Reddit Reddit reviews The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think

We found 12 Reddit comments about The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think
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12 Reddit comments about The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think:

u/robochairmanmao · 11 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

You know how people bitch and moan about people posting "stupid" statuses and updates they don't care about? Well, the solution is to bring you information that is relevant specifically to you. The trend is to "personalize" the Internet for you instead of presenting you with an otherwise overwhelming amount of information.

You see it everywhere: in social media, news, and search results. There is a shift towards cultivating the mass amount of information available to you, for you. If you have 800 friends on Facebook, it's significantly more difficult for you to chronologically view everything that's happened. Using algorithms based on your likes, shares, page views, and general preferences, Facebook "curates" the information coming at you and presents to you the most relevant information. There is an insane amount of information available to you. If you were shown every status, every comment, every picture, everything that your friends posted in chronological order, it could be overwhelming or disinteresting to you.

The same thing happens when you use Google as well. The search engine "learns" from your searching patterns & preferences, then extrapolates "who you are," and returns appropriate search results. For example, if a sports fan searches for "panthers," they're likely looking for information on the football team. However, a nature-lover would likely be looking for the animal.

TL;DR there is a lot of information available to you, so the goal is to present you with relevant news to your interests

For more information, see:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Filter-Bubble-Personalized-Changing/dp/0143121235

u/gr8sk8 · 3 pointsr/skeptic

Eli Pariser has been preaching about this problem for quite some time now. Here is his book, "The Filter Bubble" further condensed into his Ted Talk. From the description, "As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy."

u/saltandvinegar25 · 3 pointsr/todayilearned

I need a citation to back this up? I think you're just avoiding a discussion and the post definitely wasn't addressed to you otherwise. The point is, people regularly do this and you're more than likely kidding yourself if you think you don't avoid a discussion with someone and prefer to be around like-minded individuals, it's simply human nature.

Here, if you're really interested in the subject, buy and read this:

https://www.amazon.com/Filter-Bubble-Personalized-Changing-Think/dp/0143121235

u/ANTDrakko · 1 pointr/technology

I'll do the best I can to reply to both the reply you referenced as well as your director's cut.

> The concept that he alluded to is called the Marketplace of Ideas -- it's a very well-known and time-worn theory of free speech.

Your argument here is that the Marketplace of Ideas is popular, therefor it must be valid and true. This is an example of the Bandwagon fallacy.

The Marketplace of Ideas is a system gamed easily, just like how an actual marketplace is gamed easily to cause certain products to become the better selling ones and not necessarily the best product. It's duplicitous in it's nature in that it advertises "Variety" and "Fairness" and "The Best Ideas will naturally Rise to the Top" but in actuality it's controlled by those who run the means of dissemination; the Store (Social Media) and the companies willing to sell the most attractive product regardless of quality (Politicians). Cambridge Analytica is a prime, recent example of how easily the system can be gamed and how effective gaming that system is.

This isn't a new criticism, either, and is one that is specific to the modern world and our environment and circumstances. If you, as you say, aren't intellectually lazy and would like to challenge your view on this, I'll recommend a quick starting video:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94tms2pIjYs

 

and the gentlemen's book: https://www.amazon.com/Filter-Bubble-Personalized-Changing-Think/dp/0143121235

 

> Your argument is the basic underpinnings of censorship, which is essentially reduced to "Well, the public is just too stupid for rational thought, so we need to make sure that they aren't exposed to pernicious speech."

 

You're now committing a strawman fallacy. At no point in time did I call anyone stupid or even lazy. In fact, I specifically stated that wasn't the case at all and was simply acknowledging the reality that most people, regardless of whether they ought to fact check properly, will simply process what is conveniently placed in front of them and already adheres to what their normal intuitions and beliefs are because challenging that is time consuming and mentally stressful. People are busy and/or lazy, whether you want to accept it or not. Politicians are counting on it.

 


>
I would just add that I think we must be discerning consumers of information. You don't go to a grocery store and feel overwhelmed by all the different brands of macaroni and cheese, or spend hours struggling to decide what lunch meat you're going to make sandwiches out of next week. You have lots of choices, but you filter them down to what is relevant - what do I need, what do I want if I have a little extra in my budget - and then you check out.

 

Not sure if you realize it, but you're actually proving my point in your analogy. What you're not doing is acknowledging that the products that you are seeing in that marketplace aren't sorted by value per quality. In fact, the whole PLACEMENT of product in a supermarket is 100% about what company makes the store the most profit and therefor gets eye-level placement; not to mention all of the other products that simply don't get any placement at all due to not "paying" enough (via lack of wholesale discounts to the store). Does this system make sure that you get exposed to the best products worth your money while you're strolling down the aisles? Of course not.

 

> When people talk about information overload, I really think they're just trying to pass the buck.

This is an ad hominem argument. Why are all people suffering from information overload actually just trying to pass the buck and be lazy? I'm not sure I understand your argument here other than "I feel this way."

You then go on to elaborate the following points:

  • Not all news is worth paying attention to.
  • People should ration wisely what they spend their thought cycles on.
  • Politicians lie, therefor take what they have with a large grain of salt.
  • People generally only read what is in their echo chamber, which Facebook can't fix (it can, see Filter Bubble book).
  • Bias exists everywhere, especially when talking about complex things like how the country is run.
  • We all want the simple 15-second soundbite, but this is a bad thing.

    I hope you don't think I misrepresented anything you said up to this point with my summary. I agree with all of these individual points except for the idea that Social Media companies are powerless to help. They can in fact, and are culprits in the current climate of things as it exists today.

