> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.
If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse.
Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?
It could also be something structural about how the "friendship graph" looks. The mean number of friendships isn't the median or typically experienced number of friendships, and if friendship relationship distributions follow some kind of power law, a change in the power-law exponent could make those diverge.
I am wondering the same thing. It's interesting that they didn't report at all on the median and only the average. Also find the timing interesting, as I can't help but suspect that both the justification and incentive for self-reporting a higher number of friends materially changed for some people in the early days of social media. They didn't seem to acknowledge this at all.
The model they built that draws a causal relationship between graph density and polarization is interesting, but these gaps leave me skeptical.
There are just so many other reasons I can see for polarization.
1. Late-stage of civilizational monetary cycle (bretton woods - petrodollar) -> historically leads to polarization
2. Dramatic increase in access to information / wide range of things to know and care about
3. Attention economy (novel upsetting news is best at getting attention, not nuance, not truth)
4. Habits of instant gratification diminishes patience for nuance
5. Maybe foreign state interference/bias towards polarization to destabilize rivals?
6. Several more maybe??
So I buy the graph density correlation, and I'm curious about contributing to causation, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's the primary or sole cause.
Personally, I find modern technology makes it easier to maintain them. 25 years ago my friendships around the world would have been relegated to 'penpalships' because of the cost of long distance calls and the lack of face time.
Loneliness is a big topic now due to the pandemic, and the lingering trends from stay/work-at-home mandates.
They probably aren't the friends people are thinking of when referring to things like this. The benefit of friends isn't just that you have someone fun to talk to, it's that you're building out a social support circle. Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss, or help you get an interview at a job shortly after you're fired (or at least, not one local to you).
Loneliness is a big topic now, imo, because people are losing helpful human friends and relying on middling digital friends. Just like how looking at pictures of a forest is nowhere near as healthy as actually going to a forest.
Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss
I'll make the counter argument that -- although I value those things and try to provide them to friends in need -- all of those can be addressed by hiring someone.
On the other hand, I've recently received fantastic emotional support from a friend who moved away a few years ago. We've seen each other in person only a handful of times since then, but of all my friends, she happened to be the one with the experience and attitude to help me.
Incidentally, I'll add that I'm the type of person to provide those types of support to others, but the vast majority of my friends are not. That doesn't make them bad friends, it just means that I have a service disposition while they don't. I think there's a vast range of qualities that people seek and experience from friends and you're going to have a hard time objectively rating them on any sort of scale.
Yeah and you can rent a truck every time you need to haul something, but it's nice when your friend lets you borrow his - and his manpower/time. And yeah, you can hire an emergency remediation company, or chef, or psychologist for your friends, but that seems... impersonal to me?
I'm not trying to say there's no value to Discord friends, but I do think it's substantially less valuable to the human condition than real, in-person friends.
This is an interesting argument, as by the first definition, I have more close friends than ever. If I need someone to make me food, I don't have a friend who is either nearby or has time for that.
On the other hand, I can buy all those services on an app for the most part. People I enjoy talking to for hours on end aren't available for $20 anywhere.
Keep in mind that it is "average" and it is about close friends.
Anecdotally, the pandemic was the great cutting of weaker ties. I talk to far fewer people than I did pre-pandemic (and most friends report the same), but I speak to those people more often. I can easily see that ending in a way where some 20% find themselves with nobody.
I would say I have 4 close friends. But some 10 weaker ties disappeared from my life. Did those 10 also double down on close friends? Or did perhaps some of them not have enough close friends to do that?
Many of my friends live abroad. We started a weekly Zoom meeting during Covid-19 lockdown. Now we have a WhatsApp group too. Does that change the classification from plain friends to close friends?
Oh god flashback, I remember the zoom calls, and people acting like they didn’t know how zoom worked 10 months into it or that the host can mute anyone that doesn’t know how to mute themselves
I opted out of the extended family ones and the social ones
I wonder if they’re still doing that, I’d rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
I would agree - usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you. Having more close friends that all think alike would increase rejection of ideas not shared by other close friends. It is harder (but not impossible) to have close friends that have dramatically different lifestyles, ideals, or socioeconomic class.
Weaker ties would include friends that have less in common, and have different ideas. But that fact that they are a friend means that you are aware of their existence and different ideas. In that way, having a broad range of weak friends suggests that you can see things from different perspectives instead of in your own (close) friend bubble.
It's like how people are less likely to know their neighbors now, who can hold different ideas. But you don't have to be close friends with them to have some empathy.
> usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you
That stirkes me as myopic. My closest friends--the ones I trust with all my secrets, with whom have have practically no secrets, the ones I'd hide if it came to that or risk my life to save--are all over the place values and ideas-wise. It's what makes their company fun. It's also what makes their advice useful, because they'll call me out on my bullshit in a way a mirror image of me could not.
If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety.
And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.
I have a sinking feeling it's a situation where people who are adept at creating and maintaining relationships are getting more of them, whilst people who struggle socially are being excluded more than ever as a result. The overall count grows, but a substantial slice of the population still has barely any.
I have no data for this, just a gut feeling. I still see so many people on the day-to-day who are completely socially inept. I don't even mean just like, rude or abrasive, I mean people who don't have the emotional intelligence to like, navigate basic conflicts.
When you look at studies, women and men are lonely at about the same rate. There are differences at the margins - period right after divorce, being stay at home and such. But overall rates are the same.
You mean "feel lonely at the same rate" or that they are actually alone at the same rate? Men do have fewer friends and its much more common for men to have no close friends at all.
The free market rate of a young/fit woman's sexual services are several hundred or even thousand+ $/hr. I suspect any man who is seen as potentially offering 100s of $/hr in services if you pretend to be a friend long enough, would see similar interest of fake friends.
