I'll take good recommendations, thank you.

I'm surprised so few people here have picked up on the fact that "filter bubble" is a rhetorical trick about as obvious as the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" dichotomy.

People like getting good recommendations, and they'll always like them. "Filter bubbles" are here to stay.

Sure, we all want good recommendations, but how do we define "good"? I see some obvious problems with the way tech recommendations are playing out that have nothing to do with the filter bubble issue.

First, we are outsourcing recommendations to profit-driven corporations. At best, the recommendations I want to see will be mixed with the ones advertisers want me to see. Revenue expectations of social media companies currently ensure this is a non-trivial issue with no easy middle ground.

Even assuming the recommendations are reasonably good, you still have the problem that these ML-type recommendations require massive datasets and therefore it naturally gravitates towards a winner-take-all situation. Having one giant borg of a recommendation engine is bad.

We are replacing a rich tapestry of individual word-of-mouth and small-scale communication channels with a massive mono-culture. Scalability is worshipped in tech companies (it's great for getting rich!), but it's not a inherently a good thing. In nature we find diversity trumps scalability, and I feel the same way about culture.

Google News claims to include other sources in a story's feed, to expose the readership to other points of view. That sounds like a great way to burst the "social media bubble".

Good recommendations are like a convenient browser that comes with your OS. The problems come in when it's just one company that has the public locked in to their particular solution.

What problems?

IE 6

No discovery = isolation bubble

I found this out when I switched from Pocket to Instapaper. Instapaper has a curated list of articles updated about once a month, and I don't read half of them. Pocket recommends articles based on what you read, and it's not just more of the same. I'm probably going to switch back.

You can follow hn and other aggregators like reddit via rss. I have it set up for hn where I only get posts that have hit 100 points, otherwise it’s a firehose.

> Recommendations + Discovery = Filter Bubble.

Yep. When it decentralized you can control how strong are the bubble walls and can try different bubbles from time to time.