Three Ways to Escape the Echo Chamber - And Why We Must

Social media is, for many, an escape. To glance down at our phones is to enter a safe world composed of our friends and family sharing our preferred content. This allows us to maintain the strength of our relationships even from a distance.

These strong ties also fashion a tough, protective cocoon out of our newsfeeds and notifications. Recommendation algorithms feed us the most relevant content to our interests, or the content deemed most likely to engage us. These algorithms are developed based on our observed actions and histories - not on our thirst for new experience and strange knowledge.

This is an inevitable result of the way these social systems are designed. On Facebook, the quickest path to content is the easiest, and the most likely to delight us: through our immediate friends. But the easy path also lulls us into a passive relationship with social media - we see the same websites shared over and over or small variations on a headline theme. With research showing that people choose to associate very strongly with those of similar political persuasion, it’s likely we only hear or see those views we agree with. Thus the echo chamber is created.

It’s important to note that we do this by choice - but the choice is passive. Because we long ago picked our preferred friends, we long ago committed to the content prioritized on our news feed. Because we long ago performed certain actions online, certain advertisers are shown to us that reflect our entrenched interests and perspectives.

But in my view, a truly healthy relationship with social media means actively using it to find content that can expand us, not simply sustain us.

I have found a few reliable ways to escape the echo chamber - to have a sort of social media “out of body experience.” I use these tools daily to step into the minds and perspectives of those unlike me. There’s two reasons I absolutely must do this:

• I want to make things better. I believe that to change the world, we must first seek to understand it and love it. To hear others’ thoughts in their own words and to visualize their perspectives humanizes them and expands my knowledge of them and their worlds. Social media can be used to build understanding and empathy - and without them, nothing can change for the better.
• I want to stay happy. Reading things that could upset me or that I could disagree with is sometimes unpleasant, but always necessary to sustain long-term happiness on social media. To maintain a healthy (read: not depressing) relationship with social media, it has been shown that you need to remain active in using it. That means engaging directly with other users by commenting or creating your own content to share on social media, rather than simply using it for news aggregation. To me, it also means being active in finding the content I consume on a daily basis and stepping outside the “feed.”

Here are some simple methods I use every day to escape the echo chamber. I hope they work as well for you.

1) Curate lists of alternative opinions.

I have often used the lists feature on Twitter liberally to organize the voices my life - friends, coworkers, influencers, trusted news sources, comedians. But one list I make sure to check daily is my “Disagree” list. It is entirely composed of people I generally do not see eye-to-eye with: mostly certain columnists, politicians, and businesspeople.

I’ll take some time to go through and see what content they’ve created to share, what issues they are engaging with, how people are responding to their message, and so on. Reading through gets me out of my comfort zone and helps stimulate my creative mind. It also helps me understand the language these influencers use and the effect it has on those who follow them. Being active in looking through this list is important - even when the content is unpleasant, I’m able to channel negative feelings into strong, productive energy afterward.

2) Visit pages for things that I don’t use or follow.

On Facebook in particular I like to visit brand pages for products I don’t currently or would never use. I ask myself: How is the company trying to reach its customer base, and who do they believe their customers are? How is it different from the way brands normally try to engage me, or people like me?

I’ll also visit fan pages for artists or shows that I don’t have interest in. Then I ask: how do the fans interact with their interests? How is it different from the way I choose to interact with my interests? How do the artists or producers respond? Understanding other peoples’ communities helps shed light on the way I form and build friendships and how I participate in my interests.

3) Use the “Discover” feature as the main feature.

I believe the Discover feature is not meant to be a novelty on social media - it’s supposed to be the primary feature. On Twitter, I frequently go through the top trending hashtags and choose one that seems irrelevant to my interests. I read manually through recent tweets and figure out for myself what’s getting talked about and why.

Meanwhile, on Snapchat, I use Discover to briefly scroll through content from brands I don’t particularly care about. I follow promoted Stories from events that I wouldn’t particularly want to attend. I watch the faces of the people involved and I recognize the joy and excitement that I feel toward my own strong interests and close friends.