I could see it making you even more lonely, to have to filter through that though, as a man is probably less likely to reject someone as a 'false positive' who might be a true friend through such filtering process. If you are down and out man and someone is being nice to you and not trying to sell you something, I've found it pretty rare that the person isn't being genuinely friendly. I've heard the exact opposite from females.
If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend.
We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?
Agreed, there's so many headlines on X and Reddit that are obviously highly spun and could take 5 seconds of reading into it to see through the BS. But they kill as long as people agree with the phrasing and people go right to the comments to cheer it on instead of reading the article.
It's tough on the internet being a skeptic or generally thoughtful about the world. It's not even worth debunking stuff anymore. Much healthier to not engage entirely.
I can no longer engage in (controversial) debates on other social medias, as responses often indicate a lack of understanding with the other person - they glance over the arguments, make a prejudice-based opinion, and then they respond to their straw man, often loaded with bad emotions. It's quite frustrating and as you say, sadly only solution is to disengage, but in so doing the polarisation only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.
> but in so doing the polarization only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.
It used to make sense when the internet was smaller but now? Not so much. Especially when the people running platforms/media, content moderators and influencers explicitly don't care about the truth. You're not just fighting some dummy posting a comment.
The only positive thing I've seen in the last decade to address this was Community Notes on X.
I feel ya. It is true on hn too sadly. There are certain subjects that trigger people to fall into a rhetoric mode of clapbacks and us vs them mindset. Eg the individual disappears replaced by some form of ideology. It isnt a left right up down thing but a phenomenon of hyper polarization. It is especially scary to see it in person. Mobs are a dangerous thing.
> That's one of Chomsky's major points for decades
Curious for the source? To my recollection, Chomsky talked about distraction, i.e. repurposing attention. OP is talking about the pool of attention as a whole drying up (versus being misdirected).
Not to be flippant but this takes a couple of hours to essentially make the point that the complexities of the world resist summarization or at least the opportunistic summarization that can be used to sway the inattentive public (among other nuances to this) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60
Disclaimer: I think the most correct criticism of Chomsky was by Everett, and the following shitshow that ensued is _really_ a shame for linguistics in the Anglo world [0] (Chomsky wasn't the instigator, but his silence doesn't paint him in a great light). Some of the other criticisms are also valid, but often too ideologically tainted or too incorrect to be worth your time (or anyone's time tbh).
I think you have to start with his criticism of Skinner (papers that criticize other papers are often the best and the most informative ones) and his theory of UG, then Everett's claim and Chomsky's rebuttal (sightly weak, but interesting to understand his views on UG). I know UG has been rebuilt (basically his theory was falsifiable, was falsified on the field, then UG people worked on another similar theory that corrected some mistakes), but it was post 2011 and i stopped followed humanities around that time, and never got back into linguistics, so you might want to read about that.
[0] Something similar happened in France with Furet, and the fact that Furet's school of thought still somewhat exist and the debate lasted decades on polite terms without ad hominem is a compliment to historian's values and practice. Saying "critical thinking" and running away from correct criticism is shameful.
You can start with his recent Russian apologia where he blames the U.S. and Ukraine for forcing Russia to invade Ukraine. That might provide some context when you read one of his books.
The new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, has been publishing genocide denial pieces, pointing ro various children dying in Gaza as false stories. That happened this week, you seem to be concerned that Chomsky signed a petition for Faurisson on the 1970s, that he should not be jailed for publishing his book on the holocaust. Chomsky signed hundreds of letters for jailed Soviet dissidents, Turkish authors on trial etc. That he did not want Faurisson jailed for his book is seen as a bad thing by those who don't believe in free speech and believe authors should be jailed by governments.
Regarding Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge coalition was pushed out in 1979 and the US began arming the KR coalition, providing UN support for it etc. You would think the US and Reagan arming the Khmer Rouge coalition more heinous, if you don't like them, than Chomsky saying the US should not bomb Cambodia in the 1970s etc.
The UN and every human rights organization in the world says the US has been and is involved in a genocide in Gaza. The denial of this in the US has been incredible, but now that the first stage is done the Press is more forthcoming about it. Something Chonsky opposed, the establishment supported.
It sounds like we both agree that genocide denial is a serious matter. By familiarizing themselves with the links I put above, people will be able to make an informed opinion on Chomsky's engagement with it.
i think this is a good article, but these statements,
> If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)?
> For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)?
... are not quite as applicable to left-wing populism (for the latter --- at least, at the surface). post-colonial, _left-wing_ populism tended to be of international character, or at least of wider appeal than the nation (e.g., nasser). the "distrust of central banking" is of wildly unique impetuses for left- vs. right-wing populism.
the common-sense point is quite poignant, at least for me in the u.s., where each party paints their own solutions as explicitly "common-sense", for solutions as unique as harsh border control ("solutions") vs. city-owned grocery stores & free childcare.
there are certainly issues i imagine i don't hold the "elite" view on. many people don't consider the "elite" view at all --- anti-punitive justice, for example, is rejected for particular types of crimes, despite provenly worse outcomes if we simply punish these crimes. the rise of anti-intellectualism doesn't help :D
In-group dynamics are further ingrained as the group gets bigger. If you have 4 friends in a group, their opinions aren't as strong. If you have 40 friends in a group, not only are their opinions stronger, they'll fight vigorously to defend the group's commonly accepted beliefs. So a growing social circle does reinforce the group dynamic. (this is well established by lots of studies)
But increased polarization around the world isn't because of this. There's the typical environmental factors: an increase in changes (or challenges) to traditional values increases polarization; an influx of migrants increases polarization. But then there's also social media, where mastery of "engagement" by businesses for profit has been adopted by political groups looking to sow division to reap the benefits of polarization (an easier grip on power). The rapid rise of polarization is a combination of both.