     

    > So when you say information overload, I say this. If a person doesn't have the time to really look into something themselves, and appreciate the complexity of it so that they do it carefully, to listen to both sides of the argument and try and fact check and draw their own conclusions, then I don't think that issue matters very much to them. I think that they want to feel like they're informed without actually doing the work to be informed. They want the credit without doing the work. They don't want to think. They want to be TOLD how to think.

     

    Again, you're making an ad hominem argument about how people are lazy and that if they don't spend hours and hours researching and properly fact-checking a given topic, they don't actually "care" about it.

     

    This doesn't make any sense at all, when you try to extend that mode of thinking to things that you entrust to experts every day. Do you trust your medical doctor? Do you trust your mechanic? Do you trust your accountant? Do you trust your insert service professional here ? My guess is that you don't research everything that you are presented with by these types of individuals. You probably did some initial research to figure out who people recommend, or who has what qualifications, but ultimately after selecting the person that you chose, you take their expertise at face value and don't research every diagnosis to the level that a medical professional does or look at engineering manuals the way a mechanic does, etc.

     

    You do the best to find qualified opinions and then trust in their diagnosis of the topic at hand. This is how most people go about making decisions or holding opinions on complicated topics.

     

    > And I'm sorry, but I don't think my rights to draw my own conclusions should be stepped on by the government, or by corporations just because some people are too busy, or lazy, or otherwise uninterested to actually think for themselves. And I don't think anyone's rights to say what they believe, even if its a complete falsehood, should be trampled on because those busy/lazy/uninterested people might believe it.

     


    Another strawman argument. I'm not saying that fact-checking is something that the government or corporations should be in the business of at all. I'm saying that the system needs to be fixed so that it isn't so easily gamed and swayed to benefit those that are actively set out to deceive people, and that part of the solution to this is the acknowledgement of the problem (the system is easily gamed) and actively demonstrate proclivity to correct for the loopholes that generate people's Filter Bubbles.

     

    In sum, I'm not advocating for censorship at all. I'm advocating for strengthening the systems by which people predominantly consume their information so that when people inevitably try to come to a conclusion on a topic, that they do so having been exposed to as close to 50% one side and 50% other side as possible instead of 95% one side and 5% other side.


     

    Give the truth a fair shake is all I ask.


     

    <3
u/JoshuaLyman · 1 pointr/Showerthoughts

The Filter Bubble - good read on this...

u/EnthusiastGrade · 1 pointr/AskTrumpSupporters

I'm from California and I see what you're saying, with people equating Trump to Hitler and things like that, which I personally think is insulting for people who were actually affected by the Holocaust and things like that. I've literally heard some people say that Trump was going to put gays and immigrants into internment camps once he was elected, which is possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

I think Facebook is purposely designed to be an echo-chamber, so that it guarantees people stay on there longer. The more you see people that agree with your views, the more likely you are to use their platform, the more you use their platform the more Facebook learns about your likes and dislikes and the better they can show you things that you like and remove things you dislike, and the cycle continues
Here are some interesting sources that talk about how social media acts as an echo chamber of sorts:?

https://www.amazon.com/Filter-Bubble-Personalized-Changing-Think/dp/0143121235

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/07/24/486941582/the-reason-your-feed-became-an-echo-chamber-and-what-to-do-about-it

?

u/SirNuke · 1 pointr/learnprogramming

I'll throw out The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (related Wikipedia article), which discusses splinterization of the Internet driven by innocent personalization algorithms. Regardless of what position you take on that particular problem, I think it's representative of the sort of non-technical social issue that will increasingly come up in the software field.

A more technical book I've always liked is The Zen of Assembly Language by Michael Abrash. Michael Abrash is one of the old brilliant iD guys, bouncing around all over the place and now at (ugh) Facebook working on the Oculus Rift. The technical parts of the book were hilariously outdated when it came out, focusing on 8086 assembler when the 80486 was already widely available. It's still an excellent read for approaching optimizing low level performance, as well as being a great work by a very good technical writer. You should be able to readily find PDF copies on the internet.

u/BruceWayneIsBarman · 1 pointr/lectures

For others interested in this topic: I highly recommend a book called The Filter Bubble that explores how algorithms impact our social and political lives.

u/JBlitzen · 1 pointr/tipofmytongue

Oh! Found it via an old bookmark. The Filter Bubble.

https://www.amazon.com/Filter-Bubble-Personalized-Changing-Think/dp/0143121235

Thanks!

u/maxifer · 1 pointr/videos

I wrote a term paper on a similar topic (The filter bubble and collaborative filtering). Got a lot of information from this book, which is a really good read even without writing a paper.

u/rasmis · 1 pointr/panelshow

I don't understand the argument. You're keen that I'm being delivered personalised results, but insist that I am the only person in the world who aren't given identical results to you. And that's somehow related to the religion of the original creators of the content people are linking to.

“Differently from the rest of the world” is what keeps me from walking away. I shall retire from the conversation with these links. To people who live in the same world as I do. Where people get different results, based on where they are, what tracking software they allow, what language they've set their browser to, what OS they're using and what the search engine / ISP want them to see.

u/bradfromearth · 0 pointsr/politics

FILTER BUBBLE people...

Unless that browser was logged out of Google AND all the cache and ALL the history was cleared this is not necessarily happening to everyone. I just did the search and got all candidates and I am a Trump supporter.


Filter bubble is simple to understand. If a huge baseball fan googles "red socks" what he will get is results for the baseball team.

If Santa Clause googled "Red Socks" he is going to get results for red socks for his feet.


Google does this intentionally in order to be able to sell better targeted advertizing.

This is a problem because diversity is very important for progress. Without being exposed to new or information that you may not like you are given less chance to expand your knowledge.

Great book on this topic is

The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think