There's been evidence, admittedly anecdotal AFAIK, that YouTube recommendation algorithms can tend towards increasingly extremist content from quite innocuous starting points. For example:
This doesn't mean YouTube staff are purposefully designing the algorithm to specifically trend towards extremism: this can fall out naturally from human psychology and ML algorithms that note which videos increase engagement and recommend videos based on user interest and recommending videos that will increase the user's time on site.
I think this is worth looking into in a more methodical manner. You can dismiss it as cherry-picking, but I think it's something reasonable people can be concerned about. And these services and products should be looked at separately, determining which parts are good and which parts are bad.
You could write a pseudo-explanation even longer than the comment you are purporting to describe, or you could simply read the words that I wrote and not try to put words in my mouth.
Would the two of you ('jonathanyc and 'kimdcmason) please stop engaging uncharitably with each other? There might be common ground there somewhere, but you're not even trying to listen to each other. It doesn't matter at this point who's right or who's wrong or who started it or who's at fault. You're both contributing to continuing it. As one HN member to another, please help increase civility and substantive discourse.
I feel obligated to listen to and respect people who disagree with me on the issue of whether Google and Facebook are evil. But I can get and have gotten intelligent and reasoned perspective from people who aren’t spouting the names of logical fallacies as if they were hexes and caltrops.
As much as I feel obligated to engage with others constructively, I feel obliged to discourage and make others aware of nonconstructive behavior. I take your point that this thread is going nowhere, though, and I will stop. I acknowledge I may have gone too far.
Why is it a dangerous notion? For the sake of argument, if everyone went completely over the top and deleted all their social media accounts, the world would go back to looking like it did around 2006. A few corporations would go broke. A few other corporations values would increase. Mass psy-ops would become more difficult and expensive.
So in the extreme case that you're talking about it's not dangerous in any way I can think of at the moment. One of the big reasons I called it dangerous was that the effect only a portion of the users leaving the platform is dangerous and more subtle. To my eye, it's a social critique which leads to people who agree with it voluntarily removing themselves from the 21st century version of the "public square." I worry that this leads to disenfranchisement on their part as I've seen such isolation result in those feelings.
I guess the spirit of my claim is that the shape of group conversation will always come to resemble the cultural context of that conversation, regardless of the medium. While the medium can and should be critiqued, calling for total abstention from the medium is effectively self-censorship and I don't think that'll lead to the desired result.
This times a million. Delete the FB account now, install uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, and the data about you that's out there will become increasingly stale.
I never liked the reciprocal friend model of Facebook, and I liked even less that it was exposed publicly by default, allowing anyone to crawl the social graph. Even if you lock down your friend list, it doesn't matter because your friends mostly aren't locking down theirs.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal clearly demonstrates why this is a dangerous thing. The clear solution is to unfriend everybody then delete (not suspend, but delete) your account.
Enough people do this, and Facebook's cherished network effect will be weakened enough for better alternatives to begin appearing. Alternatives that don't vomit large amounts of data about you into the public sphere by default.
And what exactly is the business model for that going to be? Unless people switch to decentralised services (they won't) or pay for a centralised one (they won't), what way could any alternatives survive?
The problem isn't Facebook as much as it is the system in which it exists.
It's libertarian extremism. It's simply the reverse of communism, where the taxation level is 100%, and the state provides everything. Under this model, the taxation level is 0, and the government provides nothing.
Sounds sensible, but how does one ensure that the "lots of consumer options" part holds? There seem to be quite a few sectors with winner-take-all dynamics (e.g. social networking), and quite a few other sectors that under many conditions tend toward oligopoly or monopoly (e.g. insurance, banking, credit history reporting).