It's nothing new of course, political/ideological groups have been doing this forever. We just have far more advanced tools with which to polarize.
Before the Internet and social media, groups had a practical size cap because they had to meet up in person. Polarization was naturally limited.
I don't think the social media companies' algorithms are entirely to blame. But more broadly it's centralized moderation of public online spaces.
Moderation of public behavior of physical spaces was only necessary because it wasn't possible to selectively filter people's influences on eachother in public. If someone is doing something you don't want to see in public, covering your eyes is not good enough because you also block out the people you do want to see. Centralized moderation was a practical half-measure rather than an ideal solution for a democratic society that values free expression and self-determination.
That kind of moderation isn't necessary online because all filters can be implemented client-side. We just aren't doing it because people are so used to the old way. But the old way will naturally lead to more and worse conflict when we have infinite connectivity.
I know this paper isn't about social networks, but we know this, we knew it in the 70s. The only difference is that we continue to ignore and forget it.
> What disappears as a result is a societal baseline of tolerance—a development that could contribute to the long-term erosion of democratic structures. To prevent societies from increasingly fragmenting, Thurner emphasizes the importance of learning early how to engage with different opinions and actively cultivating tolerance.
That could be a problem, considering how the push back to "actively cultivating tolerance" has unfolded so far.
I noticed this when I studied abroad in the Netherlands — a highly educated, slightly more digitalized country than my own. Politics there splintered into micro-parties, each “hardly exchanging between bubbles,” as the study puts it. First impressions were warm, but dates always ended with splitting the bill. Friend groups felt just as closed off, except for Dutchies who had just as me lived abroad before, learned to bridge cultures and still are my closest friends today.
Digitalization and the pursuit of perfect information seemed to invite more binary thinking — and with it, more opportunities to disagree every single day. Meanwhile, other forces found easy consensus on simpler, more immediate issues: cheap gas, housing, grocery prices, job security, immigration. Complex, long-horizon topics like the climate crisis rarely stood a chance.
The fact that we have more close friends on average is a novel and surprising observation to me. Very worthy of investigation.
But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level? There's also a 10-year gap between USA (and other countries' data points too) that covers the span of the whole alleged "aligned trend". It feels a little bit like the authors just went "Look! Two data trends moving in the same direction! Causal?!"
More seriously, I would love to see a much deeper dive on:
- Technological and associated psychological trends that might be causing greater polarisation (plenty of existing data here)
- How an increase in close friends can co-exist with an apparent loneliness epidemic (plenty of existing data here too)
> But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level?
You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones.
> You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones
I did this after Covid. Consciously started declining invitations from acquaintances, and instead making time and travel to see close friends. Would never go back.
I’m more interested in how people determine who they trust, and the parameters by which humans decide to trust someone.
I would wager that people are shit at determining trustworthiness based on limited information (like social media representations). In the old days before social media, you got to know people in person, and decades ago, most of the people you knew were likely people you grew up around. You knew that person’s background, how they treated people, what their family was like, and what likely influences them as a person.
So much of how we process trustworthiness is how we perceive the motives of the speaker. With shallower friendships and parasocial relationships, we want to feel connected but really lack any good context that you need to actually know who you’re listening to.
> The sharp rise in both polarization and the number of close friends occurred between 2008 and 2010—precisely when social media platforms and smartphones first achieved widespread adoption. This technological shift may have fundamentally changed how people connect with each other, indirectly promoting polarization.
Indirectly? Seems to me that this is far more likely the "direct" cause, given what we know about the psychology around algorithmic feeds.
Also - I'm not sure if I missed it in the article, but did they define what they mean by "close relationship" means? I'd be very curious to know if a purely online relationship is counted and how this may also contribute to the observations made.
The article said that a close relationship is one where the other person can influence your views. I didn't dig into the details to see how that was measured.
I think the causal relationship is not quite that way.
better connectivity -> destroyed physical limits on group size -> groups not only get larger but also more ideologically homogenous because they're moderated by a central authority like how physical crowds are moderated -> people make friends more easily in those homogenous groups OR get kicked and start their own group, which also has the potential to get larger and more homogenous without limit -> groups have larger differences and clash harder
Polarization maybe a bit unclear word here. Connectivity creates cohesion, which creates larger creatures. So what we have is, virtual monsters roaming around with huge human groups riding on them. They can organize real protests, polarized opinion and massive impact wherever these monsters go.
More polarization is good if people are allowed to naturally polarize in different directions. Alignment between individuals are supposed to emerge naturally, forming small groups that are internally polarized in the same direction. Democracy would work fine in that society.
But now we have huge online mobs that are homogenously polarized that want to kill eachother. It gets violent when the group size reaches the nation-state level because that's where most of the violence and oppression in our society is siloed.
We have to limit group sizes online. Before social media, it was physically limited by the difficulty of meeting up in person. But now groups just keep getting larger and more homogenous.
> When people are more connected with each other, they encounter different opinions more frequently. This inevitably leads to more conflict and thus greater societal polarization
If this is true, it is counterintuitive, and runs against the prevailing narrative that living within your bubble and not interacting with opposing viewpoints is what causes polarisation. I thought cities were supposed to be less polarised because people can't help encountering other viewpoints.
This always seemed intuitively inevitable if you ever played with a graph layout tool like dot or similar kinetic layout engine. With weak connectivity the nodes don't cluster readily, but with more connections they "snap" into rigid subassemblies. It always seemed to me like a bad thing for society but it could well be a case of "old man yells at moon."
Links are "DOI NOT FOUND". Article does not seem to suggest that the study actual found any relationship between the increase in the two things, just that they both happened around the same time.
