I’ve yet to see a personalized filter bubble, I’ve certainly been part of some nebulous other’s filter bubble, but I am constantly and consciously struggling to get social media websites to serve up feeds of content I WANT to interact with.
Now while I am in someone else’s bubble—there is certainly a progressive slant to most of the external or reshared content I see on Meta platforms (and it seems to be American-centric despite the fact I’m not in the United States), it took me an incredibly long time to curate my ‘for you/Explore’ page in Instagram, to remove all ‘meme’ videos, basically anything with a white-background and text like “wait for it” or “watch until the end” or intentionally impractical craft projects. It is only through aggressively using the “not interested” option on almost every item in the For You page, it now shows me predominantly High Fashion photography.
Alas, one stray follow (i.e., following a friend of a friend) or like and Voompf the bubble bursts and I’ll start seeing stuff I have no interest in like “top 5 almond croissants” or “homemade vicks”—I have never EVER liked any local cuisine content ever and I’m really against the idea of getting medicinal craft projects from popular reels, sorry.
I suspect the filter bubble is grossly exaggerated - (Counter theory: I am not profitable enough for the algorithm to build such a bubble) - I suspect that much the fear and shock when you see Google ads delivered to you that match a conversation you had just 3 hours ago (although there is a lot of truth to the idea that smart devices are spying on you). Likely this is a combination of good old fashioned Clustering Illusion and the ego-deflating idea that the topic of that conversation you had just isn’t that unique or uncommon (particularly). I’ve had three different people DM me the same OK GO Reel in one week recently. I never interacted with it directly—clearly the algorithm was aggressively pumping that to EVERYONE.
Spotify ads suggest I’m a parent who plays golf. Instgaram Ads are slightly better these days—I just flicked through and most had to do with music and photography. But recently it was serving me a lot of obvious scam ads, with a photoshop image of a prominent political figure with a black eye. (again—politics. I don’t follow or interact with ANY political content.)
It’s someone else’s bubble, I’m just living in it.
P.S. do not allow Spotify to add suggested tracks to the end of your playlist if you’re not a fan of top 50 pop music, it will start playing Taylor Swift et. al., and you won’t be able to remove it from your ‘taste profile’ rendering certain mixes unlistanble as it won’t just be her music but every other top 50 artist.
On YouTube I keep getting Russian propaganda videos recommended all the time, and I really don’t remember upvoting anything of that kind. So either YouTube does not use this algorithm (or maybe gives to “upvoted by people similar to you” much lower weight than “upvoted in general”), or there is some clever trick the authors of those videos use, but I am not sure what it could be.
On Facebook, I think people used this trick that they posted hundred cat videos, people upvoted them, and then they deleted the cat videos and posted some advertisement on their channel, and now the advertisement was shown to everyone, including “people you know liked this page”. But I think this should not be possible on YouTube, because you cannot change the videos once uploaded.
So… I don’t know. I wish YouTube created a bubble for me, but it seemingly does the opposite.
I think their metric might be click and not upvote (or at least, clicking has a heavy weight). Are you more likely to click on a video that pushes an argument you oppose?
As a quick test, you can launch a vpn and open private browsing to see how your recommendations change after a few videos
They absolutely do. This phenomenon is called filter bubble.
I’ve yet to see a personalized filter bubble, I’ve certainly been part of some nebulous other’s filter bubble, but I am constantly and consciously struggling to get social media websites to serve up feeds of content I WANT to interact with.
Now while I am in someone else’s bubble—there is certainly a progressive slant to most of the external or reshared content I see on Meta platforms (and it seems to be American-centric despite the fact I’m not in the United States), it took me an incredibly long time to curate my ‘for you/Explore’ page in Instagram, to remove all ‘meme’ videos, basically anything with a white-background and text like “wait for it” or “watch until the end” or intentionally impractical craft projects. It is only through aggressively using the “not interested” option on almost every item in the For You page, it now shows me predominantly High Fashion photography.
Alas, one stray follow (i.e., following a friend of a friend) or like and Voompf the bubble bursts and I’ll start seeing stuff I have no interest in like “top 5 almond croissants” or “homemade vicks”—I have never EVER liked any local cuisine content ever and I’m really against the idea of getting medicinal craft projects from popular reels, sorry.
I suspect the filter bubble is grossly exaggerated - (Counter theory: I am not profitable enough for the algorithm to build such a bubble) - I suspect that much the fear and shock when you see Google ads delivered to you that match a conversation you had just 3 hours ago (although there is a lot of truth to the idea that smart devices are spying on you). Likely this is a combination of good old fashioned Clustering Illusion and the ego-deflating idea that the topic of that conversation you had just isn’t that unique or uncommon (particularly). I’ve had three different people DM me the same OK GO Reel in one week recently. I never interacted with it directly—clearly the algorithm was aggressively pumping that to EVERYONE.
Spotify ads suggest I’m a parent who plays golf.
Instgaram Ads are slightly better these days—I just flicked through and most had to do with music and photography. But recently it was serving me a lot of obvious scam ads, with a photoshop image of a prominent political figure with a black eye. (again—politics. I don’t follow or interact with ANY political content.)
It’s someone else’s bubble, I’m just living in it.
P.S. do not allow Spotify to add suggested tracks to the end of your playlist if you’re not a fan of top 50 pop music, it will start playing Taylor Swift et. al., and you won’t be able to remove it from your ‘taste profile’ rendering certain mixes unlistanble as it won’t just be her music but every other top 50 artist.
On YouTube I keep getting Russian propaganda videos recommended all the time, and I really don’t remember upvoting anything of that kind. So either YouTube does not use this algorithm (or maybe gives to “upvoted by people similar to you” much lower weight than “upvoted in general”), or there is some clever trick the authors of those videos use, but I am not sure what it could be.
On Facebook, I think people used this trick that they posted hundred cat videos, people upvoted them, and then they deleted the cat videos and posted some advertisement on their channel, and now the advertisement was shown to everyone, including “people you know liked this page”. But I think this should not be possible on YouTube, because you cannot change the videos once uploaded.
So… I don’t know. I wish YouTube created a bubble for me, but it seemingly does the opposite.
I think their metric might be click and not upvote (or at least, clicking has a heavy weight). Are you more likely to click on a video that pushes an argument you oppose?
As a quick test, you can launch a vpn and open private browsing to see how your recommendations change after a few videos