> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.
If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse.
Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?
The DOI links aren't working so I can't read the study but I think there's a simple explanation, that also belies the headline. It may be that the typical number of close friends is now 0. But as people no longer even have any concept of close friendships, they're considering 'lesser' relationships as close friendships, because it's all they know.
This is made even more likely if they didn't define the term and allowed 'online friends' to be counted as 'close friends.' And I strongly suspect this may be the case since the graph shows a major inflection point in the increase of friends being 2007, the exact year when Facebook started becoming massive.
I can't find this study even searching for the author's name and the title. FYI, the cited author Stefan Thurner has published 73 articles in peer reviewed journals in the past 3 years (all of the ones I glanced at appeared to involve statistical correlations), so they are very prolific.
> Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"?
I suspect that you've hit the nail on the head. It would also be interesting to see numbers on churn. How long do these many close friendships last? Do they last longer than before? Or, more likely, less long?
I think longer is… possible, at least? The internet has allowed me to keep in touch with friends from elementary school. I’m, unfortunately, approaching 40 more quickly than I’d like, so these are around 30 year friendships.
Although, I’ve also got some college friends that I’d consider close. So that’s more like 15 years. Also online mostly at this point.
Reflecting on my own experience - frequency of contact (if I see them once a year, can't really count them as close friends) How involved they are in my life - are they people I turn to when I'm facing a problem, do they turn to me when facing their own problems? Do we have frequent deep conversations - not just surface level discuss the weather, sports etc. but stuff that matter. Quantifying this - length of friendship (# of years), frequency of contact (annually, monthly, weekly etc.), level of trust (low, medium, high - can I trust my kids with them kind of trust), level of involvement (low, medium, high - what things do I feel comfortable sharing with them - suppose this is also level of trust?)
Personally, I find modern technology makes it easier to maintain them. 25 years ago my friendships around the world would have been relegated to 'penpalships' because of the cost of long distance calls and the lack of face time.
Loneliness is a big topic now due to the pandemic, and the lingering trends from stay/work-at-home mandates.
They probably aren't the friends people are thinking of when referring to things like this. The benefit of friends isn't just that you have someone fun to talk to, it's that you're building out a social support circle. Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss, or help you get an interview at a job shortly after you're fired (or at least, not one local to you).
Loneliness is a big topic now, imo, because people are losing helpful human friends and relying on middling digital friends. Just like how looking at pictures of a forest is nowhere near as healthy as actually going to a forest.
Most of those things seem like services rather than friends. I want a friend to talk to, not to cook me food or watch my dog, anyone can do those other things. And talking to a friend many times is as good as a video call. In fact because of the internet I can get conversations and opinions from friends all over the world quite quickly.
This is an interesting argument, as by the first definition, I have more close friends than ever. If I need someone to make me food, I don't have a friend who is either nearby or has time for that.
On the other hand, I can buy all those services on an app for the most part. People I enjoy talking to for hours on end aren't available for $20 anywhere.
Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss
I'll make the counter argument that -- although I value those things and try to provide them to friends in need -- all of those can be addressed by hiring someone.
On the other hand, I've recently received fantastic emotional support from a friend who moved away a few years ago. We've seen each other in person only a handful of times since then, but of all my friends, she happened to be the one with the experience and attitude to help me.
Incidentally, I'll add that I'm the type of person to provide those types of support to others, but the vast majority of my friends are not. That doesn't make them bad friends, it just means that I have a service disposition while they don't. I think there's a vast range of qualities that people seek and experience from friends and you're going to have a hard time objectively rating them on any sort of scale.
Yeah and you can rent a truck every time you need to haul something, but it's nice when your friend lets you borrow his - and his manpower/time. And yeah, you can hire an emergency remediation company, or chef, or psychologist for your friends, but that seems... impersonal to me?
I'm not trying to say there's no value to Discord friends, but I do think it's substantially less valuable to the human condition than real, in-person friends.
This is how I can tell you don’t get it. It’s not about the value of your friends doing those things for you which you can hire someone for, it’s the value YOU get out of doing those things for your friends.
You’re right that the net can be used that way but I’m not sure everyone does.
Also the loneliness epidemic has been growing worse since the 1990s. There’s a well known book about it called Bowling Alone. COVID made it worse of course but it didn’t start the trend.
Loneliness pandemic is a topic because one author wrote a book on it and is pushing and agenda to generate sales for his book.
The biggest article about the loneliness pandemic was one in the New York times and oh just to happened to mention said book. Countless articles followed on from there. If the book were sound, it would be less sad, but the studies it cites have problems so this is all built on a huge heaping of confirmation bias.
It could also be something structural about how the "friendship graph" looks. The mean number of friendships isn't the median or typically experienced number of friendships, and if friendship relationship distributions follow some kind of power law, a change in the power-law exponent could make those diverge.
I am wondering the same thing. It's interesting that they didn't report at all on the median and only the average. Also find the timing interesting, as I can't help but suspect that both the justification and incentive for self-reporting a higher number of friends materially changed for some people in the early days of social media. They didn't seem to acknowledge this at all.
The model they built that draws a causal relationship between graph density and polarization is interesting, but these gaps leave me skeptical.
There are just so many other reasons I can see for polarization.
1. Late-stage of civilizational monetary cycle (bretton woods - petrodollar) -> historically leads to polarization
2. Dramatic increase in access to information / wide range of things to know and care about
3. Attention economy (novel upsetting news is best at getting attention, not nuance, not truth)
4. Habits of instant gratification diminishes patience for nuance
5. Maybe foreign state interference/bias towards polarization to destabilize rivals?
6. Several more maybe??
So I buy the graph density correlation, and I'm curious about contributing to causation, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's the primary or sole cause.
I think you left out the biggest one (though I suppose #3 indirectly hits on this). Social media, and increasingly even online media in general, tends to heavily misrepresent 'the other side.' In the past relationships were formed primarily in person so you actually got see what 'the other side' was like. Now a days people instead depend on completely inaccurate stereotypes that are far more like cartoon caricatures than real people. See: the perception gap. [1]
So people simply don't understand 'the other side', but ironically think they do - which is a rather toxic combination. For instance the more news somebody follows, the less accurate their assessments of 'the other side.'
I agree completely, though I continually wonder why. Is it by specific design? By economic incentive? Is it because novel threats attract attention, and having a need to be validated continually satisfied maintains attention?
I can't help but wonder if the polarization in the media is deliberate (e.g. foreign state sewing division) or accidental (second order consequence of attention economy) or organic (the claims of the paper, and/or other psychological effects of anonymity, etc.) or maybe all of the above?
When was that past? People used to hate you for being from a different village.
Polarization could instead be because there are fundamental differences in how people see the world and what is right. And now that we've tangled ourselves through all the wars imaginable to dispel the old division lines, this is what we're left with. This is what we have, now that information has become available for the masses; the real differences which split people. Not based on phony dividers of the past.
Polarization also means that if you disagree with the ideology of your family or of your village, you have millions of friends on a national or international level who think like you, instead of being ostracized for life.
It seems insane to try to connect a twenty year shift in one global variable to one causal factor. This approach is why the social sciences continue to struggle to create understanding. It is all they can afford to do, though.
That said, 3) I think possibly best explains both: the increase in average number of friends due to influencer dynamics skewing the distribution, and the increase in polarization due to the tactics in social media.
However there seems to be no chance it is a durable or reproducible link, as it depends on the novelty of polarization techniques which wear over time and become known and integrated in education, reducing their effectiveness
Without knowing the distribution it is unwise to place too much trust in a numerical average. There is always a tendency to assume a normal distribution, but even a small population of hypersocial individuals can drag the mean higher.
And reported loneliness does not always imply an absence of close friends, although I'd agree that that is a major factor.
It may be a combination of both: the fact it is easier to stay in touch makes it more difficult to let go of friendships. But this may make those friendships feel less meaningful and therefore increase loneliness.
I don't really see the causal link here between "more close friends" and "growing polarization", and I'm having trouble finding the actual study - the link in the article seems broken.
I can't find more information on the actual distribution, but I think looking at the _average_ number of close friendships is a red flag. It's perfectly possible for some social groups to be growing, while others are shrinking.
It likely doesn't account for the evolving definition of what a "close" friend actually is.
Just because Jack and Jill know a bunch of details about each others' lives owing to facebook updates or group chats, that doesn't necessarily mean they share a strong connection, at least not in the traditional sense. But I suspect they might still feel a certain connection and belonging to each other.
It used to require frequent, active, quality communication to know someone well. Now it just requires a few clicks.
Keep in mind that it is "average" and it is about close friends.
Anecdotally, the pandemic was the great cutting of weaker ties. I talk to far fewer people than I did pre-pandemic (and most friends report the same), but I speak to those people more often. I can easily see that ending in a way where some 20% find themselves with nobody.
I would say I have 4 close friends. But some 10 weaker ties disappeared from my life. Did those 10 also double down on close friends? Or did perhaps some of them not have enough close friends to do that?
Many of my friends live abroad. We started a weekly Zoom meeting during Covid-19 lockdown. Now we have a WhatsApp group too. Does that change the classification from plain friends to close friends?
Oh god flashback, I remember the zoom calls, and people acting like they didn’t know how zoom worked 10 months into it or that the host can mute anyone that doesn’t know how to mute themselves
I opted out of the extended family ones and the social ones
I wonder if they’re still doing that, I’d rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
I would agree - usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you. Having more close friends that all think alike would increase rejection of ideas not shared by other close friends. It is harder (but not impossible) to have close friends that have dramatically different lifestyles, ideals, or socioeconomic class.
Weaker ties would include friends that have less in common, and have different ideas. But that fact that they are a friend means that you are aware of their existence and different ideas. In that way, having a broad range of weak friends suggests that you can see things from different perspectives instead of in your own (close) friend bubble.
It's like how people are less likely to know their neighbors now, who can hold different ideas. But you don't have to be close friends with them to have some empathy.
> usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you
That stirkes me as myopic. My closest friends--the ones I trust with all my secrets, with whom have have practically no secrets, the ones I'd hide if it came to that or risk my life to save--are all over the place values and ideas-wise. It's what makes their company fun. It's also what makes their advice useful, because they'll call me out on my bullshit in a way a mirror image of me could not.
If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety.
And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.
Same for "far left", those can't be trusted either.
However, what strikes me as interesting: Do you actually destinguish between right and far right? Because I have a feeling, many people don't. Why do I think that? I recently read on Planet Debian: "Conservatives tend to be criminals". That sentences struck me as the core of the problem. People seem to fail to see the difference between a person with conservative values, and outright "Nazis". There is a clear difference, but some politically active people seem to fail to see that.
Just at the moment: a lot of people who consider themselves merely "right" voted for a candidate who is undeniably "far right". So for the moment I'm not drawing much distinction between "conservative values" and "outright Nazis".
That was not always true and I hope it will not remain true. But speaking at this specific time in history, this fact represents a genuine threat to life and liberty.
From my POV, you are pissed that your people lost, and can't get over it. Remember that democracy is a pendulum. Swinging from side to side is a necessary ingredient of democracy. You can't always win, and, you shouldn't. But I guess you are unable to listen to this simple principle, because you and your people railed yourself up so much that you are unable to calm down. That is weird to me, as I believe that is a skill we all learn when moving from childhood to adulthood. Throwing tantrums isn't very useful.
The difference between right and far right is, in a nutshell, endorsement of insurrection and militarism.