Unfortunately, even for the most fast-moving journals, that time is typically several hours before the actual articles appear on the journal’s website. So, anyone who’s reading quickly is likely to find that the DOI fails.
But that rule only applies to the fast-moving journals, like Nature and Science. Many other journals can take a few days between when they allow journalists to write about a paper and when it becomes available to the scientific community—PNAS, which is a major source of material for us, falls in that category.
The study linked at the beginning of this article, and the two listed under "More information" at the bottom all take me to a page with the error
"DOI Not Found"
Given that the main (only significant) fact cited in the article goes against everything else I've read, I would like to see the actual study and how it came to the conclusion that the number of close friends has doubled.
Here are some sources that appear to contradict this article:
You can have 10 "friends". 3 close ones. Anything larger than that and you are way out of your depth and can't possibly maintain those relationships in a meaningful, personal way.
The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit.
The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
Each person should be able to control what they can post and view online, but not what anyone else posts or views. The norms that we use to moderate physical public spaces must not be applied to online public spaces. Until we discard those norms, people will continue to become increasingly polarized, democracy will continue to decline worldwide, and violent conflicts will continue to increase in frequency and scale.
In practice I don't think this really changes anything at least for moderation. It takes a bunch of time and effort to moderate online communities - under the process outlined by the post you linked most communities are going to have a single effective clientside moderation list you can subscribe to anyway.
Totally unmoderated internet communities would be completely unusable because of spam, and it's also questionable whether you could even stay up with no serverside moderation - you'd have to delete stuff otherwise it just takes one script kiddie with a botnet to flood your disk space with garbage.
(User produced ranking/filtering algos though I can see being viable)
Parent isn't saying "totally unmoderated" he's saying the client chooses the algorithm/filters.
That means there can be a bunch of algorithms/filters out there to choose from (any tech savvy person could make their own as a blend of others that exist) and the end user could basically choose which feed[s] to subscribe to.
There are multiple providers of Adblock lists. It would be like that, not single-provider.
Regarding banning server-side moderation, we probably can't do it without decentralizing content delivery in a BitTorrent fashion. But even half measures like replacing moderators with client-side filters would be a big improvement.
>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
This is such a HN response. A HN reader might think it's fun to spend a weekend on writing/testing a ranking algorithm, but not the average person. They're just going to use whatever the platform recommends.
It's impractical even for tinkerers. YouTube claims to get over 20 million videos uploaded daily and it has well over 10 billion stored videos in its corpus. The metadata alone is tens of terabytes. The usual introduction-to-recommendations approaches out there are going to completely fall over on an item set of this size, even if you have disk space to spare.
If facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available.
I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.
Most people will use the default algorithm. A minority will choose a different algorithm.
It's only a partial solution. Really, the correct response is regulatory oversight and taxation on remaining economic rent. They are monopolies, and should be regulated as such.
Understanding other cultures and giving me a chance to experience them has always been the quickest way to get me to become far more stereotypical / bigoted. I am willing to be open and idealistic about most any idea / ethnicity / culture but once I actually face it in real life and question if I want my kids exposed to that, then the rubber hits the road.
I've lived in several countries in 3 continents now, and the more I get to
know different peoples, the more I feel we're all the same—albeit stuck in these almost kaleidoscopic ways of outwardly displaying the very same humanity.
Perhaps OP got fixated on the collective differences instead of seeing through them. Perhaps.
The major difference in the more extreme case were I was shot at, or had a gun put to my head, or was caught in between a knife fight, or systematically on a regular basis saw people getting the shit beat out of them. Which I acknowledge can happen anywhere, but such trauma is not so easily rationalized when considering what I'd like my kids exposed to and after viscerally experiencing it in real life.
In any case, "I've found good people from all sorts of cultures and countries" is something I've definitely found to be true, and I don't view that as mutually exclusive. The trouble being, the amount of bad things a certain sector of people get away with can vary a lot depending on where you are and what the cultural response and incentives to that is.
> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.
If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse.
Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?
It could also be something structural about how the "friendship graph" looks. The mean number of friendships isn't the median or typically experienced number of friendships, and if friendship relationship distributions follow some kind of power law, a change in the power-law exponent could make those diverge.
I am wondering the same thing. It's interesting that they didn't report at all on the median and only the average. Also find the timing interesting, as I can't help but suspect that both the justification and incentive for self-reporting a higher number of friends materially changed for some people in the early days of social media. They didn't seem to acknowledge this at all.
The model they built that draws a causal relationship between graph density and polarization is interesting, but these gaps leave me skeptical.
There are just so many other reasons I can see for polarization.
1. Late-stage of civilizational monetary cycle (bretton woods - petrodollar) -> historically leads to polarization
2. Dramatic increase in access to information / wide range of things to know and care about
3. Attention economy (novel upsetting news is best at getting attention, not nuance, not truth)
4. Habits of instant gratification diminishes patience for nuance
5. Maybe foreign state interference/bias towards polarization to destabilize rivals?
6. Several more maybe??
So I buy the graph density correlation, and I'm curious about contributing to causation, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's the primary or sole cause.
Personally, I find modern technology makes it easier to maintain them. 25 years ago my friendships around the world would have been relegated to 'penpalships' because of the cost of long distance calls and the lack of face time.
Loneliness is a big topic now due to the pandemic, and the lingering trends from stay/work-at-home mandates.
They probably aren't the friends people are thinking of when referring to things like this. The benefit of friends isn't just that you have someone fun to talk to, it's that you're building out a social support circle. Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss, or help you get an interview at a job shortly after you're fired (or at least, not one local to you).
