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by blhack 2014 days ago
I am? My Facebook feed contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car. Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are.

I’m not sure how that’s me living is a socioeconomically stratified filter bubble.

My twitter on the other hand, is mostly (all?) left wing Silicon Valley/tech types. It’s diverse in the way that I’d expect a hackathon to be “diverse”.

4 comments

> contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car.

If you live in the Bay Area, this can actually be the same group.

I'm not shaming you. Congrats, you made it.

But you're basically talking about all Bay Area people, which is not a representative cross-section of America as a whole in any way shape or form.

I've lived all over this country and abroad, succeeded, failed, been homeless, succeeded again. My social circle is absurdly broad and my Facebook looked like people fighting each other all the time.

Facebook has even confirmed that it drives engagement.

>But you're basically talking about all Bay Area people, which is not a representative cross-section of America as a whole in any way shape or form.

What? I live in Arizona, and I grew up in the midwest. I've only ever even been to the bay area like 4 times in my life. Most of my friends are in Arizona, and then some in North Dakota, northern MN, and Iowa.

> Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are.

And somehow this isn't spilling over into big toxic feuds?

No not that I've seen. On facebook, most of the people know each other in real life, so it seems like those sorts of feuds don't really happen there as much.

There is a groups of people I can think of who occupy dramatically different idealogical spaces, and they do argue with one another, but it's usually more in the form of giant walls of text back and forth.

The most "dramatic" thing happening in my facebook space right now is that a bunch of my friends worked on building a drive through Christmas light show (many of my friends are artists and fabricators), and then the person they built it for didn't pay them, so they're organizing protests.

Just going through my feed right now it's:

Somebody posting pictures about her adventure van build.

Somebody posting a "shop local" guide for Arizona.

A person posting a bunch of selfies of herself.

Somebody asking questions about a soft egg that one of their chickens laid (in a backyard chickens group)

Somebody posting that she just graduated with her masters degree

A post in a group called "let's really argue about film/tv" about christmas movies.

A solicitation for donations to a charity for the homeless (its' getting cold here in Phoenix right now. It was in the 30s last night)

Solicitations in a "buy nothing Tempe" group.

Ah, the first political post: the headline is: "even with three Trump appointed justices on the Bench, SCOTUS Declines to Roll Back Marriage equality"

Picture of a clock tower

A news article about NZ lifting covid restrictions

A motivational picture/meme about self care

Somebody talking about fasting

Somebody selling their tiedyes

Somebody graduating nursing school

More backyard chickens

I'm trying to find something inflammatory here but honestly my entire feed is basically just this forever and ever. People I know and am acquainted with in real life just posting about what they're doing. A few political posts here and there, and generally those don't get any comments.

When you have billions of users, and you know every little detail about their lives, "millionaires plus guys sleeping in their car" is probably it's own little segment.