The GOP was a right-wing party. MAGA is bona fide far right. There are plenty of conservatives (or pissed-off idiots) who voted for Trump but aren’t MAGA. There are also lots of folks who believe in MAGA to the core. The latter are far right, probably fascists.
> democracy is a pendulum. Swinging from side to side is a necessary ingredient of democracy
It’s a multidimensional pendulum. There is no natural partisan swing to group dynamics; it’s why parties fail and are remade or replaced, even in two-party systems.
Also, Democrats should embrace Trump’s precedents next cycle. But the results will uglier than before for those on the other side. (To port prior policy goals, you’d cancel student debts by literally shredding the documents, thereby undermining the government’s ability to collect even if it wants to. And you’d pursue environmental policy by dismantling coal power plants and mines. The courts may get mad later. But it wouldn’t be rebuilt.)
And the various articles found seem to agree. The GP claims to have combined 30 surveys. I wonder if they wound-up with one of those statistical paradoxes where a combining of data sets points to something different from each individual data set. But something probably isn't true 'cause the individuals sets are well curated and the combination isn't.
Completely agree. Fully online friendships are hollow simulacrums of the real thing, like most fully online things compared to their offline counterparts. That's not to say there isn't real connection or real value there, just that they are a supplement to - and not a replacement for - the 'real thing'.
Example: long-distance relationships vs. in-person. My wife and I started off as long distance before moving to the same city together. Obviously we established a very real relationship digitally, but it was a means to an end, and not an end in itself, and the real-world date nights and so on are so much deeper and richer than Facetime calls.
When you look at studies, women and men are lonely at about the same rate. There are differences at the margins - period right after divorce, being stay at home and such. But overall rates are the same.
You mean "feel lonely at the same rate" or that they are actually alone at the same rate? Men do have fewer friends and its much more common for men to have no close friends at all.
The free market rate of a young/fit woman's sexual services are several hundred or even thousand+ $/hr. I suspect any man who is seen as potentially offering 100s of $/hr in services if you pretend to be a friend long enough, would see similar interest of fake friends.
I could see it making you even more lonely, to have to filter through that though, as a man is probably less likely to reject someone as a 'false positive' who might be a true friend through such filtering process. If you are down and out man and someone is being nice to you and not trying to sell you something, I've found it pretty rare that the person isn't being genuinely friendly. I've heard the exact opposite from females.
I have a sinking feeling it's a situation where people who are adept at creating and maintaining relationships are getting more of them, whilst people who struggle socially are being excluded more than ever as a result. The overall count grows, but a substantial slice of the population still has barely any.
I have no data for this, just a gut feeling. I still see so many people on the day-to-day who are completely socially inept. I don't even mean just like, rude or abrasive, I mean people who don't have the emotional intelligence to like, navigate basic conflicts.
If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend.
We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?
On top of that, text based communication for short attention spans is both brief and dehumanized, encouraging "dunking" behaviour. Hard to empathize with folks who have differing views when the discourse can broadly be described as "lol got'em!".
it does feel like there's been a slow shift from the Internet being a place to make friends to a place to make enemies.
The article that sticks in my mind is "Internet of Beefs": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ - ironically I have vague memories of the author being on the wrong side of various beefs, but the description of the phenomenon is spot-on.
Some corners of bluesky are resisting this with trying to form the habit of aggresive blocking of clickbait and anyone who comes into your mentions to beef. But overall it's gone horribly mainstream, everyone is just promoting themselves by whom they have beef with.
Agreed, there's so many headlines on X and Reddit that are obviously highly spun and could take 5 seconds of reading into it to see through the BS. But they kill as long as people agree with the phrasing and people go right to the comments to cheer it on instead of reading the article.
It's tough on the internet being a skeptic or generally thoughtful about the world. It's not even worth debunking stuff anymore. Much healthier to not engage entirely.
I can no longer engage in (controversial) debates on other social medias, as responses often indicate a lack of understanding with the other person - they glance over the arguments, make a prejudice-based opinion, and then they respond to their straw man, often loaded with bad emotions. It's quite frustrating and as you say, sadly only solution is to disengage, but in so doing the polarisation only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.
> but in so doing the polarization only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.
It used to make sense when the internet was smaller but now? Not so much. Especially when the people running platforms/media, content moderators and influencers explicitly don't care about the truth. You're not just fighting some dummy posting a comment.
The only positive thing I've seen in the last decade to address this was Community Notes on X.
I feel ya. It is true on hn too sadly. There are certain subjects that trigger people to fall into a rhetoric mode of clapbacks and us vs them mindset. Eg the individual disappears replaced by some form of ideology. It isnt a left right up down thing but a phenomenon of hyper polarization. It is especially scary to see it in person. Mobs are a dangerous thing.
It's super hard to have good faith discussions on the internet for years now. When someone has different opinions, those opinions are associated with certain groups (liberals, conservatives, etc). And it's very easy to demonize other groups, because social media shows curated content with extremely idiotic and malicious people in that group. Even if we have only slightly biased opinions, the algorithm knows watching content which follow your existing opinions are super engaging. We can't resist the satisfaction and dopamine hit of finding out our opinion is right. Attacking obviously wrong people from a moral high ground without risking being attacked by other people is also really attractive. After consuming such content for a long time, we come to see other groups as nothing but evil, and it makes it very difficult to have good faith conversations.
> That's one of Chomsky's major points for decades
Curious for the source? To my recollection, Chomsky talked about distraction, i.e. repurposing attention. OP is talking about the pool of attention as a whole drying up (versus being misdirected).
Not to be flippant but this takes a couple of hours to essentially make the point that the complexities of the world resist summarization or at least the opportunistic summarization that can be used to sway the inattentive public (among other nuances to this) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60
Disclaimer: I think the most correct criticism of Chomsky was by Everett, and the following shitshow that ensued is _really_ a shame for linguistics in the Anglo world [0] (Chomsky wasn't the instigator, but his silence doesn't paint him in a great light). Some of the other criticisms are also valid, but often too ideologically tainted or too incorrect to be worth your time (or anyone's time tbh).
I think you have to start with his criticism of Skinner (papers that criticize other papers are often the best and the most informative ones) and his theory of UG, then Everett's claim and Chomsky's rebuttal (sightly weak, but interesting to understand his views on UG). I know UG has been rebuilt (basically his theory was falsifiable, was falsified on the field, then UG people worked on another similar theory that corrected some mistakes), but it was post 2011 and i stopped followed humanities around that time, and never got back into linguistics, so you might want to read about that.
[0] Something similar happened in France with Furet, and the fact that Furet's school of thought still somewhat exist and the debate lasted decades on polite terms without ad hominem is a compliment to historian's values and practice. Saying "critical thinking" and running away from correct criticism is shameful.
You can start with his recent Russian apologia where he blames the U.S. and Ukraine for forcing Russia to invade Ukraine. That might provide some context when you read one of his books.
The new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, has been publishing genocide denial pieces, pointing ro various children dying in Gaza as false stories. That happened this week, you seem to be concerned that Chomsky signed a petition for Faurisson on the 1970s, that he should not be jailed for publishing his book on the holocaust. Chomsky signed hundreds of letters for jailed Soviet dissidents, Turkish authors on trial etc. That he did not want Faurisson jailed for his book is seen as a bad thing by those who don't believe in free speech and believe authors should be jailed by governments.
Regarding Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge coalition was pushed out in 1979 and the US began arming the KR coalition, providing UN support for it etc. You would think the US and Reagan arming the Khmer Rouge coalition more heinous, if you don't like them, than Chomsky saying the US should not bomb Cambodia in the 1970s etc.
The UN and every human rights organization in the world says the US has been and is involved in a genocide in Gaza. The denial of this in the US has been incredible, but now that the first stage is done the Press is more forthcoming about it. Something Chonsky opposed, the establishment supported.
It sounds like we both agree that genocide denial is a serious matter. By familiarizing themselves with the links I put above, people will be able to make an informed opinion on Chomsky's engagement with it.
i think this is a good article, but these statements,
> If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)?
> For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)?
... are not quite as applicable to left-wing populism (for the latter --- at least, at the surface). post-colonial, _left-wing_ populism tended to be of international character, or at least of wider appeal than the nation (e.g., nasser). the "distrust of central banking" is of wildly unique impetuses for left- vs. right-wing populism.
the common-sense point is quite poignant, at least for me in the u.s., where each party paints their own solutions as explicitly "common-sense", for solutions as unique as harsh border control ("solutions") vs. city-owned grocery stores & free childcare.
there are certainly issues i imagine i don't hold the "elite" view on. many people don't consider the "elite" view at all --- anti-punitive justice, for example, is rejected for particular types of crimes, despite provenly worse outcomes if we simply punish these crimes. the rise of anti-intellectualism doesn't help :D
In-group dynamics are further ingrained as the group gets bigger. If you have 4 friends in a group, their opinions aren't as strong. If you have 40 friends in a group, not only are their opinions stronger, they'll fight vigorously to defend the group's commonly accepted beliefs. So a growing social circle does reinforce the group dynamic. (this is well established by lots of studies)
But increased polarization around the world isn't because of this. There's the typical environmental factors: an increase in changes (or challenges) to traditional values increases polarization; an influx of migrants increases polarization. But then there's also social media, where mastery of "engagement" by businesses for profit has been adopted by political groups looking to sow division to reap the benefits of polarization (an easier grip on power). The rapid rise of polarization is a combination of both.
It's nothing new of course, political/ideological groups have been doing this forever. We just have far more advanced tools with which to polarize.
Before the Internet and social media, groups had a practical size cap because they had to meet up in person. Polarization was naturally limited.
I don't think the social media companies' algorithms are entirely to blame. But more broadly it's centralized moderation of public online spaces.
Moderation of public behavior of physical spaces was only necessary because it wasn't possible to selectively filter people's influences on eachother in public. If someone is doing something you don't want to see in public, covering your eyes is not good enough because you also block out the people you do want to see. Centralized moderation was a practical half-measure rather than an ideal solution for a democratic society that values free expression and self-determination.
That kind of moderation isn't necessary online because all filters can be implemented client-side. We just aren't doing it because people are so used to the old way. But the old way will naturally lead to more and worse conflict when we have infinite connectivity.
Yes. Indulging in that desire to boss over other people (and also hubris, thinking oneself knows better) was fine before social media because it was hard to have a say over what others hear at scale. People congregated into groups that moderated speech internally, but those small groups rarely got large enough to influence nation-states. Democracy worked fine because those small groups were independently-thinking entities despite being internally homogenous. And individuals from different groups could still talk to eachother intelligently because the inter-group rifts weren't that large. The groups weren't that large. Many small groups existed and could debate eachother to generate effective policies in a democratic society.
Now there are big social media mobs. The number of independently-thinking entities have gone down drastically over the past 2 decades. We're ranking, filtering, and moderating ourselves into authoritarian governments ran by Internet echo chamber mobs.
Government-moderated echo chambers existed long before the internet. In fact I think they're the default throughout history. But I think business has developed the manipulation (through specific technologies, products, services) into a science. The gift of big data and business analytics applied to the problem of manipulating public opinion.
Government propaganda is used to rile people up so that they're willing to kill eachother in war. This is indeed a default throughout history but I don't think it's a good default and we could change it by making and then keeping the Internet a free place.
It doesn't have to be government propaganda, though. It can be everyone with enough money to broadcast, and in the Internet age that is basically everyone.
We've spent most of the 20th century honing propaganda techniques to the point where its potency is like a nuke compared to a dynamite stick. And then we've spent most of the 21st century so far making that nuke cheap and easily available to everyone.
