
Ask HN: What's the biggest problem with social networks today? - devchris10
I&#x27;m curious about differentiating between causes and symptoms. Seems like a complicated mix of privacy, increasing polarization, centralization&#x2F;decentralization, ad incentives, just to name a few.
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derrick_jensen
Companies exist to maximize some measure, and maximizing "social" isn't
inherently a good thing. All the nonsense that happens on social media is the
same as what happens in real life, but you can't monetize/optimize the real
world in the same way.

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cloudking
Echo chambers - algorithms are optimized to show you more content related to
your personal beliefs and interests. Then monetizes ads related based on your
beliefs and interests.

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chrismatheson
I would agree that most recommendation engines are as you described. However,
my conclusion was that this is a product of people.

Ad revenue increases with time spent on the site. So the goal is to get people
to spend more time, if people genuinely wanted to engage with others of
differing beliefs, or be show content outside of their obvious interests, then
it would make sense to do this in order to increase the magic “engagement”
numbers?

So the fact that it’s not happening suggests to me at least that most people
are quite happy in their echo chamber?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this line of semi logic pseudo phycology ;)

