
Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social - nkurz
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/11/16/who-filters-your-news-why-we-built-gobo-social/
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apatters
Gobo's a very interesting experiment in social media and news aggregation.

I think the premise for the service is very insightful -- we're inundated with
information and we want to filter it. FB, Twitter etc. give us very few tools
to do that -- why? Because we're the product, not the customer. They want to
customize us. They don't want us customizing them. They want to make our
attention as saleable to advertisers as possible.

So Gobo turns that on its head and gives you the power to filter as you like.
I think the filters Gobo has chosen to implement, such as "only show me posts
from a certain gender or race," are stupid beyond belief and I hope they never
become popular.

This post nails the problem statement though.

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twiceaday
The nice thing about Reddit is that content is strongly encouraged to group
into subreddits making it easy to filter. My only problem is the opt-in model.
I'd rather it be an opt-out model, show me r/all minus the blacklisted
subreddits. They added a filter to r/all recently but it is limited to only
100 subreddits and is a pain to manage on mobile. So I wrote a script that
periodically signs in as me and hides posts from subreddits I've blacklisted.
It was initially getting the list from a google sheet but I've recently done
something smarter. I have the script auto-subscribe to all new subreddits it
sees on the front page and then monitor whether I stay subscribed. If it
notices that I manually unsubscribed from a subreddit it takes that as a sign
to blacklist that subreddit. It works amazingly.

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SpeciesInvader
Could you share the source on that? I'm removing Reddit from many aspects of
life but still like several subs but an overwhelmed and don't need all.

~~~
twiceaday
[https://pastebin.com/tLQ8LTvp](https://pastebin.com/tLQ8LTvp)

It uses praw [1] for the API.

[1]
[https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

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t1o5
If I understand it right, gobo uses twitter's and facebook's APIs using user's
access token to fetch the results and applies filter to it.

What if the feeds from the APIs are already conditioned/personalized for the
user ? I didn't sign up for gobo because I don't have a twitter or facebook
anymore. I left these social medias for the very reasons that Gobo is trying
to solve.

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Xeoncross
Wait, facebook doesn't provide your full friends feed stream. How do they get
it?

~~~
bordercases
They don't.

From la poast

> You’ll also notice that there’s probably a lot less content from Facebook
> than from Twitter. Facebook allows us to show you posts from public pages,
> but not from your friends’ individual pages. We’re exploring ways you might
> be able to feed your whole, unedited Facebook news feed through Gobo, but
> we’re not there yet.

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iamcasen
I'm glad the minds over at MIT are working on this issue, as I think it will
be the most trying problem of our time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle)

It's the reason propaganda works: people can only stand against the flow for
so long before their will is broken down. If you are assaulted every day by
messages, without any possibility of verifying their veracity, you will either
shutdown completely, or become influenced by lies. Trust is a huge part of the
human experience, and the internet has eroded that.

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CaptSpify
It's amazing how much of the past we ignore. We already learned years ago that
the best filtering is one you manage yourself. kill-files, procmail rules,
spam-filters, etc all work better when the user has control. I don't see why
you would use a system that lets anyone send anything to you without that
personal level of filtering available.

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isaiahg
The problem in my mind with the world of social media is that we can filter
our content until we've created a bubble around ourselves and an echo chamber
with only those who think like we do. It's important to be able to see things
we don't agree with. It's important to that people with different opinion
collide on social media and debate their ideas.

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tapanjk
“What is Gobo?” Is buried deep in the article:

To use Gobo, you link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to Gobo and choose a
set of news publications that most closely resembles the news you follow
online. Gobo retrieves recent posts from these social networks and lets you
decide which ones you want to see.

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eighthnate
Apparently google and the traditional media ( nytimes, wapo in collusion with
the government/cia ).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15748579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15748579)