I'm very pro-free-speech in general and I don't think censorship is a solution, but in order to argue for free speech in good faith we have to acknowledge the problem. The reason why people want government to censor is, in many cases, the same reason why they want government to crack down on someone who is building a nuke in their garage (but are okay with the government itself having the same nuke).
I don't understand what you mean with your last paragraphs, but I disagree that there's a centralized moderation. Of all the social media I'm aware of, moderation is mostly distributed, and weighted. Instagram flagged posts go to "a team" to review, but they weigh that against the account and the content. Reddit moderation is per-subreddit. Facebook moderation is a combination of group moderators and site moderators.
In any case, I don't think moderation isn't a factor, because moderation is for commenters. Something like 90% of people just lurk. And that's where ads, influencers, comments, and everything else, are targeted.
How can we get more people viewing TikToks, or YouTube Shorts? How can we get more people to sub to our Patreon? How can we get more followers, or likes? This has nothing to do with moderation. It's the math of "what can we post that will make people "engage" with their eyeballs and their clicks?" That's what matters. Partly because eyeballs equal ad dollars; but also because eyeballs equal influence. The science of manipulation is getting you to see what I want you to see, and you coming back for more. The more you come back, the more you're part of my in-group.
Another example is astroturfing. I can't remember if it started for commercial or political gain, but the point is the same. Post some fake shit to make people believe there's a grassroots opinion, in order to get them to back it, with them assuming it's really a grassroots movement. Whether you're Vladimir Putin or DuPont, you benefit the same way: manipulation of public perception, through the science of social media disinformation.
I don't mean there's a single centralized moderating authority overseeing everything, but rather the general tools and mechanisms used for moderation on the Internet are centralized and undemocratic. They produce groups with authoritarian power structures and norms. Those groups get larger over time with no limit on their size. When they get large enough, they fight over which one gets to run a country. This is how modern democratic countries can turn authoritarian very fast, and it's already happening.
When I say "group", I don't mean an actual Facebook group or subreddit (it could be, though). I mean a group of intellectually/ideologically homogenous people. They may be distributed across many subreddits and comment sections. Forums/subreddits/servers can be separate entities in form, but not in substance. Two Discord servers that moderate content the same way are the same group in this context.
Moderation is not just for posters. It also affects lurking viewers because it changes what they will see. If a post is deleted by a moderator, then that moderator has decided for the viewers what they can and cannot see.
Up/down voting (aka likes/dislikes) is a hidden form of moderation as well. People's likes and dislikes are deciding what other people are more likely to see because upvoted posts get to the top of the feed. Recommendation and ranking algorithms do the same thing.
I'm not making a statement about who has nobler goals, be it the ad companies or Putin or the US gov or the people here on HN. I'm saying that the concept of centralized moderation on the Internet is itself the problem. Regardless of what or whose goals these tools serve, they're bad because they coagulate people into intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups, and there is no group size limit due to the practically infinite connectivity of the Internet. This will create nasty real-world consequences in the long run. But we can defuse this by moving all moderation and ranking to the client-side.
Lol what caused this, it couldn’t have been a major financial collapse that happened around 2008, that’s what radicalised me. It must be caused by people talking to each other.
Social Media getting big → larger perceived friend groups
Social Media getting big OR
screen time increasing OR
phones preferencing more limited forms of communication OR
… → more polarization
Maybe I missed it but it would have been helpful to know which confounds had been ruled out.
It could be due to a change in the PEW polling or the polling questions staying the same but the definition of terms shifting over time which caused the perceived increase in polarization. Or even the researchers’ definition of polarization which was stated as an increase in people stably identifying as either liberal or conservative. It is worth noting the article did say the PEW polling is supposed to be a stable source of data.
I know this paper isn't about social networks, but we know this, we knew it in the 70s. The only difference is that we continue to ignore and forget it.
> And this increase happened suddenly, between 2008 and 2010
Occam’s Razor tells me that it’s almost certainly linked to the near-total failure of the economic system (and the very slow recovery outside specific US cities).
It is obviously social media: more connections does not equally mean social interactions - people substituted costly and hard in-person for cheap and easy online interactions, with AI optimization fueling the polarization.
It would correlate well with the social media boom in the late 2000s. Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Google's purchase and aggressive expansion of Youtube, etc. 4Chan.
When did algorithmic recommendations (by which I mean injecting content into your feed to maintain attention, rather than an attempt to rank by quality) become commonplace? ISTR Youtube was being criticised for pushing conspiracy theories in the late 2000s, but I could be misremembering the timeline.
It is just as obviously late stage capitalism - as everyone is busy working 10-12 hours just to survive you have zero time left for costly and hard in-person interactions.
Like, if people are more polarized, there are more likely to have wider ground to sympathize. Less throttle in opinion divergences, so they can deal with more social exchanges as the only interactions are endless smooth easy agreements within their social bubbles.
The fact that we have more close friends on average is a novel and surprising observation to me. Very worthy of investigation.
But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level? There's also a 10-year gap between USA (and other countries' data points too) that covers the span of the whole alleged "aligned trend". It feels a little bit like the authors just went "Look! Two data trends moving in the same direction! Causal?!"
More seriously, I would love to see a much deeper dive on:
- Technological and associated psychological trends that might be causing greater polarisation (plenty of existing data here)
- How an increase in close friends can co-exist with an apparent loneliness epidemic (plenty of existing data here too)
> But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level?
You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones.
> You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones
I did this after Covid. Consciously started declining invitations from acquaintances, and instead making time and travel to see close friends. Would never go back.
I’m more interested in how people determine who they trust, and the parameters by which humans decide to trust someone.
I would wager that people are shit at determining trustworthiness based on limited information (like social media representations). In the old days before social media, you got to know people in person, and decades ago, most of the people you knew were likely people you grew up around. You knew that person’s background, how they treated people, what their family was like, and what likely influences them as a person.
So much of how we process trustworthiness is how we perceive the motives of the speaker. With shallower friendships and parasocial relationships, we want to feel connected but really lack any good context that you need to actually know who you’re listening to.
A person's trustworthiness has always been based more on perception though, even if you were familiar with more of their history - that's how you end up with members of a community who are perfectly kind people but are ostracized because they're perceived as strange and untrustworthy in some way; it's also how you end up with members of a community who have demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness continuing to be trusted, because they can appear trustworthy and persuade others to trust them despite the prior evidence.
I think the causal relationship is not quite that way.
better connectivity -> destroyed physical limits on group size -> groups not only get larger but also more ideologically homogenous because they're moderated by a central authority like how physical crowds are moderated -> people make friends more easily in those homogenous groups OR get kicked and start their own group, which also has the potential to get larger and more homogenous without limit -> groups have larger differences and clash harder
I noticed this when I studied abroad in the Netherlands — a highly educated, slightly more digitalized country than my own. Politics there splintered into micro-parties, each “hardly exchanging between bubbles,” as the study puts it. First impressions were warm, but dates always ended with splitting the bill. Friend groups felt just as closed off, except for Dutchies who had just as me lived abroad before, learned to bridge cultures and still are my closest friends today.
Digitalization and the pursuit of perfect information seemed to invite more binary thinking — and with it, more opportunities to disagree every single day. Meanwhile, other forces found easy consensus on simpler, more immediate issues: cheap gas, housing, grocery prices, job security, immigration. Complex, long-horizon topics like the climate crisis rarely stood a chance.
When I was in Amsterdam I was with a group of acquaintances of a friend who lived there. One of them offered me an extra piece of pizza they had when I showed up. When the bill came, they asked me for the exact percentage of the bill that that piece of pizza cost. First time experiencing something like that.
I also offered to buy several people a drink while I was there. This was received every time with suspicion and I was treated as if I was trying to gain something transactional besides a simple friendship in the moment. It was an interesting part of that society to experience.
> The sharp rise in both polarization and the number of close friends occurred between 2008 and 2010—precisely when social media platforms and smartphones first achieved widespread adoption. This technological shift may have fundamentally changed how people connect with each other, indirectly promoting polarization.
Indirectly? Seems to me that this is far more likely the "direct" cause, given what we know about the psychology around algorithmic feeds.
Also - I'm not sure if I missed it in the article, but did they define what they mean by "close relationship" means? I'd be very curious to know if a purely online relationship is counted and how this may also contribute to the observations made.
The article said that a close relationship is one where the other person can influence your views. I didn't dig into the details to see how that was measured.
> What disappears as a result is a societal baseline of tolerance—a development that could contribute to the long-term erosion of democratic structures. To prevent societies from increasingly fragmenting, Thurner emphasizes the importance of learning early how to engage with different opinions and actively cultivating tolerance.
That could be a problem, considering how the push back to "actively cultivating tolerance" has unfolded so far.
For years, I have had very few close friends, fewer than mentioned as previous average, I’ve withdrawn almost completely from social media, and I’m still polarized, because there are only two major political sides in the U.S., and which news source you listen to drives your opinion.
Polarization maybe a bit unclear word here. Connectivity creates cohesion, which creates larger creatures. So what we have is, virtual monsters roaming around with huge human groups riding on them. They can organize real protests, polarized opinion and massive impact wherever these monsters go.
More polarization is good if people are allowed to naturally polarize in different directions. Alignment between individuals are supposed to emerge naturally, forming small groups that are internally polarized in the same direction. Democracy would work fine in that society.
But now we have huge online mobs that are homogenously polarized that want to kill eachother. It gets violent when the group size reaches the nation-state level because that's where most of the violence and oppression in our society is siloed.
We have to limit group sizes online. Before social media, it was physically limited by the difficulty of meeting up in person. But now groups just keep getting larger and more homogenous.
I dont know, stockholm syndrome exists and I feel like its very relevant in modern society considering how many people are bootlickers for their employers.
I agree that people with an anti humanistic worldview being able to network is very dangerous. But most polarization I've personally witnessed are people not wanting to live in a system that heavily favors the rich without forcing them to contribute in the same amount poorer people do. People just wanna buy houses and be able to afford a family, while houses are being used as speculative objects by the rich.
I've had a similar experience. The bigger my social circle gets and the more people I follow, the easier it is to end up surrounded by a single perspective, especially on work-related topics. At first, I thought I was broadening my view, but it turned out I was just reinforcing my existing preferences.
Do you make a point of keeping people with different opinions in your network, or do you find it more comfortable to stay in circles where everyone thinks alike?
People talked for a long time about filter bubbles. I think we are realizing that it was actually GOOD to be in a filter bubble (neighborhood, school, a few close friends, etc.)
It is not that people have wildly different views all of a sudden, it is that being exposed to views we used to be protected against is really unpleasant.
"The world isn't so bad" -> "The world is very bad"
4 western countries with aging populations, what they really found is that people are getting older, have more free time for friends, who are now interest oriented rather than work or school related.
Links are "DOI NOT FOUND". Article does not seem to suggest that the study actual found any relationship between the increase in the two things, just that they both happened around the same time.
Unfortunately, even for the most fast-moving journals, that time is typically several hours before the actual articles appear on the journal’s website. So, anyone who’s reading quickly is likely to find that the DOI fails.
But that rule only applies to the fast-moving journals, like Nature and Science. Many other journals can take a few days between when they allow journalists to write about a paper and when it becomes available to the scientific community—PNAS, which is a major source of material for us, falls in that category.
> When people are more connected with each other, they encounter different opinions more frequently. This inevitably leads to more conflict and thus greater societal polarization
If this is true, it is counterintuitive, and runs against the prevailing narrative that living within your bubble and not interacting with opposing viewpoints is what causes polarisation. I thought cities were supposed to be less polarised because people can't help encountering other viewpoints.
