HN is an echo chamber when it comes to tech choices, but it's absolutely not when it comes to politics. I've seen many pro-Trump supporters in the ranks here, which is very surprising given the demographic.

Watching the front page through the historical lens of hckrnews.com was very insightful. By default, hckrnews shows articles which have made it onto the front page for at least a little bit of time. Then it would continue to display those, highlighting them in HN orange if they were still on the front page, or turning them black when they fell off (even marking them as dead with a faint grey font when appropriate).

Pro Trump articles (and anti Clinton) would appear on in the sea of other articles, but they were always black or grey within a minute or two of their appearance. Pro Clinton articles were about 50/50 throughout the day, some staying, some being voted off.

I attribute a lot of the lost articles to the feeling of "keep HN clear of politics", and a lot more to fringe/fanatical news sites making being flagged, but the overall trend of preferring Clinton to Trump was definitely visible. Bernie Sanders articles were ones which stayed up even longer than the others combined.

So, long story short, yeah, HN is still quite the political echo chamber. It's understandable: many of us share both general job descriptions and life goals; I'd hazard a guess that most even share an age group and fall within a handful of ethnicities.

It is fascinating the extent to which smart-ish coastal city liberals cannot conceive of an intelligent or even highly intelligent Trump voter. There are plenty of them.

Really?

When I read HN, I got the feeling, most political comments that get upvoted are phrased like "I know everyone here is a liberal leftist, BUT I have to tell you about my conservative right opinion right now, even if you don't wanna hear it!"

But I never really encountered these "liberal leftist" majority here. Just in places of the Internet that don't have anything good to say about HN.

I think the difference with this site is that enough of us recognize that the world isn't black or white, but grey. It seems like most sites don't have the majority of people that think like that.

I'm not sure that this is the case. But I am sure that the majority of people here like to think of themselves as such.

Word! (btw. Sanders would have won |-)

An echo chamber can include dissent and still be an echo chamber. In fact that's what keeps them alive long term.

Is the same 5 or 6 conversations over and over really any less of an echo chamber than 2 or 3?

Why is it surprising?

I like to come up with my own conclusions, which may - or may not - be what my demographic group "expects" me to.

48% of the country voted for him, not a surprise to see his supporters represented in any group with 2 or more people.

It has everything to do with human behavior. It takes energy and induces cognitive load to interact with 'the other' - other people, other view points, etc. So people group up by like interests. Technology just makes it possible to highly concentrate.

I agree, but I think this goes beyond technology at this point. I hypothesize that we are self-segregating as a nation into Rural and Urban tribes and this is going to cause a lot of pain for half the country and further erode the trust in our institutions. I think we are on a dark path, not because a Republican won, but because we can't effectively govern by coming together and being nuanced and compromising.

It is so much easier to sell something people want than something people need.

Perhaps a way forward is instead much greater personalization?

Yes, reddit, HN, and the NYT, are echo chambers. But is that the problem, or the eternal-Septemeber, clueless reporting, low-signal high-noise level of the echos?

Is the problem that the LA Times publishes a propaganda piece on Copyright Office staffing? Or that it's so very hard to find high-quality commentary? With which, if you cared to, you could to discredit the dreck? Is the enormous role that groupthink plays in Washington the problem, or that even when people wish to break out of it on some topic, the information infrastructure doesn't exist to support them?

Imaging an HN which, instead of pretending its quality hadn't declined over the years, was instead trying to technically address the decline. What might be done?

Well, why couldn't a high-quality discussion community exist embedded in a reddit? A necessary condition is "we don't see the dreck". Personalization. Everyone has control of what the site looks like to them. So you can be fine with reddit-style puns on topic A, but only see insightful expertise on topic B. And I can make the opposite choice. On Tuesdays.

A core idea of machine-learning-based human-computer-hybrid systems, is that the system learns about the people at the same time that the people help the system execute the process. The candy machine bribing CS undergraduates to grade CS 101 exams, learns both about the answers being graded, and about how much to trust different people's grading of different subjects.

And the system can recognize when it needs advice. "This clearly goes in bucket M, and this in bucket N, but hmm... I'm not sure where to put this one. Hey, statistically well-executed sample of people, which bucket?".

Perhaps it's overly optimistic to think that people might choose to not live in mind ghettos if given the choice. But we won't have a choice until we get better at cultivating quality. Instead of chance "Oh, look over there, by the petunias! A thoughtful thread! Oh, no, it's dead now".

There are now a multitude of echo chambers, you could easily argue that each user has his own personalized bubble. What is different from before social and personalized media is that there is (much) less common experience anymore, no dominant common denominator like a major newspaper. What Zuckerberg should point out is that – in a way – this is detrimental to what his alleged aim with FB is: to connect people. I'm not sure where this will lead us to. Since I started using FB more intensively I actually feel more disconnected from people than ever.

Is social media really more of an echo chamber than traditional newspapers/TV stations?

* Most of the liberal stuff in my FB/Twitter feeds are from NYT or Washington Post

* Back in the day, consumers of traditional media probably zoned out of TV bits/skimmed over newspaper articles that they didn't agree with

The whole "echo chamber" thing seems like a meme to me. "In the olden days, we used to go to ye olde coffee store and have intellectual conversations with randos with different political beliefs."

Yup. But at a more core level, the real problem is that what we want to know isn't what we should know. The two ideally would be equivalent. The solution for this problem is personal wisdom, and hopefully the shock that people are feeling regarding this election's results will produce a bit of wisdom for us all. :)

I actually really dislike the personalization that happens on a lot of sites.