Loneliness is a big topic now, imo, because people are losing helpful human friends and relying on middling digital friends. Just like how looking at pictures of a forest is nowhere near as healthy as actually going to a forest.
Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss
I'll make the counter argument that -- although I value those things and try to provide them to friends in need -- all of those can be addressed by hiring someone.
On the other hand, I've recently received fantastic emotional support from a friend who moved away a few years ago. We've seen each other in person only a handful of times since then, but of all my friends, she happened to be the one with the experience and attitude to help me.
Incidentally, I'll add that I'm the type of person to provide those types of support to others, but the vast majority of my friends are not. That doesn't make them bad friends, it just means that I have a service disposition while they don't. I think there's a vast range of qualities that people seek and experience from friends and you're going to have a hard time objectively rating them on any sort of scale.
Yeah and you can rent a truck every time you need to haul something, but it's nice when your friend lets you borrow his - and his manpower/time. And yeah, you can hire an emergency remediation company, or chef, or psychologist for your friends, but that seems... impersonal to me?
I'm not trying to say there's no value to Discord friends, but I do think it's substantially less valuable to the human condition than real, in-person friends.
This is an interesting argument, as by the first definition, I have more close friends than ever. If I need someone to make me food, I don't have a friend who is either nearby or has time for that.
On the other hand, I can buy all those services on an app for the most part. People I enjoy talking to for hours on end aren't available for $20 anywhere.
This comment is really funny to me for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
Keep in mind that it is "average" and it is about close friends.
Anecdotally, the pandemic was the great cutting of weaker ties. I talk to far fewer people than I did pre-pandemic (and most friends report the same), but I speak to those people more often. I can easily see that ending in a way where some 20% find themselves with nobody.
I would say I have 4 close friends. But some 10 weaker ties disappeared from my life. Did those 10 also double down on close friends? Or did perhaps some of them not have enough close friends to do that?
Many of my friends live abroad. We started a weekly Zoom meeting during Covid-19 lockdown. Now we have a WhatsApp group too. Does that change the classification from plain friends to close friends?
Oh god flashback, I remember the zoom calls, and people acting like they didn’t know how zoom worked 10 months into it or that the host can mute anyone that doesn’t know how to mute themselves
I opted out of the extended family ones and the social ones
I wonder if they’re still doing that, I’d rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
> I'd rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
did it dry in the end?
I stopped paying attention and did something entrepreneurial then left
I would agree - usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you. Having more close friends that all think alike would increase rejection of ideas not shared by other close friends. It is harder (but not impossible) to have close friends that have dramatically different lifestyles, ideals, or socioeconomic class.
Weaker ties would include friends that have less in common, and have different ideas. But that fact that they are a friend means that you are aware of their existence and different ideas. In that way, having a broad range of weak friends suggests that you can see things from different perspectives instead of in your own (close) friend bubble.
It's like how people are less likely to know their neighbors now, who can hold different ideas. But you don't have to be close friends with them to have some empathy.
> usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you
That stirkes me as myopic. My closest friends--the ones I trust with all my secrets, with whom have have practically no secrets, the ones I'd hide if it came to that or risk my life to save--are all over the place values and ideas-wise. It's what makes their company fun. It's also what makes their advice useful, because they'll call me out on my bullshit in a way a mirror image of me could not.
If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety.
And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.
I can't find any evidence supporting the claim in the article, and the study it links to for me is a dead link. Are you able to find the source?
I have a sinking feeling it's a situation where people who are adept at creating and maintaining relationships are getting more of them, whilst people who struggle socially are being excluded more than ever as a result. The overall count grows, but a substantial slice of the population still has barely any.
I have no data for this, just a gut feeling. I still see so many people on the day-to-day who are completely socially inept. I don't even mean just like, rude or abrasive, I mean people who don't have the emotional intelligence to like, navigate basic conflicts.
> have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"?
Yes. People nowadays spent 8 hours per day chatting to someone online and they call it close friend even if they never met in real life.
Also, people nowadays are notorious for being unable to have friendship that is not a [insert activity here] buddy.
Or women have 8 and guys have 1
When you look at studies, women and men are lonely at about the same rate. There are differences at the margins - period right after divorce, being stay at home and such. But overall rates are the same.
You mean "feel lonely at the same rate" or that they are actually alone at the same rate? Men do have fewer friends and its much more common for men to have no close friends at all.
The free market rate of a young/fit woman's sexual services are several hundred or even thousand+ $/hr. I suspect any man who is seen as potentially offering 100s of $/hr in services if you pretend to be a friend long enough, would see similar interest of fake friends.
I could see it making you even more lonely, to have to filter through that though, as a man is probably less likely to reject someone as a 'false positive' who might be a true friend through such filtering process. If you are down and out man and someone is being nice to you and not trying to sell you something, I've found it pretty rare that the person isn't being genuinely friendly. I've heard the exact opposite from females.
>> goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse
This seems like a hot-take. IMHO one does not and cannot cure loneliness by having more online friends.
Yeah, if anything I would say that leans in to the loneliness epidemic, if we take things like Dunbars Number to be true.
Having more shallow friends is actually much more isolating than having fewer deep friends.
Indeed. Conflicting info.
NOTE: I did NOT read the article.
If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend.
We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?
I favor the theory that polarization is due to decreasing attention spans, effectively preventing us from appropriately considering nuance.
Related:
https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/populism-fast-an...
Agreed, there's so many headlines on X and Reddit that are obviously highly spun and could take 5 seconds of reading into it to see through the BS. But they kill as long as people agree with the phrasing and people go right to the comments to cheer it on instead of reading the article.
It's tough on the internet being a skeptic or generally thoughtful about the world. It's not even worth debunking stuff anymore. Much healthier to not engage entirely.
