Reddit Was Fun

Yeah, I certainly want people who want to see new people, topics, and points of view to be able to do so. Fortunately, I think networks of trust are pretty good at getting you to far away ideas pretty quickly though. Veritasium actually did a video on this quite recently but basically even a small number of connections outside the "bubbles" create bridges that connect networks really well.

I think a system that put this into practice would need precise controls over who gets added to your network (e.g. friend this person but don't add their friends to the network of trust, or block this person and prevent any of their friends from being added to the network of trust, or friend this person but privately so others can't use that connection in their own networks of trust, etc.). That would help with balancing seeing a lot of posts while still "exploring" the network at your own pace and comfort level.

And today discoverability is still pretty weird and closed off. You either get algorithmic feeds that just show you shit they think you'd like, and you're likely to see posts from influencers a bunch, causing para social relationships, or nobodies who you've never seen before and never will again, making it hard to form a connection. Or, you have closed off groups like discord servers that aren't very "permeable". You can't, say, use the server you like and use it to "explore" similar communities.

So alongside the network of trust I think being able to "traverse" the network would help discoverability. I picture this as like a digital neighborhood, where being friends with someone is like them being your neighbor, and you can "walk down the street" so to speak, and the further out you walk the further the people may be from your "bubble". I don't know exactly what that would look like in practice, but one idea I've played around with is myspace style pages. So instead of a global feed, you go to someones page, see their friends and some posts that spark your interest, so you go to the friends page, and so on.

But IDK, this is all theoretical and IDK exactly what such an app would look like. But I think the discoverability problem is solvable in a network of trust based platform

Well part of the network of trust would be enabling a protocol or platform where individuals can control their identity and data, and thus use clients that don't use AI.

I'm also not sure I agree with the idea of echo chambers being bad or even a thing to avoid. You're already in various echo chambers of varying sizes, based on your interests, spoken languages, and so on. It would certainly be cool for people to just learn all languages and learn all about every culture and every point of view, etc., but that's simply not feasible. So who, then, decides which cultures and points of views to prioritize? Well I don't want the answer to be the some company or some nation, so it really has to be the individual.

Besides, a lot of the reasons an individual might have for not engaging with certain points of view can be quite reasonable. I don't want to force trans people to regularly expose themselves to posts by transphobes, for example. Society can handle that particular interaction not occurring. And once again it just comes down to who gets to decide which interactions are worth having and which aren't, and it's really going to come down to individuals and what they're individually comfortable with. Sure, a transphobe interacting with trans people might change their ways, but I think we can find better ways of fixing transphobes existing than building a platform where trans people become obligated to do exposure therapy for transphobes.

I think a lot of the "we have to avoid echo chambers" sentiments stems from an unfounded trust in liberal democracy and the free market of ideas. Time and time again, it's been shown that that just leads to allowing extremists to portray their ideas as having some level of legitimacy. It's what leads to fascism and hate (even though ironically you'll see people argue echo chambers do that instead).