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"Personalization is just a different term for relevant results"

Fine. It's not a "filter bubble", it's "excessive personalization", and it's still bad.

Arguing about what it's called doesn't do a thing to change whether or not it exists, or whether or not it's a real problem.



Is it actually excessive, though? You're just assuming that it's a real problem without any evidence to support that it is.


Read my last paragraph carefully; I'm just pointing out the name doesn't matter, it's a real phenomena that doesn't go away by changing the name.

My personal stance is actually a great deal more nuanced, which is that you can't not be in a bubble. It is mathematically impossible. Any way of slicing the torrent of information coming at you constitutes a bias. The entire idea of "piercing the bubble" is an instance of English misleading you, it's a concept without a referent. The question is not how to "escape" the bubble, the question is how do we choose our bubble?


So filtering/personalization is always present; we entirely agree on that point. Is it excessive, though? If it's not excessive, then, almost by definition[1], it's not a problem - or at least is not a major one. There is actually a huge difference between "personalization" and "excessive personalization", which was what I was trying to get at.

(Also, paragraph != sentence)

[1] Excessive meaning "more than is necessary, normal, or desirable".


A paragraph may legally consist of one sentence. It may legally consist of one word in some cases.

You seem to be trying to draw me into defending a point I'm not making. I'm making a much more subtle one, which is that you can't escape being in a bubble (not the bubble, which I initially typed, because there isn't the bubble, there's all kinds of them), so in a way arguing about whether it's "excessive" isn't even the right dimension to argue on; the filter bubbles simply are. (Not "simply ar excessive", simply are; they simply exists regardless of whether they are excessive or desirable or anything else.) The question is, what should be done about that fact, rather than how do we prevent that fact from being true, and to be honest I'm rather ambivalent about the answer to that question, because the answer is dominated more by your preconceptions and pre-existing goals than anything interesting.

I really should just blog this up.




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