Posted by ingve 9/13/2025
Different opinions do matter. But due to the algorithms, the most emotional responses are promoted. There is no way to promote facts or what people think are facts.
So most discussion will be extremely emotional and not based on facts and their value. This is even true in scientific discussions.
Combined with group-think, these emotions can grow and lead to catastrophic outcomes.
There is no way with existing platforms and algorithms. We need systems that actually promote the truth. Imagine if claims (posts) you see come with a score* that correlates with whether the claim is true or false. Such a platform could help the world, assuming the scores are good.
How to calculate these scores is naturally the crux of the problem. There's infinite ways to do it; I call these algorithms truth heuristics. These heuristics would consider various inputs like user-created scores and credentials to give you a better estimate of truth than going with your gut.
Users clearly need algorithmic selection and personalized scores. A one-size-fits-all solution sounds like a Ministry of Truth to me.
* I suggest ℝ on [-1,1].
-1 : Certainly false
-0.5 : Probably false
0 : Uncertain
0.5 : Probably true
1 : Certainly true
All people are biased. It's impossible to also avoid bias needed to filter out the firehose of data.
What your describing is often a form of moderation.
> Different opinions do matter. But due to the algorithms, the most emotional responses are promoted. There is no way to promote facts or what people think are facts.
This is tuneable. We have tuned the algos for engagement, and folks engage more with stuff they emotionally react to.
People could learn to be less emotionally unstable.
> So most discussion will be extremely emotional and not based on facts and their value. This is even true in scientific discussions.
I think your over fitting. Moderation drives a lot of how folks behave in a community.
> Combined with group-think, these emotions can grow and lead to catastrophic outcomes.
Group think is also how we determined mamales are mamales and the earth isn't the center of the universe. Sometimes a consensus is required.
There will be a bias in moderation, but that will have less of an effect when there is no deletion. If possible, the user could choose their preferred style (or bias) of moderation. If you want full freedom, you can let users select "super-users" to moderate/categorize for them.
Emotional responses and troll jokes could be a separate categories as long they do not call for violence and or break other laws.
Consensus is still group-think. I think it is destructive without any clear view where it stands within other options or other ideas. Like: "why exactly is earth not the center". A lot of consensus is also artificial due to biased reporting, biased censorship and biased sponsorship. During discussions, people within a consensus tend to use logical fallacies. Like portraying the opposition as idiots, or avoiding any valid points that the opposition bring into the discussion.
I think that people have becomes less intelligent due to one-sided reporting of information. With extra information, people will become smarter and more understanding of how other (smart) people think.
This exists on Bluesky under "labeling" name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39684027
How does it make sense to make billions of people responsible for abating the consequences of choices made by a few social media companies?
Reddit is by far the worst though since everything is clearly botted yet people pretend it’s organic leading to a kind of false sense of security that what you see is curated and willed by the “people”.
It’s far more than “engagement” and the “algorithm” - it’s beyond that It’s all blatantly manufactured as some Aquino-esque psyop.
We should be educating children at a young age about the benefits and risks of social media. We haven't adapted the way we educate society in light of massive tech changes.
This will likely be a topic that future humans look back on and wonder why we did this to ourselves.
Repeat the process long enough and with enough variation and tuning and anyone can be made to believe anything.
Written "news" is frequently a report about a series of X posts by various authorities, thought leaders and celebrities, embedded directly in the story.
Square that circle.
And then, the continuous re-discovery or the ails of social media on social media is a trip, in itself.
While still somewhat detrimental, it's at least a visible problem - everyone is aware of it because everyone sees the same thing.
With filter bubbles, you create personalized echo chambers, that nobody is aware of unless they're in there.
This is social media. It's a fairly benign manifestation of it, I suppose, but it's social media nonetheless.
Something to consider while carefully crafting denigrations of what we all think is meant when discussing "social media." Especially if you'd rather not see HN and similar places damaged by righteous politicians.
The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.
Unfortunately algorithmic social media is one of the factors adding fuel to the fire, and I believe it’s fair to say that social media has helped increase polarization by recommending content to its viewers purely based on engagement metrics without any regard for the consequences of pushing such content. It is much easier to whip people into a frenzy this way. Additionally, echo chambers make it harder for people to be exposed to other points of view. Combine this with dismal educational outcomes for many Americans (including a lack of critical thinking skills), our two-party system that aggregates diverse political views into just two options, a first-past-the-post election system that forces people to choose “the lesser of two evils,” and growing economic pain, and these factors create conditions that are ripe for strife.
