How To Narrow Your World View

May 15, 2022

Ever wonder how conspiracy theories, crazy ideas, and outright lies become so wide-spread and popular? The answer lies in the “show more like this” technology that is an integral part of so many big web sites:

If I happen to watch a video about abused life stock, and maybe watch another one about poor living conditions of life stock, I’ll soon find five or ten more videos of that sort being offered to me and if I make no conscious effort to avoid these by pursuing a completely different topic, I’ll soon be flooded with so much about the horrors of the life stock industry that that animals on every farm, everywhere, must suffer being raped and beaten, kicked and mutilated, and heinously abused in every conceivable way. Don’t believe me?

Pick a topic, any topic! Pick funny animals, or stupid people, or historic airplanes, whatever… now watch a few videos on that topic and count how many of those start showing up in your feed, and also how the diversity shrinks compared to what used to be offered to you.

Now use a brand-new account on that website and see how the selection changes (some sites may let you erase the viewing history, but erasing your cookies is not going to help much if the site “knows you”.) In any case, the idea is to give the website no clue who you are, so it has no history from which to determine what you like and is forced to offer you a “neutral” view from where it can narrow down what is most likely to hold your interest and keep you visiting often and for long periods of time. Do you see how this works? Ingenious, isn’t it?

It’s quite ingenious, actually, and if it were just about lolcats and some entertaining things on Saturday night, it wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s no stretch to say that the computer algorithms control what you are exposed to as soon as you provide them something to go by, and thereby literally end up controlling your world view and what you think!

Is this pure evil? Are “they” looking to subjugate you?

No, of course not. Hanlon’s Razor says, “Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity.” As I already hinted above, what’s driving all these clever algorithms is the website owner’s desire to maximize profits and that means they need to keep you on their site, browsing more of their content. The more often you visit and the longer you spend there, the better for them (their pocket book). You and I may not understand how they profit from your viewing habits, but believe me this: They’re not operating a free service out of the goodness of their big hearts. Those servers cost millions of dollars a year (maybe each month) and they’re making back that money easily. So, what about me and this site?

I’m paying just under $200 hosting fees per year for this server and waste my time writing stuff like this in hopes of reaching a few people with my opinions, rants, and just whatever comes to mind. I don’t like posting on “big sites” to millions of followers because that becomes a job with responsibilities, and I’ve already got one of those, so this here is merely a self-hosted blog on a domain which nobody owns or controls but me. I get no profit from this whatsoever and don’t miss $200/year, so meh, now you know.

But back to the purpose of these world-view-limiting algorithms. The goal is profit by monetizing information about millions of visitors. It is really no more malicious than that. It’s money, but what about the stupid part of Hanlon’s Razor?

The stupid part is that social media is creating divisions along lines of one extremism or another, dividing society into balkanized camps, and making wider and civil discourse increasingly difficult because opinions become so divergent that there is practically no place left in the middle where a meeting can take place.

In effect, social media is not uniting, but dividing us.

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