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I strongly recommend doing these three things every day, or as regularly as you use social media. If you use these methods, I promise you will end up with a stronger and more active relationship with social media. You will also be happier and more understanding of others - and maybe you will discover something crucial that you will carry the rest of your life.

Remember: Social media is a very powerful tool when we wield it, but it is just as powerful when it is wielding us.

You are not your feed. Go explore.

The Strongest Net Will Break The Fall

What brings down a network?

I’m not really thinking about this in the black-hat hacker sense of “bringing down” networks. I’m more talking about social networks - when and how do they end? What makes them vulnerable?

If you look at Myspace, for example, the end came as the result of a strong challenger (Facebook) and a weak product that succumbed to user exodus after a difficult acquisition by NewsCorp and a series of spam infestations and high-profile investigations.

But there’s one quote in particular from Bloomberg’s report that stands out to me from Myspace’s collapse in particular. "Influential peers pull others in on the climb up—and signal to flee when it’s time to get out.“ It’s rarely a coordinated, consensus-driven decision to abandon ship. The movement is driven by a small number of users who may not even directly call peers to action.

So why are these social networks often susceptible to rapid destruction initiated by a few well-connected users? And which modern ones have done well to protect themselves from collapse?

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Let’s briefly look at the topology of common networks. Below I excerpt an image from Paul Baran’s paper "On Distributed Networks” from 1964:

A centralized network is one where an individual influencer connects to a number of unconnected nodes - much like a single blogger with thousands of independent followers.

A decentralized network is one where there are multiple smaller influencers that act as hubs connecting individuals and other hubs - this is a good portrayal of Twitter communities organized around a particular subtopic. It is also a good representation of airline route maps.

A distributed network is one where each node in the network has a similar number of connections, forming a sort of mesh as seen in © above. In contrast, decentralized networks conform to a power law distribution where most nodes have only one or two connections, while a small number could have dozens or hundreds.

One of the results of monetization of social networks has been the proliferation of decentralized networks organized around powerful brands and influencers. At this point, the vulnerability of the network is clear - if the hubs are removed, the network collapses. It’s similar to why airport delays in Montana don’t cause havoc, while airport delays at O'Hare in Chicago can bring the entire sky to a standstill.

It’s clearly no surprise, then, that Facebook and Twitter and other platforms bend over backwards to create positive experiences for their top influencers (and revenue generators) while ignoring the best interests of their broader user base.

In Facebook’s early days, however, users’ networks more closely resembled a distributed network. With the platform closed to non-Harvard students, each student on the platform was connected to a high percentage of the full population of other students, forming something like a mesh topology. As other students at other schools joined, those schools’ Facebook networks took similar form. Facebook’s exponential growth was enabled by connecting these strong individual networks.

Lacking distinct hubs, distributed networks are far more stable - the loss of one node does not compromise the strength of the network. Just look at the visualizations from the Baran paper above - which net would you feel safest jumping into?

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Like Facebook, many other successful social networks have grown from a stable base of small, unassociated distributed networks. One current example: Snapchat, where users generally have a very small number of strong connections (“Best Friends”) that receive the bulk of their direct communications.

By introducing Our Stories and Discover, Snapchat is allowing users to explore outside of their strong friendship networks and connect across other dimensions such as location or interest. They’ve also done a great job of attracting brands to a still mostly unproven content distribution platform. A brand leaving Snapchat will just leave a void that can quickly be filled by other brands looking to reach young, engaged users.

Snapchat’s strength is in its network topology - people using its core functionality of sharing snaps take the form of a distributed network. Users are engaged primarily not by the presence of brands and artists, but by their close friends. And because most users only need to maintain their ties with a very small number of friends or followers - not the hundreds they might have on Facebook or Twitter - it’s easier for them to keep up a high level of engagement.

Therefore, Snapchat’s weakness might not be its influencer hubs. Rather, it comes from alienating its active users in moving towards a more brand-conscious business model. See: the recent user pushback as Snapchat added Discover but temporarily removed the Best Friends feature. Users were not nearly as upset about the presence of brands as they were about losing that functionality.

I am curious to see how Snapchat and others choose to prioritize features as they seek to attain profitability (or revenue period). But if they fail and fall hard, it will likely be because they burned the net beneath them.