The polarization bit is like watching a person who hit your parked car explain why the crash is really your own fault.
Explanations that 'the web is too broad' or 'it takes an active choice to enable the goggle' mean nothing. It takes an active choice to watch polarizing news and those sources will tell you that you really need to only get your info from them. I would not be shocked to see major sites use this to control how people view the world.
"Use our brave search and escape the leftist google agenda!" or such.
An active choice is better than a passive one, if only because it requires an effort, in that respect the explicitness is an advantage over the typical personalization.
The article also mentions that Goggles will not stop polarization, it suffices to not exacerbate it.
No technology/system on any period of time has been able to suppress it, censorship included.
I think they were going for "Active choice is [considered] bad [by] people who think they know better and want to control others." At least, that's my read.
Being that the vast majority of the public facing internet is ad driven there will always be some sort of leaning.
Allowing the users to choose their own filters will allow advertisers to actually read the market based on the the sites that are whitelisted in the filters instead of shotgunning ads at any website that claims to be relevant to the target demographic they can actually see the popular ones that users choose based on these filters.
its still targeted advertising, but abstracted one layer away from the actual user so that the targeted ads don't have to be as fucking creepy with all the data they're gathering on people. With the customer choosing what sites they want to see results from, the advertisers can stop wasting money on ad revenue for click farms that everyone hates.
its a better deal for advertisers, and provides a better end result for the user and some degree of transparency.
It can't make people accept inconvenient/uncomfortable facts, it won't solve any political problems. You can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink, you can point out any number of problems to a person but you cannot make them care.
edit- relevant to solso's comment about an active choice
The active choice democratizes the ad market allowing users to choose, instead of the passive route of allowing an algorithm to coerce the market.
>its still targeted advertising, but abstracted one layer away from the actual user so that the targeted ads don't have to be as fucking creepy with all the data they're gathering on people.
How is it less creepy if the advertisers still end up with all the same data? Whether they snoop on my browsing history or snoop on my search rankings doesn't make any material difference to me. The problem is building a profile on me through snooping.
That said, I'll trade the world crashing to an end for a search engine that knows that when I type 'Angular template variable scope' It knows that when I say angular I explicitly mean angular 2-current not 'angularjs'
I've seen a number of stories from places like r/QAnonCasualties (support group for people whose loved ones have fallen into the QAnon conspiracy) where people have deprogrammed their parents or family members by blocking far-right/conspiracy content via DNS or through the cable box parental controls.
The obvious questions of morality aside, my perception of those stories is that most of the victims are hopelessly addicted to the feeling being righteous and correct and part of something bigger to the point that it takes over their whole lives. They end up a husk of a person all for a fake cause. But what is interesting is that after you take it away they generally don't find something else to latch onto, they slowly go back to having hobbies and normal conversations and normal relationships with their family, friends, and coworkers.
This is of course all anecdata, but if Goggles are another tool for giving people their loved ones back I think that's worth weighing as part of the equation.
"Use our brave search and escape the leftist google agenda!" or such.