting up in person. But now groups just keep getting larger and more homogenous.
Thanks to David Wong for explaining this in JDATE, calling it the Babel threshold.
better connectivity -> destroyed physical limits on group size -> groups not only get larger but also more ideologically homogenous because they're moderated by a central authority like how physical crowds are moderated -> people make friends more easily in those homogenous groups OR get kicked and start their own group, which also has the potential to get larger and more homogenous without limit -> groups have larger differences and clash harder
More friends is a symptom rather than a cause.
Related:
https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/populism-fast-an...
Curious for the source? To my recollection, Chomsky talked about distraction, i.e. repurposing attention. OP is talking about the pool of attention as a whole drying up (versus being misdirected).
It's tough on the internet being a skeptic or generally thoughtful about the world. It's not even worth debunking stuff anymore. Much healthier to not engage entirely.
It used to make sense when the internet was smaller but now? Not so much. Especially when the people running platforms/media, content moderators and influencers explicitly don't care about the truth. You're not just fighting some dummy posting a comment.
The only positive thing I've seen in the last decade to address this was Community Notes on X.
> If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)? > For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)?
... are not quite as applicable to left-wing populism (for the latter --- at least, at the surface). post-colonial, _left-wing_ populism tended to be of international character, or at least of wider appeal than the nation (e.g., nasser). the "distrust of central banking" is of wildly unique impetuses for left- vs. right-wing populism.
the common-sense point is quite poignant, at least for me in the u.s., where each party paints their own solutions as explicitly "common-sense", for solutions as unique as harsh border control ("solutions") vs. city-owned grocery stores & free childcare.
there are certainly issues i imagine i don't hold the "elite" view on. many people don't consider the "elite" view at all --- anti-punitive justice, for example, is rejected for particular types of crimes, despite provenly worse outcomes if we simply punish these crimes. the rise of anti-intellectualism doesn't help :D
The internet has accelerated this.
I've lived in several countries in 3 continents now, and the more I get to know different peoples, the more I feel we're all the same—albeit stuck in these almost kaleidoscopic ways of outwardly displaying the very same humanity.
Perhaps OP got fixated on the collective differences instead of seeing through them. Perhaps.
Indirectly? Seems to me that this is far more likely the "direct" cause, given what we know about the psychology around algorithmic feeds.
Also - I'm not sure if I missed it in the article, but did they define what they mean by "close relationship" means? I'd be very curious to know if a purely online relationship is counted and how this may also contribute to the observations made.
"DOI Not Found"
Given that the main (only significant) fact cited in the article goes against everything else I've read, I would like to see the actual study and how it came to the conclusion that the number of close friends has doubled.
Here are some sources that appear to contradict this article:
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a...
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250617/dq250...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11288408/#pone.0305...
But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level? There's also a 10-year gap between USA (and other countries' data points too) that covers the span of the whole alleged "aligned trend". It feels a little bit like the authors just went "Look! Two data trends moving in the same direction! Causal?!"
More seriously, I would love to see a much deeper dive on:
- Technological and associated psychological trends that might be causing greater polarisation (plenty of existing data here)
- How an increase in close friends can co-exist with an apparent loneliness epidemic (plenty of existing data here too)
You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones.
I did this after Covid. Consciously started declining invitations from acquaintances, and instead making time and travel to see close friends. Would never go back.
I would wager that people are shit at determining trustworthiness based on limited information (like social media representations). In the old days before social media, you got to know people in person, and decades ago, most of the people you knew were likely people you grew up around. You knew that person’s background, how they treated people, what their family was like, and what likely influences them as a person.
So much of how we process trustworthiness is how we perceive the motives of the speaker. With shallower friendships and parasocial relationships, we want to feel connected but really lack any good context that you need to actually know who you’re listening to.
dooglius•2h ago
unglaublich•2h ago
smallerize•2h ago
But that rule only applies to the fast-moving journals, like Nature and Science. Many other journals can take a few days between when they allow journalists to write about a paper and when it becomes available to the scientific community—PNAS, which is a major source of material for us, falls in that category.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/03/dois-and-their-disco...