These projects are pretty interesting: "News from people like you." It seems like these kinds of apps further the isolation people develop from reading mostly articles recommended by like-minded friends.
I wonder if anyone is building an app that recommends articles that provide a variety of perspectives different from your own. "News from people who think differently than you do", or something like that.
But I think that's what newspapers are supposed to be.
>I wonder if anyone is building an app that recommends articles that provide a variety of perspectives different from your own.
When building Recent News (https://recent.io/) we considered adding the options of seeing news from perspectives both similar to and different from your own, at least as we understand them based on your usage.
We didn't do that. It turns out in early testing that users liked seeing a broad range of articles. For instance, a pro-2A voter might want to read a Salon.com article talking about how firearms should be banned--just to share it to argue how wrong it is! Or an anti-2A voter might be interested in a Fox News article talking about repealing anti-gun laws, if only because it reinforces how nutty those conservatives can be. (It also added more complexity when our goal was an MVP.)
The current version of our iOS+Android app includes a personal tab that is unique to you based on what we believe your interests to be, and a Hot News tab that is not unique to you. Neither filters by perspective, and not one person has requested that feature in the weeks since we launched--the feature requests have included things like dark theme, offline mode, text resizing, etc. instead.
I use Twitter this way, to some extent. I consciously try to follow people with different perspectives than me and with opinions counter to my own. Sometimes I end up unfollowing those people if the signal:noise ratio is too high, but over time it serves as a way of introducing me to new ideas and ways of looking at things that I hadn't considered before. And, because of retweets, I'm then introduced to more people with similar perspectives. Once you "seed" your timeline with a few people with different perspectives/opinions than your own, this works really well.
All that to say you can use at least Twitter to intentionally break out of that intellectual isolation that can otherwise be difficult to escape.
Your concern is the so called "filter bubble". I think it all comes down to how this kind of system is implemented. Svven in particular encourages you to navigate further from your fellows and it immediately adapts to however your interests (ie. tweets) are changing. A new tweet gives you a new perspective.
japhyr|10 years ago
I wonder if anyone is building an app that recommends articles that provide a variety of perspectives different from your own. "News from people who think differently than you do", or something like that.
But I think that's what newspapers are supposed to be.
declan|10 years ago
When building Recent News (https://recent.io/) we considered adding the options of seeing news from perspectives both similar to and different from your own, at least as we understand them based on your usage.
We didn't do that. It turns out in early testing that users liked seeing a broad range of articles. For instance, a pro-2A voter might want to read a Salon.com article talking about how firearms should be banned--just to share it to argue how wrong it is! Or an anti-2A voter might be interested in a Fox News article talking about repealing anti-gun laws, if only because it reinforces how nutty those conservatives can be. (It also added more complexity when our goal was an MVP.)
The current version of our iOS+Android app includes a personal tab that is unique to you based on what we believe your interests to be, and a Hot News tab that is not unique to you. Neither filters by perspective, and not one person has requested that feature in the weeks since we launched--the feature requests have included things like dark theme, offline mode, text resizing, etc. instead.
tnorthcutt|10 years ago
All that to say you can use at least Twitter to intentionally break out of that intellectual isolation that can otherwise be difficult to escape.
ducuboy|10 years ago
Your concern is the so called "filter bubble". I think it all comes down to how this kind of system is implemented. Svven in particular encourages you to navigate further from your fellows and it immediately adapts to however your interests (ie. tweets) are changing. A new tweet gives you a new perspective.