AFAIK there is no mechanism to artificially favor any particular view. There is only the thumbs up/down mechanism meaning what you see is what the userbase finds useful or amusing. It ain't that serious.
There is probably a good middle ground between amplifying and stifling.
You go to twitter, and ignorance is on blast. You try to get GPT to do anything non khaki non beige -- good luck.
Either extreme is harmful imo, but we haven't found a way to a happy medium because, guess what: "will anyone think of the investors/advertisers/lawyers/...?!"
Stop censoring, stop amplifying. Just reflect what is.
It's a great question, and I don't pretend to have an answer. Also, I was thinking bit more broadly than just Hoodmaps -- the amplification of nonsense (being generous here, amplification of vile, harmful misinfo is more like it) has been an issue across the "social" media landscape for years. Same goes for the corporate-y "sanitization" of everything into bland lumpy paste -- it's not a new phenomenon.
The one common thread I see there is ~money~ -- both the dark patterns that frontload incendiary garbage into feeds, and the ultra-conservative (as in, cautious and risk-averse) culture of large corps that stains their products, these are in effort to maximize profits / minimize losses.
It would be inaccurate to say for example "nobody wants to see musk's inane drivel" -- there are probably a handful of stans, sycophants, grifters and trainwreck-watchers who follow that aberrant humanoid. But the mutant has a megaphone, and projects his mental illness larger than life, on one of the major online platforms that reaches tens of millions. This is the sort of amplification I see as being harmful. It's out of proportion, and many of the users of that platform seem to reject it.
A little website tagging neighbourhoods? As long as no one there has the power to override what people put in and force their own individual opinion to the front? Let it be! So what if some nancy wrings her hands that a neighbourhood is tagged with a racial slur? Maybe it was someone from the very neighbourhood who tagged it as such. Who draws the line and where, regarding what is permitted? If something really transgresses against major social mores, people will shun it.
We've got to remember we don't all ever agree on nothing -- different groups, different cultures hold different values. Don't muzzle people because you don't like what they say -- but at the same time, don't multiply their voice; especially not those who aim to start fights.
obviously if they support the view point of the reader they are well informed. If they don't they are ignorant. Its my understanding thats how the internet works.