The study linked at the beginning of this article, and the two listed under "More information" at the bottom all take me to a page with the error
"DOI Not Found"
Given that the main (only significant) fact cited in the article goes against everything else I've read, I would like to see the actual study and how it came to the conclusion that the number of close friends has doubled.
Here are some sources that appear to contradict this article:
This always seemed intuitively inevitable if you ever played with a graph layout tool like dot or similar kinetic layout engine. With weak connectivity the nodes don't cluster readily, but with more connections they "snap" into rigid subassemblies. It always seemed to me like a bad thing for society but it could well be a case of "old man yells at moon."
You can have 10 "friends". 3 close ones. Anything larger than that and you are way out of your depth and can't possibly maintain those relationships in a meaningful, personal way.
Some theories on polarization I've collected so far that are interesting to think about:
1. Fragmented Realities and Epistemic Closure
Society has splintered into separate informational worlds.
People no longer disagree about interpretations — they disagree about basic facts.
Every event is reinterpreted through group narratives, while algorithms and media ecosystems reinforce self-sealing belief systems that reject contradictory evidence.
Truth has become tribal.
⸻
2. Complexity, Distrust, and the Need for Simplicity
Modern systems — from technology to institutions — are too complex for most to grasp.
This creates epistemic anxiety and fuels distrust.
People fill gaps in understanding with emotionally satisfying stories or conspiracies that reaffirm their group’s worldview, simplifying chaos into moral clarity.
⸻
3. Freedom Without Shared Norms
Unlimited freedom of expression, especially online, allows individuals to curate entire realities — news, values, communities, even moral codes.
With no shared gatekeepers or social guardrails, this leads to radical pluralism without cohesion, making dialogue and compromise feel impossible.
⸻
4. Identity Through Opposition
People now define themselves less by what they love than by what they hate.
Belonging is sustained through shared enemies, not shared ideals.
When external foes disappear, movements turn inward, targeting internal dissenters in purity spirals.
This “negative partisanship” keeps polarization alive even in victory.
⸻
5. Homogeneity Within, Division Between
Within each ideological camp, members become increasingly uniform, while differences between camps grow unbridgeable.
Social media and online subcultures create homogeneous echo chambers, replacing the moderating influence of local, mixed communities.
⸻
6. Moral Absolutism and Emotional Reasoning
Disagreement has become moralized.
Positions are interpreted as ethical declarations, not intellectual arguments — “if you question this policy, you must be evil.”
Complex moral issues are reduced to emotional reactions (“yay” or “boo”), eliminating space for nuance and ensuring every debate feels existential.
⸻
7. Fear of Ostracism and the Loss of Honest Discourse
Individuals self-censor to avoid social punishment.
Within tribes, dissent signals disloyalty; silence becomes survival.
Even when people privately know inconsistencies in their group’s logic, they publicly conform, reinforcing collective delusion.
⸻
8. Purity Spirals and Internal Cannibalization
Movements built on moral fervor tend to devour their own.
The demand for ideological purity leads to factionalism and self-destruction — evident in both political extremes.
Each cycle of purification shrinks the movement and intensifies radicalism.
⸻
9. Outrage Economies and Performative Extremes
Attention, not truth, is the currency of the digital age.
Algorithms reward anger, certainty, and spectacle, pushing participants toward theatrical extremity.
Outrage becomes addictive, and moderation becomes invisible.
⸻
10. Collapse of Shared Identity
Both left and right have lost sources of positive collective identity.
The left often ties self-worth to guilt or systemic critique; the right has turned against institutions it once championed.
Without shared symbols or pride, all that remains is mutual resentment and moral posturing.
⸻
11. Self-Directed Polarization and Moral Competition
Especially in progressive spaces, moral status is signaled through self-critique and guilt, producing competition over who can appear most virtuous.
This inward moral warfare fragments coalitions and deepens alienation, even among ideological allies.
⸻
12. Excessive Individualism and Identity Nihilism
When every norm, archetype, and tradition is deconstructed, people lose a sense of meaning and belonging.
The absence of shared cultural frameworks drives individuals to seek identity in micro-tribes — often online — where belonging depends on rigid ideological loyalty.
⸻
13. Perception Distortion and Amplified Extremes
Media and social networks exaggerate the prevalence of fringe behaviors and views, making each side believe the other is dominated by extremists.
This illusion of extremity fuels fear and rage, even when most people are moderate.
⸻
14. Cynicism, Performance, and the Collapse of Grace
Public moral life has become performative.
People perform virtue or outrage online instead of acting constructively in reality.
Every good deed is questioned as clout-seeking; every mistake is eternal.
This erodes trust, forgiveness, and the possibility of moral growth.
⸻
15. Technology and the Future of Polarization
AI and algorithmic personalization amplify division by creating individually tailored echo chambers.
Combined with emotional fatigue (“outrage burnout”), this could produce a paradoxical future: a society both numb and hyper-polarized — disengaged yet unbridgeably divided.
Yes. The same Internet that was going to connect the gay teenager in gay-hostile territory like rural Alabama or Iran and save them from suicide, it unfortunately turns out can also connect actual neo-Nazis and KKK members across the globe.
Understanding other cultures and giving me a chance to experience them has always been the quickest way to get me to become far more stereotypical / bigoted. I am willing to be open and idealistic about most any idea / ethnicity / culture but once I actually face it in real life and question if I want my kids exposed to that, then the rubber hits the road.
I've lived in several countries in 3 continents now, and the more I get to
know different peoples, the more I feel we're all the same—albeit stuck in these almost kaleidoscopic ways of outwardly displaying the very same humanity.
Perhaps OP got fixated on the collective differences instead of seeing through them. Perhaps.
The major difference in the more extreme case were I was shot at, or had a gun put to my head, or was caught in between a knife fight, or systematically on a regular basis saw people getting the shit beat out of them. Which I acknowledge can happen anywhere, but such trauma is not so easily rationalized when considering what I'd like my kids exposed to and after viscerally experiencing it in real life.
In any case, "I've found good people from all sorts of cultures and countries" is something I've definitely found to be true, and I don't view that as mutually exclusive. The trouble being, the amount of bad things a certain sector of people get away with can vary a lot depending on where you are and what the cultural response and incentives to that is.
The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit.
The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
Each person should be able to control what they can post and view online, but not what anyone else posts or views. The norms that we use to moderate physical public spaces must not be applied to online public spaces. Until we discard those norms, people will continue to become increasingly polarized, democracy will continue to decline worldwide, and violent conflicts will continue to increase in frequency and scale.
In practice I don't think this really changes anything at least for moderation. It takes a bunch of time and effort to moderate online communities - under the process outlined by the post you linked most communities are going to have a single effective clientside moderation list you can subscribe to anyway.
Totally unmoderated internet communities would be completely unusable because of spam, and it's also questionable whether you could even stay up with no serverside moderation - you'd have to delete stuff otherwise it just takes one script kiddie with a botnet to flood your disk space with garbage.
(User produced ranking/filtering algos though I can see being viable)
Parent isn't saying "totally unmoderated" he's saying the client chooses the algorithm/filters.
That means there can be a bunch of algorithms/filters out there to choose from (any tech savvy person could make their own as a blend of others that exist) and the end user could basically choose which feed[s] to subscribe to.
There are multiple providers of Adblock lists. It would be like that, not single-provider.
Regarding banning server-side moderation, we probably can't do it without decentralizing content delivery in a BitTorrent fashion. But even half measures like replacing moderators with client-side filters would be a big improvement.
>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
This is such a HN response. A HN reader might think it's fun to spend a weekend on writing/testing a ranking algorithm, but not the average person. They're just going to use whatever the platform recommends.
It's impractical even for tinkerers. YouTube claims to get over 20 million videos uploaded daily and it has well over 10 billion stored videos in its corpus. The metadata alone is tens of terabytes. The usual introduction-to-recommendations approaches out there are going to completely fall over on an item set of this size, even if you have disk space to spare.
If facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available.
I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.
Most people will use the default algorithm. A minority will choose a different algorithm.
It's only a partial solution. Really, the correct response is regulatory oversight and taxation on remaining economic rent. They are monopolies, and should be regulated as such.
> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.
If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse.
Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?
The DOI links aren't working so I can't read the study but I think there's a simple explanation, that also belies the headline. It may be that the typical number of close friends is now 0. But as people no longer even have any concept of close friendships, they're considering 'lesser' relationships as close friendships, because it's all they know.
This is made even more likely if they didn't define the term and allowed 'online friends' to be counted as 'close friends.' And I strongly suspect this may be the case since the graph shows a major inflection point in the increase of friends being 2007, the exact year when Facebook started becoming massive.
So this would boil down to "social media increases polarisation". Quelle suprise
I can't find this study even searching for the author's name and the title. FYI, the cited author Stefan Thurner has published 73 articles in peer reviewed journals in the past 3 years (all of the ones I glanced at appeared to involve statistical correlations), so they are very prolific.
Yeah I'd like to see a follow up with the depth of friendships compared with pre-social media ones.
My whole life is on the internet
We've become a family
We have never met
This is life inside the machine
Give me another hit of dopamine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhQW0ufJRBQ
An entertaining insight into the thought process of adding epicycles.
What do you mean? I have hundreds of friends on Facebook. /s
> Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"?
I suspect that you've hit the nail on the head. It would also be interesting to see numbers on churn. How long do these many close friendships last? Do they last longer than before? Or, more likely, less long?
I think longer is… possible, at least? The internet has allowed me to keep in touch with friends from elementary school. I’m, unfortunately, approaching 40 more quickly than I’d like, so these are around 30 year friendships.
Although, I’ve also got some college friends that I’d consider close. So that’s more like 15 years. Also online mostly at this point.
What makes you consider them close (aside from length of friendship)?
Boils down to the basics of proper science - how does one measure/quantify close friends?
Reflecting on my own experience - frequency of contact (if I see them once a year, can't really count them as close friends) How involved they are in my life - are they people I turn to when I'm facing a problem, do they turn to me when facing their own problems? Do we have frequent deep conversations - not just surface level discuss the weather, sports etc. but stuff that matter. Quantifying this - length of friendship (# of years), frequency of contact (annually, monthly, weekly etc.), level of trust (low, medium, high - can I trust my kids with them kind of trust), level of involvement (low, medium, high - what things do I feel comfortable sharing with them - suppose this is also level of trust?)
Personally, I find modern technology makes it easier to maintain them. 25 years ago my friendships around the world would have been relegated to 'penpalships' because of the cost of long distance calls and the lack of face time.
Loneliness is a big topic now due to the pandemic, and the lingering trends from stay/work-at-home mandates.
They probably aren't the friends people are thinking of when referring to things like this. The benefit of friends isn't just that you have someone fun to talk to, it's that you're building out a social support circle. Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss, or help you get an interview at a job shortly after you're fired (or at least, not one local to you).
Loneliness is a big topic now, imo, because people are losing helpful human friends and relying on middling digital friends. Just like how looking at pictures of a forest is nowhere near as healthy as actually going to a forest.
Most of those things seem like services rather than friends. I want a friend to talk to, not to cook me food or watch my dog, anyone can do those other things. And talking to a friend many times is as good as a video call. In fact because of the internet I can get conversations and opinions from friends all over the world quite quickly.
For many people, the benefits of friendships are not just reduced to the physical tangible things a friend might do for you.