It was the current President of the US that led a charge that a Black man running for President wasn’t a “real American” and was a secret Muslim trying to bring Shari law to the US and close to half of the US was willing to believe it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
This was before social media in the northern burbs of Atlanta where I had to a house built in 2016. We didn’t have a problem during the seven years we lived there. But do you think they were “polarized” by social media in the 80s?
That’s just like police brutality didn’t start with the rise of social media. Everyone just has cameras and a platform
Saying social media fans the flames is like saying ignorance is bliss. Mainstream media (cable news, radio, newspapers, etc) only gives us one, largely conservative, viewpoint. If you're lucky, you'll get one carefully controlled opposing viewpoint (out of many!). As you say, our choices are usually evil and not quite as evil.
Anger is not an unreasonable reaction when you realize this. When you realize that other viewpoints exist, the mainstream media and politicians are not acting in anyone's best interest but their own, there really are other options (politically, for news, etc.). Social media is good at bringing these things to light.
There are no easy fixes to the divides you're talking about, but failing to confront them and just giving in to the status quo, or worse, continuing down our current reactionary transcript, is probably the worst way to approach them.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
Easy to cherry-pick stuff. You can cherry-pick Jim Crow south; I can cherry-pick Chicago in the 90s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDmAI67nBGU
I think we have to get past black-and-white thinking and see it as a matter of degree. With 340 million people in the USA, realistically, at least a few of them will always be racist. The question is how powerful and influential the racists are. That's a question which social media feeds into.
It’s a huge difference between “a few people being racist” and laws enforcing segregation and laws against interracial marriage.
The racists have always been in power. You can look at the justice system, the disparity between sentencing for the same crimes across races etc.
The Supreme Court said you can’t use race as a basis for college admissions. But you can use it as a basis for arresting someone.
Fox News is the most popular news network and isn’t part of social media.
Why are people who call themselves "progressive" so obsessed with events from half a century ago?
>The racists have always been in power.
It amazes me how quickly people forgot that we had 8 years of Obama. That was a lot more recent than racial segregation.
>the disparity between sentencing for the same crimes
The vast majority of this disparity seems to go away when you control for arrest offense, criminal history, etc.: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1985377
>The Supreme Court said you can’t use race as a basis for college admissions. But you can use it as a basis for arresting someone.
Well yeah, if someone fits the description of a criminal suspect, why not?
>Fox News is the most popular news network and isn’t part of social media.
When's the last time Fox News advocated for segregation or laws against interracial marriage?
IMO you've been making some very handwavey arguments which are collapsing important distinctions.
In any case... you can see from Table 13 in this PDF (page 13) that the rate of black-on-white crime is over 3x the rate of white-on-black crime: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf
This isn't something which happened 60 years ago. This is data from 2023. It's more recent / greater in magnitude than most of the points you've been making. So, would it be fair to conclude that black people in the US are hostile to the "other", akin to the conclusion you made in your original comment?
> It amazes me how quickly people forgot that we had 8 years of Obama. That was a lot more recent than racial segregation.
You mean the same 8 years that a large part of the country was saying he wasn’t really an American and that he was a secret Muslim wanting to bring Sharia law?
> Well yeah, if someone fits the description of a criminal suspect, why not?
So you’re okay with harassing all Hispanics because they “fit the description.”? Including American citizens?
Let’s look at what the government data says about discrepancy in sentencing…
https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/one-in-five-racial...
https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
>So you’re okay with harassing all Hispanics because they “fit the description.”? Including American citizens?
It's not the policy I would pursue if I were president. But I also wouldn't consider it harassment if a cop asked to see my ID.
If there's a community that has been breaking the law on a massive scale, there should be more shame associated with that lawbreaking than there is shame associated with enforcing the law. How are you going to have a functional society if there is more shame for enforcing the law than there is breaking it?
Your first link says that black men receive sentences that are 13.4% longer than white men. I think we should work to reduce that, but it's less than half the size of the male/female sentencing disparity from the same source (29.2%), and it's nothing compared to the 226% disparity in cross-racial crime victimization.