I can no longer engage in (controversial) debates on other social medias, as responses often indicate a lack of understanding with the other person - they glance over the arguments, make a prejudice-based opinion, and then they respond to their straw man, often loaded with bad emotions. It's quite frustrating and as you say, sadly only solution is to disengage, but in so doing the polarisation only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.
> but in so doing the polarization only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.
It used to make sense when the internet was smaller but now? Not so much. Especially when the people running platforms/media, content moderators and influencers explicitly don't care about the truth. You're not just fighting some dummy posting a comment.
The only positive thing I've seen in the last decade to address this was Community Notes on X.
I feel ya. It is true on hn too sadly. There are certain subjects that trigger people to fall into a rhetoric mode of clapbacks and us vs them mindset. Eg the individual disappears replaced by some form of ideology. It isnt a left right up down thing but a phenomenon of hyper polarization. It is especially scary to see it in person. Mobs are a dangerous thing.
That's one of Chomsky's major points for decades.
> That's one of Chomsky's major points for decades
Curious for the source? To my recollection, Chomsky talked about distraction, i.e. repurposing attention. OP is talking about the pool of attention as a whole drying up (versus being misdirected).
Not to be flippant but this takes a couple of hours to essentially make the point that the complexities of the world resist summarization or at least the opportunistic summarization that can be used to sway the inattentive public (among other nuances to this) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60
embarrassingly haven't dug into Chomsky, this is another update towards me doing so soon!
OT: As someone in the same camp, does anyone have any recommendations on where would be best to start?
Disclaimer: I think the most correct criticism of Chomsky was by Everett, and the following shitshow that ensued is _really_ a shame for linguistics in the Anglo world [0] (Chomsky wasn't the instigator, but his silence doesn't paint him in a great light). Some of the other criticisms are also valid, but often too ideologically tainted or too incorrect to be worth your time (or anyone's time tbh).
I think you have to start with his criticism of Skinner (papers that criticize other papers are often the best and the most informative ones) and his theory of UG, then Everett's claim and Chomsky's rebuttal (sightly weak, but interesting to understand his views on UG). I know UG has been rebuilt (basically his theory was falsifiable, was falsified on the field, then UG people worked on another similar theory that corrected some mistakes), but it was post 2011 and i stopped followed humanities around that time, and never got back into linguistics, so you might want to read about that.
[0] Something similar happened in France with Furet, and the fact that Furet's school of thought still somewhat exist and the debate lasted decades on polite terms without ad hominem is a compliment to historian's values and practice. Saying "critical thinking" and running away from correct criticism is shameful.
You can start with his recent Russian apologia where he blames the U.S. and Ukraine for forcing Russia to invade Ukraine. That might provide some context when you read one of his books.
Yeah to be fair I dunno about that one yeesh
IMO these should be required reading for anyone unfamiliar with Chomsky's positions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial
https://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2181/ (Chomsky defending the decision to write a foreword for a book denying the Rwandan genocide)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair (Chomsky signed a petition supporting a Holocaust denier he felt had been mistreated)
The new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, has been publishing genocide denial pieces, pointing ro various children dying in Gaza as false stories. That happened this week, you seem to be concerned that Chomsky signed a petition for Faurisson on the 1970s, that he should not be jailed for publishing his book on the holocaust. Chomsky signed hundreds of letters for jailed Soviet dissidents, Turkish authors on trial etc. That he did not want Faurisson jailed for his book is seen as a bad thing by those who don't believe in free speech and believe authors should be jailed by governments.
Regarding Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge coalition was pushed out in 1979 and the US began arming the KR coalition, providing UN support for it etc. You would think the US and Reagan arming the Khmer Rouge coalition more heinous, if you don't like them, than Chomsky saying the US should not bomb Cambodia in the 1970s etc.
The UN and every human rights organization in the world says the US has been and is involved in a genocide in Gaza. The denial of this in the US has been incredible, but now that the first stage is done the Press is more forthcoming about it. Something Chonsky opposed, the establishment supported.
It sounds like we both agree that genocide denial is a serious matter. By familiarizing themselves with the links I put above, people will be able to make an informed opinion on Chomsky's engagement with it.
i think this is a good article, but these statements,
> If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)? > For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)?
... are not quite as applicable to left-wing populism (for the latter --- at least, at the surface). post-colonial, _left-wing_ populism tended to be of international character, or at least of wider appeal than the nation (e.g., nasser). the "distrust of central banking" is of wildly unique impetuses for left- vs. right-wing populism.
the common-sense point is quite poignant, at least for me in the u.s., where each party paints their own solutions as explicitly "common-sense", for solutions as unique as harsh border control ("solutions") vs. city-owned grocery stores & free childcare.
there are certainly issues i imagine i don't hold the "elite" view on. many people don't consider the "elite" view at all --- anti-punitive justice, for example, is rejected for particular types of crimes, despite provenly worse outcomes if we simply punish these crimes. the rise of anti-intellectualism doesn't help :D
In-group dynamics are further ingrained as the group gets bigger. If you have 4 friends in a group, their opinions aren't as strong. If you have 40 friends in a group, not only are their opinions stronger, they'll fight vigorously to defend the group's commonly accepted beliefs. So a growing social circle does reinforce the group dynamic. (this is well established by lots of studies)
But increased polarization around the world isn't because of this. There's the typical environmental factors: an increase in changes (or challenges) to traditional values increases polarization; an influx of migrants increases polarization. But then there's also social media, where mastery of "engagement" by businesses for profit has been adopted by political groups looking to sow division to reap the benefits of polarization (an easier grip on power). The rapid rise of polarization is a combination of both.
It's nothing new of course, political/ideological groups have been doing this forever. We just have far more advanced tools with which to polarize.