This is an interesting argument, as by the first definition, I have more close friends than ever. If I need someone to make me food, I don't have a friend who is either nearby or has time for that.
On the other hand, I can buy all those services on an app for the most part. People I enjoy talking to for hours on end aren't available for $20 anywhere.
This comment is really funny to me for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss
I'll make the counter argument that -- although I value those things and try to provide them to friends in need -- all of those can be addressed by hiring someone.
On the other hand, I've recently received fantastic emotional support from a friend who moved away a few years ago. We've seen each other in person only a handful of times since then, but of all my friends, she happened to be the one with the experience and attitude to help me.
Incidentally, I'll add that I'm the type of person to provide those types of support to others, but the vast majority of my friends are not. That doesn't make them bad friends, it just means that I have a service disposition while they don't. I think there's a vast range of qualities that people seek and experience from friends and you're going to have a hard time objectively rating them on any sort of scale.
Yeah and you can rent a truck every time you need to haul something, but it's nice when your friend lets you borrow his - and his manpower/time. And yeah, you can hire an emergency remediation company, or chef, or psychologist for your friends, but that seems... impersonal to me?
I'm not trying to say there's no value to Discord friends, but I do think it's substantially less valuable to the human condition than real, in-person friends.
For me the problem is that everyone is way too busy working all the time to be able to do this.
So I think it’s not about “internet bad” but more about how much harder it is to make ends meet / how much more intense capitalism has become.
This is how I can tell you don’t get it. It’s not about the value of your friends doing those things for you which you can hire someone for, it’s the value YOU get out of doing those things for your friends.
Maintain? Maybe. Create new ones? No way I am believing this, literally everything in this reality for past 20+ years points exactly the opposite.
You’re right that the net can be used that way but I’m not sure everyone does.
Also the loneliness epidemic has been growing worse since the 1990s. There’s a well known book about it called Bowling Alone. COVID made it worse of course but it didn’t start the trend.
Loneliness pandemic is a topic because one author wrote a book on it and is pushing and agenda to generate sales for his book.
The biggest article about the loneliness pandemic was one in the New York times and oh just to happened to mention said book. Countless articles followed on from there. If the book were sound, it would be less sad, but the studies it cites have problems so this is all built on a huge heaping of confirmation bias.
It could also be something structural about how the "friendship graph" looks. The mean number of friendships isn't the median or typically experienced number of friendships, and if friendship relationship distributions follow some kind of power law, a change in the power-law exponent could make those diverge.
I am wondering the same thing. It's interesting that they didn't report at all on the median and only the average. Also find the timing interesting, as I can't help but suspect that both the justification and incentive for self-reporting a higher number of friends materially changed for some people in the early days of social media. They didn't seem to acknowledge this at all.
The model they built that draws a causal relationship between graph density and polarization is interesting, but these gaps leave me skeptical.
There are just so many other reasons I can see for polarization.
1. Late-stage of civilizational monetary cycle (bretton woods - petrodollar) -> historically leads to polarization
2. Dramatic increase in access to information / wide range of things to know and care about
3. Attention economy (novel upsetting news is best at getting attention, not nuance, not truth)
4. Habits of instant gratification diminishes patience for nuance
5. Maybe foreign state interference/bias towards polarization to destabilize rivals?
6. Several more maybe??
So I buy the graph density correlation, and I'm curious about contributing to causation, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's the primary or sole cause.
I think you left out the biggest one (though I suppose #3 indirectly hits on this). Social media, and increasingly even online media in general, tends to heavily misrepresent 'the other side.' In the past relationships were formed primarily in person so you actually got see what 'the other side' was like. Now a days people instead depend on completely inaccurate stereotypes that are far more like cartoon caricatures than real people. See: the perception gap. [1]
So people simply don't understand 'the other side', but ironically think they do - which is a rather toxic combination. For instance the more news somebody follows, the less accurate their assessments of 'the other side.'
[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/
I agree completely, though I continually wonder why. Is it by specific design? By economic incentive? Is it because novel threats attract attention, and having a need to be validated continually satisfied maintains attention?
I can't help but wonder if the polarization in the media is deliberate (e.g. foreign state sewing division) or accidental (second order consequence of attention economy) or organic (the claims of the paper, and/or other psychological effects of anonymity, etc.) or maybe all of the above?
When was that past? People used to hate you for being from a different village.
Polarization could instead be because there are fundamental differences in how people see the world and what is right. And now that we've tangled ourselves through all the wars imaginable to dispel the old division lines, this is what we're left with. This is what we have, now that information has become available for the masses; the real differences which split people. Not based on phony dividers of the past.
Polarization also means that if you disagree with the ideology of your family or of your village, you have millions of friends on a national or international level who think like you, instead of being ostracized for life.
It seems insane to try to connect a twenty year shift in one global variable to one causal factor. This approach is why the social sciences continue to struggle to create understanding. It is all they can afford to do, though.
That said, 3) I think possibly best explains both: the increase in average number of friends due to influencer dynamics skewing the distribution, and the increase in polarization due to the tactics in social media.
However there seems to be no chance it is a durable or reproducible link, as it depends on the novelty of polarization techniques which wear over time and become known and integrated in education, reducing their effectiveness
> average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.
Seems like median would be the much more relavent measure for this.
Without knowing the distribution it is unwise to place too much trust in a numerical average. There is always a tendency to assume a normal distribution, but even a small population of hypersocial individuals can drag the mean higher.
And reported loneliness does not always imply an absence of close friends, although I'd agree that that is a major factor.
Yeah, it might not be that people are less lonely, just that we've expanded what counts as friendship in a hyper-connected world
It may be a combination of both: the fact it is easier to stay in touch makes it more difficult to let go of friendships. But this may make those friendships feel less meaningful and therefore increase loneliness.
I don't really see the causal link here between "more close friends" and "growing polarization", and I'm having trouble finding the actual study - the link in the article seems broken.
I can't find more information on the actual distribution, but I think looking at the _average_ number of close friendships is a red flag. It's perfectly possible for some social groups to be growing, while others are shrinking.
It likely doesn't account for the evolving definition of what a "close" friend actually is.
Just because Jack and Jill know a bunch of details about each others' lives owing to facebook updates or group chats, that doesn't necessarily mean they share a strong connection, at least not in the traditional sense. But I suspect they might still feel a certain connection and belonging to each other.
It used to require frequent, active, quality communication to know someone well. Now it just requires a few clicks.
> It likely doesn't account for the evolving definition of what a "close" friend actually is
This has to be it. I’ve got guys I would die for, and I don’t know their birthdays.
Keep in mind that it is "average" and it is about close friends.
Anecdotally, the pandemic was the great cutting of weaker ties. I talk to far fewer people than I did pre-pandemic (and most friends report the same), but I speak to those people more often. I can easily see that ending in a way where some 20% find themselves with nobody.
I would say I have 4 close friends. But some 10 weaker ties disappeared from my life. Did those 10 also double down on close friends? Or did perhaps some of them not have enough close friends to do that?
Many of my friends live abroad. We started a weekly Zoom meeting during Covid-19 lockdown. Now we have a WhatsApp group too. Does that change the classification from plain friends to close friends?
Oh god flashback, I remember the zoom calls, and people acting like they didn’t know how zoom worked 10 months into it or that the host can mute anyone that doesn’t know how to mute themselves
I opted out of the extended family ones and the social ones
I wonder if they’re still doing that, I’d rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
> I'd rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
did it dry in the end?
I stopped paying attention and did something entrepreneurial then left
I would agree - usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you. Having more close friends that all think alike would increase rejection of ideas not shared by other close friends. It is harder (but not impossible) to have close friends that have dramatically different lifestyles, ideals, or socioeconomic class.
Weaker ties would include friends that have less in common, and have different ideas. But that fact that they are a friend means that you are aware of their existence and different ideas. In that way, having a broad range of weak friends suggests that you can see things from different perspectives instead of in your own (close) friend bubble.
It's like how people are less likely to know their neighbors now, who can hold different ideas. But you don't have to be close friends with them to have some empathy.
> usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you
That stirkes me as myopic. My closest friends--the ones I trust with all my secrets, with whom have have practically no secrets, the ones I'd hide if it came to that or risk my life to save--are all over the place values and ideas-wise. It's what makes their company fun. It's also what makes their advice useful, because they'll call me out on my bullshit in a way a mirror image of me could not.
If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety.
And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.
> If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety
Wide gulf between “people that share the same values and ideas as you” and Nazis.
There's a vast difference between "friends who challenge your views in constructive ways" and "people who make you feel unsafe"
I feel like GP was probably not referring to the latter.
Same for "far left", those can't be trusted either.
However, what strikes me as interesting: Do you actually destinguish between right and far right? Because I have a feeling, many people don't. Why do I think that? I recently read on Planet Debian: "Conservatives tend to be criminals". That sentences struck me as the core of the problem. People seem to fail to see the difference between a person with conservative values, and outright "Nazis". There is a clear difference, but some politically active people seem to fail to see that.
Just at the moment: a lot of people who consider themselves merely "right" voted for a candidate who is undeniably "far right". So for the moment I'm not drawing much distinction between "conservative values" and "outright Nazis".
That was not always true and I hope it will not remain true. But speaking at this specific time in history, this fact represents a genuine threat to life and liberty.
From my POV, you are pissed that your people lost, and can't get over it. Remember that democracy is a pendulum. Swinging from side to side is a necessary ingredient of democracy. You can't always win, and, you shouldn't. But I guess you are unable to listen to this simple principle, because you and your people railed yourself up so much that you are unable to calm down. That is weird to me, as I believe that is a skill we all learn when moving from childhood to adulthood. Throwing tantrums isn't very useful.
Did you ask the question to get a real answer?
The difference between right and far right is, in a nutshell, endorsement of insurrection and militarism.
The GOP was a right-wing party. MAGA is bona fide far right. There are plenty of conservatives (or pissed-off idiots) who voted for Trump but aren’t MAGA. There are also lots of folks who believe in MAGA to the core. The latter are far right, probably fascists.
> democracy is a pendulum. Swinging from side to side is a necessary ingredient of democracy
It’s a multidimensional pendulum. There is no natural partisan swing to group dynamics; it’s why parties fail and are remade or replaced, even in two-party systems.
Also, Democrats should embrace Trump’s precedents next cycle. But the results will uglier than before for those on the other side. (To port prior policy goals, you’d cancel student debts by literally shredding the documents, thereby undermining the government’s ability to collect even if it wants to. And you’d pursue environmental policy by dismantling coal power plants and mines. The courts may get mad later. But it wouldn’t be rebuilt.)
But it also creates echo chambers, especially when your "inner circle" is big enough to feel like a complete social world
Found with AI but this article claims the opposite of the GP.
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a...
And the various articles found seem to agree. The GP claims to have combined 30 surveys. I wonder if they wound-up with one of those statistical paradoxes where a combining of data sets points to something different from each individual data set. But something probably isn't true 'cause the individuals sets are well curated and the combination isn't.
I had the same thought. Some of you have 5+ close friends? and before you had 2 - 3? Where are you finding these people :)
I don't think I have had an IRL friend let alone a close one for 20+ years. So since my mid 20's
Happy for you all though!
I can't find any evidence supporting the claim in the article, and the study it links to for me is a dead link. Are you able to find the source?
>> goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse
This seems like a hot-take. IMHO one does not and cannot cure loneliness by having more online friends.
