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Posted by geox 5 days ago

Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization(phys.org)
214 points | 231 commentspage 5
Slava_Propanei 4 days ago|
[dead]
almosthere 5 days ago||
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IX-103 5 days ago||
That's exactly right. For a long time people of color were relegated to lower paying jobs and faced higher police scrutiny. Similarly, less than a century ago women were practically property - unable to even get a bank account without a man's permission.

Over the past century we've made significant progress in remediating these injustices. Unfortunately, this has caused the recent rise in reactionary politics. "Make America Great Again" = take me back to when women were property and people of color knew their place.

As for me, I'm willing to put up with a few tantrums if it means that we're that much closer to treating people as people.

almosthere 5 days ago||
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IX-103 5 days ago||
There's no law yet. But people in power seem highly in favor of it. Pete Hegseth seems to think women shouldn't be able to vote (https://19thnews.org/2025/08/pete-hegseth-doug-wilson-women-...) and he was joined by Charlie Kirk (https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-guest... https://19thnews.org/2025/08/pete-hegseth-doug-wilson-women-...)

Trump is throwing so many racist dog whistles it's a subject of scientific inquiry https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politi... https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266662272...

Charlie Kirk also thought that people of color shouldn't be pilots https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/mike-freeman...

As for the benefit of restricting the Ladies rooms to people that are assigned female at birth, that is less of a benefit than you seem to believe. How do you expect they will enforce such a rule?

So far this has resulted in countless women being groped in attempts to prove that they don't belong in the Ladies' room and a comparatively small number of trans-women with no where to go to the bathroom. Can't you see that this effectively punishes those women who don't meet a stereotypical view of women? Catching fictional trans-women peeking on women in restrooms is just the excuse! (Of course even you would understand that if you understood even the basics of gender dysphoria disorder).

As for your other point, well racists always have that one black friend - you know, to prove their not racist. And it seems like it's pretty profitable to be a token black or Hispanic person in the maga MAGA movement.

almosthere 4 days ago|||
The reason I get so mad for people to push all this shit is because it's so disingenuous and it's all lies. It's all lies mostly fed by the media machine. So fucking glad it's all dying.
almosthere 4 days ago|||
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ToucanLoucan 5 days ago|||
> The polarization is due to progressive politics messing up the country.

Yeah that's why the most progressive areas of the country are the ones struggling the most, right. Like Mississippi, Appalachia, Arkansas...

Maybe if you guys would actually deal with some of your issues instead of bashing your bibles your kids wouldn't be running the fuck out of your towns as soon as they're able to, but I'm sure it's still some poor Portlandian black transwoman's fault for being alive while not knowing you exist or whatever, and definitely not the ideological positions of everyone you've elected in the last 5 decades.

jeffbee 5 days ago||
Go make a list of the felony theft threshold in all fifty states then come back here and post where $950 falls among them.
almosthere 5 days ago||
https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...

In Texas even if you steal $100 you can go to jail for 180 days.

The nuance in CA (before it recently changed) was that there was absolutely NOTHING you could do if they stole 3 lawnmowers.

Besides why fight this? You already know you're wrong.

jeffbee 5 days ago||
The penalty for misdemeanor larceny in California is also 6 months in county jail and that has been true continuously since Spanish rule to the present day. The difference between Texas and California is that in California you can do 3 years in state prison for stealing $1000 and that is not the case in Texas.
almosthere 4 days ago||
Maybe the penalty written down, but not in practice. And that's the one that matters.

Also in Texas you can also be shot after 6pm by the shopkeep for stealing and killed and that's 100% legal.

fragmede 4 days ago||
Yes. The same Internet that was going to connect the gay teenager in gay-hostile territory like rural Alabama or Iran and save them from suicide, it unfortunately turns out can also connect actual neo-Nazis and KKK members across the globe.
mothballed 5 days ago||
Understanding other cultures and giving me a chance to experience them has always been the quickest way to get me to become far more stereotypical / bigoted. I am willing to be open and idealistic about most any idea / ethnicity / culture but once I actually face it in real life and question if I want my kids exposed to that, then the rubber hits the road.

The internet has accelerated this.

johnny22 5 days ago|
I've found the opposite of that. I've found good people from all sorts of cultures and countries.
henriquemaia 5 days ago||
I'm like you and with you.

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.

mothballed 5 days ago||
The major difference in the more extreme case were I was shot at, or had a gun put to my head, or was caught in between a knife fight, or systematically on a regular basis saw people getting the shit beat out of them. Which I acknowledge can happen anywhere, but such trauma is not so easily rationalized when considering what I'd like my kids exposed to and after viscerally experiencing it in real life.

In any case, "I've found good people from all sorts of cultures and countries" is something I've definitely found to be true, and I don't view that as mutually exclusive. The trouble being, the amount of bad things a certain sector of people get away with can vary a lot depending on where you are and what the cultural response and incentives to that is.

txrx0000 5 days ago|
The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit.

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.

p1necone 5 days ago||
In practice I don't think this really changes anything at least for moderation. It takes a bunch of time and effort to moderate online communities - under the process outlined by the post you linked most communities are going to have a single effective clientside moderation list you can subscribe to anyway.

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)

lithocarpus 5 days ago|||
Parent isn't saying "totally unmoderated" he's saying the client chooses the algorithm/filters.

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.

txrx0000 5 days ago|||
There are multiple providers of Adblock lists. It would be like that, not single-provider.

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.

gruez 5 days ago||
>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.

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.

philipkglass 5 days ago|||
It's impractical even for tinkerers. YouTube claims to get over 20 million videos uploaded daily and it has well over 10 billion stored videos in its corpus. The metadata alone is tens of terabytes. The usual introduction-to-recommendations approaches out there are going to completely fall over on an item set of this size, even if you have disk space to spare.
txrx0000 5 days ago||
The server can deliver a sparsely randomly sampled RSS feed of embedding vectors and metadata.

Fetch media after ranking on-device.

lithocarpus 5 days ago||||
If facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available.

I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.

johnny22 5 days ago||
so how would a user know which one to choose?

I already get analysis paralysis as a software dev enough.

lithocarpus 4 days ago|||
Same way people choose what to listen to in other kinds of media most likely.

I am constantly asking people who I admire or respect where they get their news/information from because I'm trying to find better ways since the general media landscape is very dismal.

Jensson 5 days ago|||
> so how would a user know which one to choose?

Word of mouth, that makes peoples needs drive the algorithm rather than profits.

johnny22 3 days ago||
That is indeed important, but it's not enough.
kiba 5 days ago||||
Most people will use the default algorithm. A minority will choose a different algorithm.

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.

txrx0000 5 days ago|||
We need to ban the platform from recommending at all.

It would be like more sophisticated Adblock. There are many providers of Adblock lists, but they can't be provided by the platform itself.