Blog/2026-04-30/The Filter Bubble Is Great
Recently I've been using Overmod more and I have set up quite a few lists to block users on Hacker News. Fortunately for me, another user has also created block lists so I can subscribe to his and get an additional view of blocks. I place my highlights at the top so that I don't lose the users I like, but the fun part of the whole enterprise is just how easy it is to ignore people who post nonsense. Knowing that I will never see their stuff again makes it not so bad to read garbage the first time.
It reminds me of when YouTube rolled out their comment moderation. Overnight, comments there went from a meme for "the worst comments on the Internet" to harmless and heartwarming and mildly entertaining.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, which means you could be:
- an Indian employee complaining about how management does X
- a Pakistani woman saying "men are all scum"
- a European saying that software engineering isn't really that lucrative
We're all placed together in the same space to talk about the same things and the pseudo-proximity that Internet social networks provide makes it seem like we have things of relevance to say to each other. My experience is that no two people selected randomly have anything of value to discuss on a randomly selected topic. Not only knowledge, but also discussion skill, and comprehension are distributed in some non-uniform manner and conversations with many people are entirely useless because they'll either tread old ground, get stuck in the weeds, or find their identity threatened simply because you don't have the missing other part of the context: they are a dog.
And I'm sure this applies to people discussing things with me as well. I'm pretty eager that anyone talking to me should feel like they want to be doing this not that they're forced to do this by something else. And I certainly don't want to be forced to listen to someone else. What I am grateful for is the ability to select out these people and build a filter bubble of useful information. Right now, for Hacker News alone, I have. And I think you should subscribe to my lists! Go to my lists and search for "Roshan's" since that's how I prefix mine.