Completely agree. Fully online friendships are hollow simulacrums of the real thing, like most fully online things compared to their offline counterparts. That's not to say there isn't real connection or real value there, just that they are a supplement to - and not a replacement for - the 'real thing'.
Example: long-distance relationships vs. in-person. My wife and I started off as long distance before moving to the same city together. Obviously we established a very real relationship digitally, but it was a means to an end, and not an end in itself, and the real-world date nights and so on are so much deeper and richer than Facetime calls.
Yeah, if anything I would say that leans in to the loneliness epidemic, if we take things like Dunbars Number to be true.
Having more shallow friends is actually much more isolating than having fewer deep friends.
Or women have 8 and guys have 1
When you look at studies, women and men are lonely at about the same rate. There are differences at the margins - period right after divorce, being stay at home and such. But overall rates are the same.
You mean "feel lonely at the same rate" or that they are actually alone at the same rate? Men do have fewer friends and its much more common for men to have no close friends at all.
The free market rate of a young/fit woman's sexual services are several hundred or even thousand+ $/hr. I suspect any man who is seen as potentially offering 100s of $/hr in services if you pretend to be a friend long enough, would see similar interest of fake friends.
I could see it making you even more lonely, to have to filter through that though, as a man is probably less likely to reject someone as a 'false positive' who might be a true friend through such filtering process. If you are down and out man and someone is being nice to you and not trying to sell you something, I've found it pretty rare that the person isn't being genuinely friendly. I've heard the exact opposite from females.
Most of most women's friends are women. Close friends even more.
> have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"?
Yes. People nowadays spent 8 hours per day chatting to someone online and they call it close friend even if they never met in real life.
Also, people nowadays are notorious for being unable to have friendship that is not a [insert activity here] buddy.
I have a sinking feeling it's a situation where people who are adept at creating and maintaining relationships are getting more of them, whilst people who struggle socially are being excluded more than ever as a result. The overall count grows, but a substantial slice of the population still has barely any.
I have no data for this, just a gut feeling. I still see so many people on the day-to-day who are completely socially inept. I don't even mean just like, rude or abrasive, I mean people who don't have the emotional intelligence to like, navigate basic conflicts.
Indeed. Conflicting info.
NOTE: I did NOT read the article.
If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend.
We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?
I favor the theory that polarization is due to decreasing attention spans, effectively preventing us from appropriately considering nuance.
Related:
https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/populism-fast-an...
On top of that, text based communication for short attention spans is both brief and dehumanized, encouraging "dunking" behaviour. Hard to empathize with folks who have differing views when the discourse can broadly be described as "lol got'em!".
it does feel like there's been a slow shift from the Internet being a place to make friends to a place to make enemies.
The article that sticks in my mind is "Internet of Beefs": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ - ironically I have vague memories of the author being on the wrong side of various beefs, but the description of the phenomenon is spot-on.
Some corners of bluesky are resisting this with trying to form the habit of aggresive blocking of clickbait and anyone who comes into your mentions to beef. But overall it's gone horribly mainstream, everyone is just promoting themselves by whom they have beef with.
The constant flood of short-form content definitely trains us to expect snap takes and instant clarity
Agreed, there's so many headlines on X and Reddit that are obviously highly spun and could take 5 seconds of reading into it to see through the BS. But they kill as long as people agree with the phrasing and people go right to the comments to cheer it on instead of reading the article.
It's tough on the internet being a skeptic or generally thoughtful about the world. It's not even worth debunking stuff anymore. Much healthier to not engage entirely.
I can no longer engage in (controversial) debates on other social medias, as responses often indicate a lack of understanding with the other person - they glance over the arguments, make a prejudice-based opinion, and then they respond to their straw man, often loaded with bad emotions. It's quite frustrating and as you say, sadly only solution is to disengage, but in so doing the polarisation only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.
> but in so doing the polarization only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.
It used to make sense when the internet was smaller but now? Not so much. Especially when the people running platforms/media, content moderators and influencers explicitly don't care about the truth. You're not just fighting some dummy posting a comment.
The only positive thing I've seen in the last decade to address this was Community Notes on X.
I feel ya. It is true on hn too sadly. There are certain subjects that trigger people to fall into a rhetoric mode of clapbacks and us vs them mindset. Eg the individual disappears replaced by some form of ideology. It isnt a left right up down thing but a phenomenon of hyper polarization. It is especially scary to see it in person. Mobs are a dangerous thing.
It's super hard to have good faith discussions on the internet for years now. When someone has different opinions, those opinions are associated with certain groups (liberals, conservatives, etc). And it's very easy to demonize other groups, because social media shows curated content with extremely idiotic and malicious people in that group. Even if we have only slightly biased opinions, the algorithm knows watching content which follow your existing opinions are super engaging. We can't resist the satisfaction and dopamine hit of finding out our opinion is right. Attacking obviously wrong people from a moral high ground without risking being attacked by other people is also really attractive. After consuming such content for a long time, we come to see other groups as nothing but evil, and it makes it very difficult to have good faith conversations.
That's one of Chomsky's major points for decades.
> That's one of Chomsky's major points for decades
Curious for the source? To my recollection, Chomsky talked about distraction, i.e. repurposing attention. OP is talking about the pool of attention as a whole drying up (versus being misdirected).
Not to be flippant but this takes a couple of hours to essentially make the point that the complexities of the world resist summarization or at least the opportunistic summarization that can be used to sway the inattentive public (among other nuances to this) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60
embarrassingly haven't dug into Chomsky, this is another update towards me doing so soon!
OT: As someone in the same camp, does anyone have any recommendations on where would be best to start?
Disclaimer: I think the most correct criticism of Chomsky was by Everett, and the following shitshow that ensued is _really_ a shame for linguistics in the Anglo world [0] (Chomsky wasn't the instigator, but his silence doesn't paint him in a great light). Some of the other criticisms are also valid, but often too ideologically tainted or too incorrect to be worth your time (or anyone's time tbh).
I think you have to start with his criticism of Skinner (papers that criticize other papers are often the best and the most informative ones) and his theory of UG, then Everett's claim and Chomsky's rebuttal (sightly weak, but interesting to understand his views on UG). I know UG has been rebuilt (basically his theory was falsifiable, was falsified on the field, then UG people worked on another similar theory that corrected some mistakes), but it was post 2011 and i stopped followed humanities around that time, and never got back into linguistics, so you might want to read about that.
[0] Something similar happened in France with Furet, and the fact that Furet's school of thought still somewhat exist and the debate lasted decades on polite terms without ad hominem is a compliment to historian's values and practice. Saying "critical thinking" and running away from correct criticism is shameful.
You can start with his recent Russian apologia where he blames the U.S. and Ukraine for forcing Russia to invade Ukraine. That might provide some context when you read one of his books.
Yeah to be fair I dunno about that one yeesh
The Chomsky-Foucalt debate is a classic [0], as is Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent [1].
[0]: https://youtu.be/eF9BtrX0YEE
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
IMO these should be required reading for anyone unfamiliar with Chomsky's positions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial
https://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2181/ (Chomsky defending the decision to write a foreword for a book denying the Rwandan genocide)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair (Chomsky signed a petition supporting a Holocaust denier he felt had been mistreated)
The new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, has been publishing genocide denial pieces, pointing ro various children dying in Gaza as false stories. That happened this week, you seem to be concerned that Chomsky signed a petition for Faurisson on the 1970s, that he should not be jailed for publishing his book on the holocaust. Chomsky signed hundreds of letters for jailed Soviet dissidents, Turkish authors on trial etc. That he did not want Faurisson jailed for his book is seen as a bad thing by those who don't believe in free speech and believe authors should be jailed by governments.
Regarding Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge coalition was pushed out in 1979 and the US began arming the KR coalition, providing UN support for it etc. You would think the US and Reagan arming the Khmer Rouge coalition more heinous, if you don't like them, than Chomsky saying the US should not bomb Cambodia in the 1970s etc.
The UN and every human rights organization in the world says the US has been and is involved in a genocide in Gaza. The denial of this in the US has been incredible, but now that the first stage is done the Press is more forthcoming about it. Something Chonsky opposed, the establishment supported.
It sounds like we both agree that genocide denial is a serious matter. By familiarizing themselves with the links I put above, people will be able to make an informed opinion on Chomsky's engagement with it.
i think this is a good article, but these statements,
> If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)? > For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)?
... are not quite as applicable to left-wing populism (for the latter --- at least, at the surface). post-colonial, _left-wing_ populism tended to be of international character, or at least of wider appeal than the nation (e.g., nasser). the "distrust of central banking" is of wildly unique impetuses for left- vs. right-wing populism.
the common-sense point is quite poignant, at least for me in the u.s., where each party paints their own solutions as explicitly "common-sense", for solutions as unique as harsh border control ("solutions") vs. city-owned grocery stores & free childcare.
there are certainly issues i imagine i don't hold the "elite" view on. many people don't consider the "elite" view at all --- anti-punitive justice, for example, is rejected for particular types of crimes, despite provenly worse outcomes if we simply punish these crimes. the rise of anti-intellectualism doesn't help :D
In-group dynamics are further ingrained as the group gets bigger. If you have 4 friends in a group, their opinions aren't as strong. If you have 40 friends in a group, not only are their opinions stronger, they'll fight vigorously to defend the group's commonly accepted beliefs. So a growing social circle does reinforce the group dynamic. (this is well established by lots of studies)
But increased polarization around the world isn't because of this. There's the typical environmental factors: an increase in changes (or challenges) to traditional values increases polarization; an influx of migrants increases polarization. But then there's also social media, where mastery of "engagement" by businesses for profit has been adopted by political groups looking to sow division to reap the benefits of polarization (an easier grip on power). The rapid rise of polarization is a combination of both.
It's nothing new of course, political/ideological groups have been doing this forever. We just have far more advanced tools with which to polarize.
The social network angle is probably just one piece of a much larger puzzle
Before the Internet and social media, groups had a practical size cap because they had to meet up in person. Polarization was naturally limited.
I don't think the social media companies' algorithms are entirely to blame. But more broadly it's centralized moderation of public online spaces.
Moderation of public behavior of physical spaces was only necessary because it wasn't possible to selectively filter people's influences on eachother in public. If someone is doing something you don't want to see in public, covering your eyes is not good enough because you also block out the people you do want to see. Centralized moderation was a practical half-measure rather than an ideal solution for a democratic society that values free expression and self-determination.
That kind of moderation isn't necessary online because all filters can be implemented client-side. We just aren't doing it because people are so used to the old way. But the old way will naturally lead to more and worse conflict when we have infinite connectivity.
We aren't doing it because most people want to suppress (some kind of) speech, meaning they don't want others to hear it either.
Yes. Indulging in that desire to boss over other people (and also hubris, thinking oneself knows better) was fine before social media because it was hard to have a say over what others hear at scale. People congregated into groups that moderated speech internally, but those small groups rarely got large enough to influence nation-states. Democracy worked fine because those small groups were independently-thinking entities despite being internally homogenous. And individuals from different groups could still talk to eachother intelligently because the inter-group rifts weren't that large. The groups weren't that large. Many small groups existed and could debate eachother to generate effective policies in a democratic society.
Now there are big social media mobs. The number of independently-thinking entities have gone down drastically over the past 2 decades. We're ranking, filtering, and moderating ourselves into authoritarian governments ran by Internet echo chamber mobs.
Government-moderated echo chambers existed long before the internet. In fact I think they're the default throughout history. But I think business has developed the manipulation (through specific technologies, products, services) into a science. The gift of big data and business analytics applied to the problem of manipulating public opinion.
