> AFAIK, the only remedy is to regulate algorithmic control of people and their content by laws more tightly. At least the appeals process needs to be more transparent and there need to be way more humans in the loop.
This sounds sounds like a very good (discrete) idea to me, well worthy of a dedicated HN thread of it's own, something like "What are the plausible societal pros and cons of forcing(!) social media companies to expose the implementations of their filtering and recommendation algorithms? What bad and good may(!) come of such a policy change?"
I think it could be argued that the way we as a community go about discussing world events is suboptimal. As it is, a commonly recurring pattern (here and elsewhere) is that some singular event occurs, a news story gets posted, and then we have the same general discussions/arguments that have been had many times before (here and elsewhere, many of them decades/centuries old), just in a somewhat differing context. Within these discussions, a large number of very important philosophical perspectives on the particular incidents appear in the comments, but are rarely discussed in depth. And then, time goes on, we all go to bed after having "had our say", and wake up the next day to do largely the same thing again. Rinse, repeat, day after month after year after decade.
I wonder...if we A/B tested a new, experimental approach, where rather than the genesis or focal point of the discussion being a news article about a specific event, instead we chose an abstract, philosophical topic as the primary topic of discussion, and then people posted instances of relevant events, and discussed those events in the context of the main philosophical idea...might these conversations bear more fruit, or fruit of a different kind?
Going further with this idea, might it also be plausibly beneficial to have some sort of a modified version of the HN Guidelines in place for these types of discussions, in order to encourage certain types of thinking (open minded, non-axiomatic, exploratory, minimized criticality and dismissiveness), and discourage others (excessive certainty and materialism, etc)?
Does this sound like a generally good idea or a bad idea?
This sounds sounds like a very good (discrete) idea to me, well worthy of a dedicated HN thread of it's own, something like "What are the plausible societal pros and cons of forcing(!) social media companies to expose the implementations of their filtering and recommendation algorithms? What bad and good may(!) come of such a policy change?"
I think it could be argued that the way we as a community go about discussing world events is suboptimal. As it is, a commonly recurring pattern (here and elsewhere) is that some singular event occurs, a news story gets posted, and then we have the same general discussions/arguments that have been had many times before (here and elsewhere, many of them decades/centuries old), just in a somewhat differing context. Within these discussions, a large number of very important philosophical perspectives on the particular incidents appear in the comments, but are rarely discussed in depth. And then, time goes on, we all go to bed after having "had our say", and wake up the next day to do largely the same thing again. Rinse, repeat, day after month after year after decade.
I wonder...if we A/B tested a new, experimental approach, where rather than the genesis or focal point of the discussion being a news article about a specific event, instead we chose an abstract, philosophical topic as the primary topic of discussion, and then people posted instances of relevant events, and discussed those events in the context of the main philosophical idea...might these conversations bear more fruit, or fruit of a different kind?
Going further with this idea, might it also be plausibly beneficial to have some sort of a modified version of the HN Guidelines in place for these types of discussions, in order to encourage certain types of thinking (open minded, non-axiomatic, exploratory, minimized criticality and dismissiveness), and discourage others (excessive certainty and materialism, etc)?
Does this sound like a generally good idea or a bad idea?