So exactly what should Puerto Ricans who are in the continental United States do to prevent being detained by ICE?
What should my six foot 2 Black stepson living in a lily white suburb of Atlanta GA (my wife and I moved to another state for reasons) do differently? Should he go to the inner city and change hearts and minds?
And you keep changing the subject. I am referring to how the government targets people - the only people who have qualified immunity and can take away an individuals rights. A random Black or White person cant legally detain me or stop me - not even in GA anymore after the Republican governor outlawed citizen’s arrest after it was used to harass and kill an unarmed black man walking down the street - yes it was caught on video.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ahmaud_Arbery
Why do I find it hard to believe that you would be okay being randomly stopped and harassed walking down the street? I now live in a major diverse city. I can see it now. I a Black guy born in south GA being detained by ICE if they raid the Hispanic barber shop I go to - where three of the barbers are from Puerto Rico - because they hear me doing small talk in Spanish.
Show their ID? https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2025/04/24/countdown...
>What should my six foot 2 Black stepson living in a lily white suburb of Atlanta GA (my wife and I moved to another state for reasons) do differently? Should he go to the inner city and change hearts and minds?
What should I as a white guy do differently? Go to the prosecutor's office and change hearts and minds?
(Also, if your stepson is so worried about white people, why does he live in a "lily white" area?)
>you keep changing the subject
I've been responding to claims you made in other comments: 'The country has always been hostile to “other”.' and 'The racists have always been in power.'
>the Republican governor outlawed citizen’s arrest after it was used to harass and kill an unarmed black man walking down the street
I suppose this is more evidence that "The racists have always been in power"? Republicans are the KKK party. That's why they outlawed citizen's arrest after the death of a black man...
I'll let you have the last word in this thread.
And a consequence of this is that some people’s perspective of the scale of the nation’s hostilities is limited to the last 5 years or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Radio_station...
The radio didn't create the divide, and it wasn't the sole factor in the genocide, but it engrained in the population a sense of urgency in eliminating the Tutsi, along with a stream of what was mostly fake news to show that the other side is already commiting the atrocities against Hutus
When the genocide happened, it was fast and widespread: people would start killing their own neighbors at scale. In 100 days, a million people were killed.
The trouble with social media is that they somehow managed to shield themselves from the legal repercussions of heavily promoting content similar to what RTLM broadcast. For example, see the role of Facebook and its algorithmic feed in the genocide in Myanmar
https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
It's insane that they can get away with it.
History has shown people don’t need a reason to hate and commit violence against others.
Propaganda and ideology were a major part of the Nazi rise to power.
Marx, Engels, and Mussolini were all in the newspaper business. Jean-Paul Marat's newspaper was very influential in promoting the French reign of terror, including some claiming he's directly responsible for the September Massacres. Nationwide propaganda were major priorities day one to Lenin and after him in Soviet Russia.
Similarly with the Cambodian genocide, Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, etc.
Propaganda even played a big role in Julias Caesar's campaign against the Gauls some 2 millenia before social media.
Before then we had the “Willie Horton ads”. Not to mention that Clinton performatively oversaw the electrocution of a mentally challenged Black man to show that he was tough on crime.
https://jacobin.com/2016/11/bill-clinton-rickey-rector-death...
Yes I know that Obama was also a champion of laws like the defense of marriage act. We have always demonized other in this country. It was just hidden before.
Right now the Supreme Court said that ICE could target people based on the color of their skin and it’s big like Obama won the hearts and minds of the states where Jim Crow was the law of the land in the 60s.
"You reap what you sow" is correct. You sew cloth with a needle and thread but sow seeds by throwing them on fertile ground, hoping they will sprout, grow and you will later reap a harvest.
In any case, there's nothing wrong with trying it out and seeing what other benefits it brings.
As a side benefit, when you do this enough, the pendulum that goes over the middle line for any of these arbitrary-but-improves-clicks division builds momentum until it hits the extremes. On either side-- it doesn't matter, cause it will swing back just as hard, again and again.
As a side benefit the back and forth of the pendulum is very distracting to the public so we do not pay attention to who is pushing it. Billions of collective hours spent fighting with no progress except for the wallets of rich ppl.
It almost feels like a conspiracy but I think it's just the direct, natural result of the vice driven economy we have these days