Government propaganda is used to rile people up so that they're willing to kill eachother in war. This is indeed a default throughout history but I don't think it's a good default and we could change it by making and then keeping the Internet a free place.
It doesn't have to be government propaganda, though. It can be everyone with enough money to broadcast, and in the Internet age that is basically everyone.
We've spent most of the 20th century honing propaganda techniques to the point where its potency is like a nuke compared to a dynamite stick. And then we've spent most of the 21st century so far making that nuke cheap and easily available to everyone.
I'm very pro-free-speech in general and I don't think censorship is a solution, but in order to argue for free speech in good faith we have to acknowledge the problem. The reason why people want government to censor is, in many cases, the same reason why they want government to crack down on someone who is building a nuke in their garage (but are okay with the government itself having the same nuke).
I don't understand what you mean with your last paragraphs, but I disagree that there's a centralized moderation. Of all the social media I'm aware of, moderation is mostly distributed, and weighted. Instagram flagged posts go to "a team" to review, but they weigh that against the account and the content. Reddit moderation is per-subreddit. Facebook moderation is a combination of group moderators and site moderators.
In any case, I don't think moderation isn't a factor, because moderation is for commenters. Something like 90% of people just lurk. And that's where ads, influencers, comments, and everything else, are targeted.
How can we get more people viewing TikToks, or YouTube Shorts? How can we get more people to sub to our Patreon? How can we get more followers, or likes? This has nothing to do with moderation. It's the math of "what can we post that will make people "engage" with their eyeballs and their clicks?" That's what matters. Partly because eyeballs equal ad dollars; but also because eyeballs equal influence. The science of manipulation is getting you to see what I want you to see, and you coming back for more. The more you come back, the more you're part of my in-group.
Another example is astroturfing. I can't remember if it started for commercial or political gain, but the point is the same. Post some fake shit to make people believe there's a grassroots opinion, in order to get them to back it, with them assuming it's really a grassroots movement. Whether you're Vladimir Putin or DuPont, you benefit the same way: manipulation of public perception, through the science of social media disinformation.
I don't mean there's a single centralized moderating authority overseeing everything, but rather the general tools and mechanisms used for moderation on the Internet are centralized and undemocratic. They produce groups with authoritarian power structures and norms. Those groups get larger over time with no limit on their size. When they get large enough, they fight over which one gets to run a country. This is how modern democratic countries can turn authoritarian very fast, and it's already happening.
When I say "group", I don't mean an actual Facebook group or subreddit (it could be, though). I mean a group of intellectually/ideologically homogenous people. They may be distributed across many subreddits and comment sections. Forums/subreddits/servers can be separate entities in form, but not in substance. Two Discord servers that moderate content the same way are the same group in this context.
Moderation is not just for posters. It also affects lurking viewers because it changes what they will see. If a post is deleted by a moderator, then that moderator has decided for the viewers what they can and cannot see.
Up/down voting (aka likes/dislikes) is a hidden form of moderation as well. People's likes and dislikes are deciding what other people are more likely to see because upvoted posts get to the top of the feed. Recommendation and ranking algorithms do the same thing.
I'm not making a statement about who has nobler goals, be it the ad companies or Putin or the US gov or the people here on HN. I'm saying that the concept of centralized moderation on the Internet is itself the problem. Regardless of what or whose goals these tools serve, they're bad because they coagulate people into intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups, and there is no group size limit due to the practically infinite connectivity of the Internet. This will create nasty real-world consequences in the long run. But we can defuse this by moving all moderation and ranking to the client-side.
Lol what caused this, it couldn’t have been a major financial collapse that happened around 2008, that’s what radicalised me. It must be caused by people talking to each other.
Instinctively this seems like it could be a common cause
rather than the causality hypothesised in the articleYea or also:
Maybe I missed it but it would have been helpful to know which confounds had been ruled out.It could be due to a change in the PEW polling or the polling questions staying the same but the definition of terms shifting over time which caused the perceived increase in polarization. Or even the researchers’ definition of polarization which was stated as an increase in people stably identifying as either liberal or conservative. It is worth noting the article did say the PEW polling is supposed to be a stable source of data.
"An information flow model for conflict and fission in small groups (1977)" by Wayne W. Zachary [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3629752.pdf]
I know this paper isn't about social networks, but we know this, we knew it in the 70s. The only difference is that we continue to ignore and forget it.
Anyone know where to find the paper?
The DOI in the article is being reported as invalid. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2517530122
It's not listed on pnas.org either: https://www.pnas.org/action/doSearch?ContribRaw=Thurner%2C+S...
Perhaps the article is yet to be published.
> And this increase happened suddenly, between 2008 and 2010
Occam’s Razor tells me that it’s almost certainly linked to the near-total failure of the economic system (and the very slow recovery outside specific US cities).
It is obviously social media: more connections does not equally mean social interactions - people substituted costly and hard in-person for cheap and easy online interactions, with AI optimization fueling the polarization.
> It is obviously social media
I get why social media could possibly be the cause but what makes you so certain it is the cause or the largest contributing factor?
It would correlate well with the social media boom in the late 2000s. Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Google's purchase and aggressive expansion of Youtube, etc. 4Chan.
When did algorithmic recommendations (by which I mean injecting content into your feed to maintain attention, rather than an attempt to rank by quality) become commonplace? ISTR Youtube was being criticised for pushing conspiracy theories in the late 2000s, but I could be misremembering the timeline.
It is just as obviously late stage capitalism - as everyone is busy working 10-12 hours just to survive you have zero time left for costly and hard in-person interactions.
So is there an actual paper?
As is it's hard to evaluate if there is anything substantial to get out of these claims.
First time for me to meet with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_Science_Hub
Is that cause or correlation?
Like, if people are more polarized, there are more likely to have wider ground to sympathize. Less throttle in opinion divergences, so they can deal with more social exchanges as the only interactions are endless smooth easy agreements within their social bubbles.
The fact that we have more close friends on average is a novel and surprising observation to me. Very worthy of investigation.
But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level? There's also a 10-year gap between USA (and other countries' data points too) that covers the span of the whole alleged "aligned trend". It feels a little bit like the authors just went "Look! Two data trends moving in the same direction! Causal?!"
More seriously, I would love to see a much deeper dive on:
- Technological and associated psychological trends that might be causing greater polarisation (plenty of existing data here)
- How an increase in close friends can co-exist with an apparent loneliness epidemic (plenty of existing data here too)
> But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level?
You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones.
In this case it sounds like the polarisation is fueled by the axing and not the adding?
> You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones
I did this after Covid. Consciously started declining invitations from acquaintances, and instead making time and travel to see close friends. Would never go back.
I’m more interested in how people determine who they trust, and the parameters by which humans decide to trust someone.
I would wager that people are shit at determining trustworthiness based on limited information (like social media representations). In the old days before social media, you got to know people in person, and decades ago, most of the people you knew were likely people you grew up around. You knew that person’s background, how they treated people, what their family was like, and what likely influences them as a person.
So much of how we process trustworthiness is how we perceive the motives of the speaker. With shallower friendships and parasocial relationships, we want to feel connected but really lack any good context that you need to actually know who you’re listening to.
A person's trustworthiness has always been based more on perception though, even if you were familiar with more of their history - that's how you end up with members of a community who are perfectly kind people but are ostracized because they're perceived as strange and untrustworthy in some way; it's also how you end up with members of a community who have demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness continuing to be trusted, because they can appear trustworthy and persuade others to trust them despite the prior evidence.
better connectivity -> people finding better friendship matches -> groups are more homogenous -> more polarization
I think the causal relationship is not quite that way.
better connectivity -> destroyed physical limits on group size -> groups not only get larger but also more ideologically homogenous because they're moderated by a central authority like how physical crowds are moderated -> people make friends more easily in those homogenous groups OR get kicked and start their own group, which also has the potential to get larger and more homogenous without limit -> groups have larger differences and clash harder
More friends is a symptom rather than a cause.
Self-actualisation often leads to conflict.
I noticed this when I studied abroad in the Netherlands — a highly educated, slightly more digitalized country than my own. Politics there splintered into micro-parties, each “hardly exchanging between bubbles,” as the study puts it. First impressions were warm, but dates always ended with splitting the bill. Friend groups felt just as closed off, except for Dutchies who had just as me lived abroad before, learned to bridge cultures and still are my closest friends today.
Digitalization and the pursuit of perfect information seemed to invite more binary thinking — and with it, more opportunities to disagree every single day. Meanwhile, other forces found easy consensus on simpler, more immediate issues: cheap gas, housing, grocery prices, job security, immigration. Complex, long-horizon topics like the climate crisis rarely stood a chance.
When I was in Amsterdam I was with a group of acquaintances of a friend who lived there. One of them offered me an extra piece of pizza they had when I showed up. When the bill came, they asked me for the exact percentage of the bill that that piece of pizza cost. First time experiencing something like that.
I also offered to buy several people a drink while I was there. This was received every time with suspicion and I was treated as if I was trying to gain something transactional besides a simple friendship in the moment. It was an interesting part of that society to experience.
Yes, the The People's Front of Judea and Judean People's Front are irreconcilable.
> The sharp rise in both polarization and the number of close friends occurred between 2008 and 2010—precisely when social media platforms and smartphones first achieved widespread adoption. This technological shift may have fundamentally changed how people connect with each other, indirectly promoting polarization.
Indirectly? Seems to me that this is far more likely the "direct" cause, given what we know about the psychology around algorithmic feeds.
Also - I'm not sure if I missed it in the article, but did they define what they mean by "close relationship" means? I'd be very curious to know if a purely online relationship is counted and how this may also contribute to the observations made.
The article said that a close relationship is one where the other person can influence your views. I didn't dig into the details to see how that was measured.
Wow that sounds like an awful definition. People get influenced by random comments online...
Thanks! I tried clicking into the linked research paper but got a 404 >.<
> What disappears as a result is a societal baseline of tolerance—a development that could contribute to the long-term erosion of democratic structures. To prevent societies from increasingly fragmenting, Thurner emphasizes the importance of learning early how to engage with different opinions and actively cultivating tolerance.
That could be a problem, considering how the push back to "actively cultivating tolerance" has unfolded so far.
They’re illegally sending the military into the streets to oppress us. I don’t think tolerance is really the move
For years, I have had very few close friends, fewer than mentioned as previous average, I’ve withdrawn almost completely from social media, and I’m still polarized, because there are only two major political sides in the U.S., and which news source you listen to drives your opinion.
Polarization maybe a bit unclear word here. Connectivity creates cohesion, which creates larger creatures. So what we have is, virtual monsters roaming around with huge human groups riding on them. They can organize real protests, polarized opinion and massive impact wherever these monsters go.
Monsters is a interesting choice of words. Why call it monsters?
Isn't polarization a good thing? If I was enslaved by tyrants making my life worse everyday, shouldn't I be opposed by their ways?
More polarization is good if people are allowed to naturally polarize in different directions. Alignment between individuals are supposed to emerge naturally, forming small groups that are internally polarized in the same direction. Democracy would work fine in that society.
But now we have huge online mobs that are homogenously polarized that want to kill eachother. It gets violent when the group size reaches the nation-state level because that's where most of the violence and oppression in our society is siloed.
We have to limit group sizes online. Before social media, it was physically limited by the difficulty of meeting up in person. But now groups just keep getting larger and more homogenous.
> If I was enslaved by tyrants making my life worse everyday, shouldn't I be opposed by their ways?