Before the Internet and social media, groups had a practical size cap because they had to meet up in person. Polarization was naturally limited.
I don't think the social media companies' algorithms are entirely to blame. But more broadly it's centralized moderation of public online spaces.
Moderation of public behavior of physical spaces was only necessary because it wasn't possible to selectively filter people's influences on eachother in public. If someone is doing something you don't want to see in public, covering your eyes is not good enough because you also block out the people you do want to see. Centralized moderation was a practical half-measure rather than an ideal solution for a democratic society that values free expression and self-determination.
That kind of moderation isn't necessary online because all filters can be implemented client-side. We just aren't doing it because people are so used to the old way. But the old way will naturally lead to more and worse conflict when we have infinite connectivity.
"An information flow model for conflict and fission in small groups (1977)" by Wayne W. Zachary [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3629752.pdf]
I know this paper isn't about social networks, but we know this, we knew it in the 70s. The only difference is that we continue to ignore and forget it.
> What disappears as a result is a societal baseline of tolerance—a development that could contribute to the long-term erosion of democratic structures. To prevent societies from increasingly fragmenting, Thurner emphasizes the importance of learning early how to engage with different opinions and actively cultivating tolerance.
That could be a problem, considering how the push back to "actively cultivating tolerance" has unfolded so far.
I noticed this when I studied abroad in the Netherlands — a highly educated, slightly more digitalized country than my own. Politics there splintered into micro-parties, each “hardly exchanging between bubbles,” as the study puts it. First impressions were warm, but dates always ended with splitting the bill. Friend groups felt just as closed off, except for Dutchies who had just as me lived abroad before, learned to bridge cultures and still are my closest friends today.
Digitalization and the pursuit of perfect information seemed to invite more binary thinking — and with it, more opportunities to disagree every single day. Meanwhile, other forces found easy consensus on simpler, more immediate issues: cheap gas, housing, grocery prices, job security, immigration. Complex, long-horizon topics like the climate crisis rarely stood a chance.
The fact that we have more close friends on average is a novel and surprising observation to me. Very worthy of investigation.
But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level? There's also a 10-year gap between USA (and other countries' data points too) that covers the span of the whole alleged "aligned trend". It feels a little bit like the authors just went "Look! Two data trends moving in the same direction! Causal?!"
More seriously, I would love to see a much deeper dive on:
- Technological and associated psychological trends that might be causing greater polarisation (plenty of existing data here)
- How an increase in close friends can co-exist with an apparent loneliness epidemic (plenty of existing data here too)
> But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level?
You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones.
> You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones
I did this after Covid. Consciously started declining invitations from acquaintances, and instead making time and travel to see close friends. Would never go back.
In this case it sounds like the polarisation is fueled by the axing and not the adding?
I’m more interested in how people determine who they trust, and the parameters by which humans decide to trust someone.
I would wager that people are shit at determining trustworthiness based on limited information (like social media representations). In the old days before social media, you got to know people in person, and decades ago, most of the people you knew were likely people you grew up around. You knew that person’s background, how they treated people, what their family was like, and what likely influences them as a person.
So much of how we process trustworthiness is how we perceive the motives of the speaker. With shallower friendships and parasocial relationships, we want to feel connected but really lack any good context that you need to actually know who you’re listening to.
> The sharp rise in both polarization and the number of close friends occurred between 2008 and 2010—precisely when social media platforms and smartphones first achieved widespread adoption. This technological shift may have fundamentally changed how people connect with each other, indirectly promoting polarization.
Indirectly? Seems to me that this is far more likely the "direct" cause, given what we know about the psychology around algorithmic feeds.
Also - I'm not sure if I missed it in the article, but did they define what they mean by "close relationship" means? I'd be very curious to know if a purely online relationship is counted and how this may also contribute to the observations made.
The article said that a close relationship is one where the other person can influence your views. I didn't dig into the details to see how that was measured.
Thanks! I tried clicking into the linked research paper but got a 404 >.<
better connectivity -> people finding better friendship matches -> groups are more homogenous -> more polarization
I think the causal relationship is not quite that way.
better connectivity -> destroyed physical limits on group size -> groups not only get larger but also more ideologically homogenous because they're moderated by a central authority like how physical crowds are moderated -> people make friends more easily in those homogenous groups OR get kicked and start their own group, which also has the potential to get larger and more homogenous without limit -> groups have larger differences and clash harder
More friends is a symptom rather than a cause.
Self-actualisation often leads to conflict.
Yes, the The People's Front of Judea and Judean People's Front are irreconcilable.
Polarization maybe a bit unclear word here. Connectivity creates cohesion, which creates larger creatures. So what we have is, virtual monsters roaming around with huge human groups riding on them. They can organize real protests, polarized opinion and massive impact wherever these monsters go.
Monsters is a interesting choice of words. Why call it monsters?
Isn't polarization a good thing? If I was enslaved by tyrants making my life worse everyday, shouldn't I be opposed by their ways?
More polarization is good if people are allowed to naturally polarize in different directions. Alignment between individuals are supposed to emerge naturally, forming small groups that are internally polarized in the same direction. Democracy would work fine in that society.
But now we have huge online mobs that are homogenously polarized that want to kill eachother. It gets violent when the group size reaches the nation-state level because that's where most of the violence and oppression in our society is siloed.
We have to limit group sizes online. Before social media, it was physically limited by the difficulty of meeting up in person. But now groups just keep getting larger and more homogenous.
> If I was enslaved by tyrants making my life worse everyday, shouldn't I be opposed by their ways?
That wouldn't create polarization, it would create extremely strong cohesion since everyone else enslaved by those tyrants would agree with you.
