#36floors

In recent times, there's been a huge increase in the number of personalized news apps on mobile platforms. Apps like Flipboard and Zite do a great job of learning from your reading habits and consequently feeding you content that they think you'd like. This approach seems to be working, if you look at the number of downloads that these apps get on iOS and Android put together, but there's one tiny problem.

YOU MEAN SODA BUBBLES?

The inherent problem with using algorithms, apart from the creepy fact that they track every single thing that you do, is something known as filter bubbling. A filter bubble is a situation where an algorithm serves you information based on information about you (your location, your interests, etc.) and what results is that you get "locked-in" in your own echo chamber. Simply put, this means you keep getting a lot more of the stuff that you like and barely anything else. This becomes more serious when, say, you Google Japan, and you get information about Japanese tourism, based on things you've searched earlier. Problem is that the rest of the world is watching the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan on TV. This sort of ignorance occurs a lot more with search engines, and that's something that DuckDuckGo is trying to solve. 

So how does this apply to personalized reading apps you ask? It's almost exactly the same situation. You enter a bunch of interests that you think would be cool and interesting. Over time, it keeps getting filtered and you get served more of the same stuff. Now this isn't really life-threatening or anything, but it sorta misses the point of the internet. The internet was built for connecting, collaboration and discovery, and personalizing all the content that you use consume defeats the purpose. The inherent paradox is that you don't know what you don't know, and filter bubbling only accentuates the ignorance.

Personalizing content isn't necessarily a bad thing. You may have absolutely no interest in reading about weirdly shaped turtles in the Galapagos. But if the entire world knows about the last remaining weirdly-shaped turtle dying, wouldn't you like to be in the know?

                              So, what is the solution then? Well that's what we're working on as well. Do sign up for our Beta here to get notified when it's up and running.