That wouldn't create polarization, it would create extremely strong cohesion since everyone else enslaved by those tyrants would agree with you.
I dont know, stockholm syndrome exists and I feel like its very relevant in modern society considering how many people are bootlickers for their employers.
I agree that people with an anti humanistic worldview being able to network is very dangerous. But most polarization I've personally witnessed are people not wanting to live in a system that heavily favors the rich without forcing them to contribute in the same amount poorer people do. People just wanna buy houses and be able to afford a family, while houses are being used as speculative objects by the rich.
Self reported through a questionnaire. Pass.
I've had a similar experience. The bigger my social circle gets and the more people I follow, the easier it is to end up surrounded by a single perspective, especially on work-related topics. At first, I thought I was broadening my view, but it turned out I was just reinforcing my existing preferences. Do you make a point of keeping people with different opinions in your network, or do you find it more comfortable to stay in circles where everyone thinks alike?
People talked for a long time about filter bubbles. I think we are realizing that it was actually GOOD to be in a filter bubble (neighborhood, school, a few close friends, etc.)
It is not that people have wildly different views all of a sudden, it is that being exposed to views we used to be protected against is really unpleasant.
"The world isn't so bad" -> "The world is very bad"
> Study finds growing social circles **may** fuel polarization
Note that this study MAY not be accurate
> Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
Anyone who has ever been to public school knows this in their bones.
4 western countries with aging populations, what they really found is that people are getting older, have more free time for friends, who are now interest oriented rather than work or school related.
Feels like another case where tech enabled something faster than society could process it
See ncase.me "the wisdom of crowds"
Links are "DOI NOT FOUND". Article does not seem to suggest that the study actual found any relationship between the increase in the two things, just that they both happened around the same time.
Unfortunately, even for the most fast-moving journals, that time is typically several hours before the actual articles appear on the journal’s website. So, anyone who’s reading quickly is likely to find that the DOI fails.
But that rule only applies to the fast-moving journals, like Nature and Science. Many other journals can take a few days between when they allow journalists to write about a paper and when it becomes available to the scientific community—PNAS, which is a major source of material for us, falls in that category.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/03/dois-and-their-disco...
The common demoninator is the rise of social media networks.
> When people are more connected with each other, they encounter different opinions more frequently. This inevitably leads to more conflict and thus greater societal polarization
If this is true, it is counterintuitive, and runs against the prevailing narrative that living within your bubble and not interacting with opposing viewpoints is what causes polarisation. I thought cities were supposed to be less polarised because people can't help encountering other viewpoints.
The study linked at the beginning of this article, and the two listed under "More information" at the bottom all take me to a page with the error
"DOI Not Found"
Given that the main (only significant) fact cited in the article goes against everything else I've read, I would like to see the actual study and how it came to the conclusion that the number of close friends has doubled.
Here are some sources that appear to contradict this article:
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a...
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250617/dq250...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11288408/#pone.0305...
This might be it? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1004008107
This always seemed intuitively inevitable if you ever played with a graph layout tool like dot or similar kinetic layout engine. With weak connectivity the nodes don't cluster readily, but with more connections they "snap" into rigid subassemblies. It always seemed to me like a bad thing for society but it could well be a case of "old man yells at moon."
In the limit you get periodic crystal structures when connectivity is maxed out and fully optimized.
You can have 10 "friends". 3 close ones. Anything larger than that and you are way out of your depth and can't possibly maintain those relationships in a meaningful, personal way.
Definitely. Close relationships of any kind involve a lot of investment and "costly signals".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Thanks to David Wong for explaining this in JDATE, calling it the Babel threshold.
Correlation is not causation. For example, 2008 was also the beginning of the Obama tern. He was pretty polarizing, even in those days.
Correlation ≠ Causation
Some theories on polarization I've collected so far that are interesting to think about:
1. Fragmented Realities and Epistemic Closure
Society has splintered into separate informational worlds. People no longer disagree about interpretations — they disagree about basic facts. Every event is reinterpreted through group narratives, while algorithms and media ecosystems reinforce self-sealing belief systems that reject contradictory evidence. Truth has become tribal.
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2. Complexity, Distrust, and the Need for Simplicity
Modern systems — from technology to institutions — are too complex for most to grasp. This creates epistemic anxiety and fuels distrust. People fill gaps in understanding with emotionally satisfying stories or conspiracies that reaffirm their group’s worldview, simplifying chaos into moral clarity.
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3. Freedom Without Shared Norms
Unlimited freedom of expression, especially online, allows individuals to curate entire realities — news, values, communities, even moral codes. With no shared gatekeepers or social guardrails, this leads to radical pluralism without cohesion, making dialogue and compromise feel impossible.
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4. Identity Through Opposition
People now define themselves less by what they love than by what they hate. Belonging is sustained through shared enemies, not shared ideals. When external foes disappear, movements turn inward, targeting internal dissenters in purity spirals. This “negative partisanship” keeps polarization alive even in victory.
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5. Homogeneity Within, Division Between
Within each ideological camp, members become increasingly uniform, while differences between camps grow unbridgeable. Social media and online subcultures create homogeneous echo chambers, replacing the moderating influence of local, mixed communities.
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6. Moral Absolutism and Emotional Reasoning
Disagreement has become moralized. Positions are interpreted as ethical declarations, not intellectual arguments — “if you question this policy, you must be evil.” Complex moral issues are reduced to emotional reactions (“yay” or “boo”), eliminating space for nuance and ensuring every debate feels existential.
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7. Fear of Ostracism and the Loss of Honest Discourse
Individuals self-censor to avoid social punishment. Within tribes, dissent signals disloyalty; silence becomes survival. Even when people privately know inconsistencies in their group’s logic, they publicly conform, reinforcing collective delusion.
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8. Purity Spirals and Internal Cannibalization
Movements built on moral fervor tend to devour their own. The demand for ideological purity leads to factionalism and self-destruction — evident in both political extremes. Each cycle of purification shrinks the movement and intensifies radicalism.
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9. Outrage Economies and Performative Extremes
Attention, not truth, is the currency of the digital age. Algorithms reward anger, certainty, and spectacle, pushing participants toward theatrical extremity. Outrage becomes addictive, and moderation becomes invisible.
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10. Collapse of Shared Identity
Both left and right have lost sources of positive collective identity. The left often ties self-worth to guilt or systemic critique; the right has turned against institutions it once championed. Without shared symbols or pride, all that remains is mutual resentment and moral posturing.
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11. Self-Directed Polarization and Moral Competition
Especially in progressive spaces, moral status is signaled through self-critique and guilt, producing competition over who can appear most virtuous. This inward moral warfare fragments coalitions and deepens alienation, even among ideological allies.
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12. Excessive Individualism and Identity Nihilism
When every norm, archetype, and tradition is deconstructed, people lose a sense of meaning and belonging. The absence of shared cultural frameworks drives individuals to seek identity in micro-tribes — often online — where belonging depends on rigid ideological loyalty.
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13. Perception Distortion and Amplified Extremes
Media and social networks exaggerate the prevalence of fringe behaviors and views, making each side believe the other is dominated by extremists. This illusion of extremity fuels fear and rage, even when most people are moderate.
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14. Cynicism, Performance, and the Collapse of Grace
Public moral life has become performative. People perform virtue or outrage online instead of acting constructively in reality. Every good deed is questioned as clout-seeking; every mistake is eternal. This erodes trust, forgiveness, and the possibility of moral growth.
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15. Technology and the Future of Polarization
AI and algorithmic personalization amplify division by creating individually tailored echo chambers. Combined with emotional fatigue (“outrage burnout”), this could produce a paradoxical future: a society both numb and hyper-polarized — disengaged yet unbridgeably divided.
group think has always been dangerous, 1984 come to mind
Yes. The same Internet that was going to connect the gay teenager in gay-hostile territory like rural Alabama or Iran and save them from suicide, it unfortunately turns out can also connect actual neo-Nazis and KKK members across the globe.
Understanding other cultures and giving me a chance to experience them has always been the quickest way to get me to become far more stereotypical / bigoted. I am willing to be open and idealistic about most any idea / ethnicity / culture but once I actually face it in real life and question if I want my kids exposed to that, then the rubber hits the road.
The internet has accelerated this.
I've found the opposite of that. I've found good people from all sorts of cultures and countries.
I'm like you and with you.
I've lived in several countries in 3 continents now, and the more I get to know different peoples, the more I feel we're all the same—albeit stuck in these almost kaleidoscopic ways of outwardly displaying the very same humanity.
Perhaps OP got fixated on the collective differences instead of seeing through them. Perhaps.
The major difference in the more extreme case were I was shot at, or had a gun put to my head, or was caught in between a knife fight, or systematically on a regular basis saw people getting the shit beat out of them. Which I acknowledge can happen anywhere, but such trauma is not so easily rationalized when considering what I'd like my kids exposed to and after viscerally experiencing it in real life.
In any case, "I've found good people from all sorts of cultures and countries" is something I've definitely found to be true, and I don't view that as mutually exclusive. The trouble being, the amount of bad things a certain sector of people get away with can vary a lot depending on where you are and what the cultural response and incentives to that is.
The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit.
For details see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45515980
The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
Each person should be able to control what they can post and view online, but not what anyone else posts or views. The norms that we use to moderate physical public spaces must not be applied to online public spaces. Until we discard those norms, people will continue to become increasingly polarized, democracy will continue to decline worldwide, and violent conflicts will continue to increase in frequency and scale.
In practice I don't think this really changes anything at least for moderation. It takes a bunch of time and effort to moderate online communities - under the process outlined by the post you linked most communities are going to have a single effective clientside moderation list you can subscribe to anyway.
Totally unmoderated internet communities would be completely unusable because of spam, and it's also questionable whether you could even stay up with no serverside moderation - you'd have to delete stuff otherwise it just takes one script kiddie with a botnet to flood your disk space with garbage.
(User produced ranking/filtering algos though I can see being viable)
Parent isn't saying "totally unmoderated" he's saying the client chooses the algorithm/filters.
That means there can be a bunch of algorithms/filters out there to choose from (any tech savvy person could make their own as a blend of others that exist) and the end user could basically choose which feed[s] to subscribe to.
There are multiple providers of Adblock lists. It would be like that, not single-provider.
Regarding banning server-side moderation, we probably can't do it without decentralizing content delivery in a BitTorrent fashion. But even half measures like replacing moderators with client-side filters would be a big improvement.
>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
This is such a HN response. A HN reader might think it's fun to spend a weekend on writing/testing a ranking algorithm, but not the average person. They're just going to use whatever the platform recommends.
It's impractical even for tinkerers. YouTube claims to get over 20 million videos uploaded daily and it has well over 10 billion stored videos in its corpus. The metadata alone is tens of terabytes. The usual introduction-to-recommendations approaches out there are going to completely fall over on an item set of this size, even if you have disk space to spare.
The server can deliver a sparsely randomly sampled RSS feed of embedding vectors and metadata.
Fetch media after ranking on-device.
If facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available.
I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.
so how would a user know which one to choose?
I already get analysis paralysis as a software dev enough.
> so how would a user know which one to choose?
Word of mouth, that makes peoples needs drive the algorithm rather than profits.
Most people will use the default algorithm. A minority will choose a different algorithm.
It's only a partial solution. Really, the correct response is regulatory oversight and taxation on remaining economic rent. They are monopolies, and should be regulated as such.
We need to ban the platform from recommending at all.
It would be like more sophisticated Adblock. There are many providers of Adblock lists, but they can't be provided by the platform itself.