I joined the HN community fairly recently, and I've been really enjoying this as Reddit but reasonable, but I'm aware that surrounding myself in an online community where everyone has roughly the same interests and roughly agrees with me is a bad idea --- I specifically find that what gets to the front page often reinforces my beliefs on <i>everything</i>. For instance, todays top post, "Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach 'Catastrophic''', reinforced essentially (though somewhat tangentially) all of my thoughts about modern technology and politics regarding security, IoT, and often unethical, obfuscating, and opaque behavior in large corporations, among others. Overall, I've experienced far less dissent here than I would expect for a random sample of articles and posts at the scale of HN.<p>I view this as something worth being concerned about, given the frequency of high-profile conspiracy theories spread on social media (though predominantly Facebook). I think HN's capacity for conspiracy theories is significantly lower than something like Facebook, where groups of like-minded people are encouraged at small scales, but an echo chamber on any scale will have an adverse effect, at least in my view.<p>The common-sense counter-measure is to introduce more sources of news and information, but I'm simply not aware of one that won't use algorithms to dynamically determine the articles I read, introducing an identical variation of the problem.<p>I suppose I'm in part asking for a software reccomendation: a preferably open source, transparent, non-user-base driven news aggregator, but I also want to know if anyone has larger and more widely-applicable advice.<p>Thanks so much!
You can't consume all your information through one source or aggregator. Use multiple and introduce new ones frequently and you will have no reason to be concerned.<p>I also think your concerns can be addressed with just thinking and rationality. If you read something from one source and agree with it just recognise that you have some information but also recognise you don't have all the information. Keep an open mind and be skeptical. I think this is critical because you can't read enough sources on every topic.
chomsky tals about this kind of thing a lot.<p>having a framework.<p>i seem to disagree with the most upvoted stuff here, so don't have a prob w the confirmation bias.<p>my old fave website went out of biz<p><a href="http://politicaltheory.info/" rel="nofollow">http://politicaltheory.info/</a><p>you used to be able to get leftie, rightie, etc.<p>and, importantly, the rightie stuff was at least occasionally not completely batshit crazy and death-cultish and fox newsy and whatever passes for conservative thought these days.<p>i dont see murdoch bringing that back.