> The Majority Goes Silent - When the majority of people looks at the feed and assumes they're outnumbered, people will often self-censor.

That's not the same thing, is it? Here the majority is, say, anti-, but they are being frightened by a noisy pro- minority. They're moderates in the sense that anti- is the conventional position to take. But they have opinions. (They could also be in the minority, and this fear of speaking up would still be a bad thing.)

Otherwise, if they're truly moderate, but are frightened into silence supposedly, what would they be saying if they dared? "Everybody listen to me, I have no strong opinion on this matter"?

The only point I'd add is that it's not handling time evolution in wicked problems quite right. Agree that the noisy room is distorting the world in exactly the ways described. But what if we've been in there so long, and the world has become so distorted.. that reality itself slides towards the once-extreme positions? Easiest to see this with climate-change controversy since that is the way that sort of thing happens, regardless of whether you think it's happened yet. Cascade, phase change, and collapse don't just call a truce.

So you have to anticipate that, acknowledging the pessimist is actually right, and that systems are a real bitch. Then you point out that if we're already doomed, we have nothing to lose nothing by trying. Systems are complex after all, that's the whole problem.. so if we miscalculated on the doom, then bothering to try actually saves us. Checkmate pessimists.

- how you does this handle the fact that a lot of accounts on social media platforms are bots that maybe controlled by a small number of people.

- how do we actually get this implemented?

The part that annoys me about the toxicity, or repetetive and annoying topics on reddit, HN, etc. is not that I am unaware that the content is produced by a small fraction. (I underestimated the count! I guessed 2%)

It's that people espouse it: They upvote and retweet it.

> Both sides develop wildly inaccurate beliefs about who the other side actually is.

That was a guess I had for a while. People have a strawman version of their out-groups in mind and quickly map people to that if an unknown person says something that indicates they might be part of the out-group.

> What percentage of the other side supports political violence?

It would be interesting to see the in-group statistic as well: "What percentage of your own side supports policical violence?", in my experience people also justify very shitty behavior as long as its from their in-group. (This plays heavily into the first point of espousing all kinds of shit)

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It would be interesting to see if the community check actually changes anything. But the actual data seems to be only possibly for very generic topics - those we have the data on already. Something that would not be available for daily-fresh topics.

For my personal sanity I simply left reddit and stopped opening comments on certain HN posts - of course that does not help with the societal problems. Unfortunately.

And the money decides how to run the circus. Not for the benefit of all.

So it is a really hard problem.

I feel like the real problem is the people. Many of us just want to be told what to think to blend in with society, some of us demonstrate Dunning-Kruger publicly and a few of us really want to drive the polarization for clout and attention.

Everyday I see people promote increasingly stupid ideas on both sides, further pushing my believe that the only solution is to severely limit what government can do, therefore making all this discussion pointless.

>We Could Do This Now - Platforms already have a lot of these capabilities. They already survey users. They even know how to run sophisticated polls. There are a few technical details to work out (spec here), but this is not a hard problem to solve.

Why do you think something like this is not already implemented? Platforms literally profit from this division, so why would they be incentivised to do anything? What's needed is not a good gesture from the overly powerful platforms, is fast, hard and deep regulation.

The tiny minority dominates the feeds because that's how the incentives for algorithmic driven social media are structured. Do we really expect Meta, X, TikTok to anything that could reduce engagement?

Good luck having any of the mainstream social media apps add the banner they propose.

This is showing how in the social media system the dynamics play out.

Both Democrats and Republicans estimated 30% but actually.. only 10% of both sides supported political violence

That number is crazy in so many ways and the post is overly nonchalant about it. The "distortion" isn't what's worrying here