See ncase.me "the wisdom of crowds"
> When people are more connected with each other, they encounter different opinions more frequently. This inevitably leads to more conflict and thus greater societal polarization
If this is true, it is counterintuitive, and runs against the prevailing narrative that living within your bubble and not interacting with opposing viewpoints is what causes polarisation. I thought cities were supposed to be less polarised because people can't help encountering other viewpoints.
This always seemed intuitively inevitable if you ever played with a graph layout tool like dot or similar kinetic layout engine. With weak connectivity the nodes don't cluster readily, but with more connections they "snap" into rigid subassemblies. It always seemed to me like a bad thing for society but it could well be a case of "old man yells at moon."
In the limit you get periodic crystal structures when connectivity is maxed out and fully optimized.
Links are "DOI NOT FOUND". Article does not seem to suggest that the study actual found any relationship between the increase in the two things, just that they both happened around the same time.
Unfortunately, even for the most fast-moving journals, that time is typically several hours before the actual articles appear on the journal’s website. So, anyone who’s reading quickly is likely to find that the DOI fails.
But that rule only applies to the fast-moving journals, like Nature and Science. Many other journals can take a few days between when they allow journalists to write about a paper and when it becomes available to the scientific community—PNAS, which is a major source of material for us, falls in that category.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/03/dois-and-their-disco...
The common demoninator is the rise of social media networks.
The study linked at the beginning of this article, and the two listed under "More information" at the bottom all take me to a page with the error
"DOI Not Found"
Given that the main (only significant) fact cited in the article goes against everything else I've read, I would like to see the actual study and how it came to the conclusion that the number of close friends has doubled.
Here are some sources that appear to contradict this article:
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a...
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250617/dq250...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11288408/#pone.0305...
This might be it? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1004008107
You can have 10 "friends". 3 close ones. Anything larger than that and you are way out of your depth and can't possibly maintain those relationships in a meaningful, personal way.
Definitely. Close relationships of any kind involve a lot of investment and "costly signals".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Thanks to David Wong for explaining this in JDATE, calling it the Babel threshold.
group think has always been dangerous, 1984 come to mind
The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit.
For details see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45515980
The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
Each person should be able to control what they can post and view online, but not what anyone else posts or views. The norms that we use to moderate physical public spaces must not be applied to online public spaces. Until we discard those norms, people will continue to become increasingly polarized, democracy will continue to decline worldwide, and violent conflicts will continue to increase in frequency and scale.
In practice I don't think this really changes anything at least for moderation. It takes a bunch of time and effort to moderate online communities - under the process outlined by the post you linked most communities are going to have a single effective clientside moderation list you can subscribe to anyway.
Totally unmoderated internet communities would be completely unusable because of spam, and it's also questionable whether you could even stay up with no serverside moderation - you'd have to delete stuff otherwise it just takes one script kiddie with a botnet to flood your disk space with garbage.
(User produced ranking/filtering algos though I can see being viable)
Parent isn't saying "totally unmoderated" he's saying the client chooses the algorithm/filters.
That means there can be a bunch of algorithms/filters out there to choose from (any tech savvy person could make their own as a blend of others that exist) and the end user could basically choose which feed[s] to subscribe to.
There are multiple providers of Adblock lists. It would be like that, not single-provider.
Regarding banning server-side moderation, we probably can't do it without decentralizing content delivery in a BitTorrent fashion. But even half measures like replacing moderators with client-side filters would be a big improvement.
>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
This is such a HN response. A HN reader might think it's fun to spend a weekend on writing/testing a ranking algorithm, but not the average person. They're just going to use whatever the platform recommends.
It's impractical even for tinkerers. YouTube claims to get over 20 million videos uploaded daily and it has well over 10 billion stored videos in its corpus. The metadata alone is tens of terabytes. The usual introduction-to-recommendations approaches out there are going to completely fall over on an item set of this size, even if you have disk space to spare.
The server can deliver a sparsely randomly sampled RSS feed of embedding vectors and metadata.
Fetch media after ranking on-device.
If facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available.
I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.
so how would a user know which one to choose?
I already get analysis paralysis as a software dev enough.
> so how would a user know which one to choose?
Word of mouth, that makes peoples needs drive the algorithm rather than profits.
Most people will use the default algorithm. A minority will choose a different algorithm.
It's only a partial solution. Really, the correct response is regulatory oversight and taxation on remaining economic rent. They are monopolies, and should be regulated as such.
We need to ban the platform from recommending at all.
It would be like more sophisticated Adblock. There are many providers of Adblock lists, but they can't be provided by the platform itself.
Understanding other cultures and giving me a chance to experience them has always been the quickest way to get me to become far more stereotypical / bigoted. I am willing to be open and idealistic about most any idea / ethnicity / culture but once I actually face it in real life and question if I want my kids exposed to that, then the rubber hits the road.
The internet has accelerated this.
I've found the opposite of that. I've found good people from all sorts of cultures and countries.
I'm like you and with you.
I've lived in several countries in 3 continents now, and the more I get to know different peoples, the more I feel we're all the same—albeit stuck in these almost kaleidoscopic ways of outwardly displaying the very same humanity.
Perhaps OP got fixated on the collective differences instead of seeing through them. Perhaps.
The major difference in the more extreme case were I was shot at, or had a gun put to my head, or was caught in between a knife fight, or systematically on a regular basis saw people getting the shit beat out of them. Which I acknowledge can happen anywhere, but such trauma is not so easily rationalized when considering what I'd like my kids exposed to and after viscerally experiencing it in real life.
In any case, "I've found good people from all sorts of cultures and countries" is something I've definitely found to be true, and I don't view that as mutually exclusive. The trouble being, the amount of bad things a certain sector of people get away with can vary a lot depending on where you are and what the cultural response and incentives to that is.