Pop the Feed Filter Bubble: Making Reddit Social Media a VR Cityscape

Rhema Linder* Alexandria M. Stacy† Nic Lupfer* Andruid Kerne* Eric D. Ragan‡
Interface Ecology Lab, Computer Science Department Department of Visualization
Texas A&M University Texas A&M University

A BSTRACT on votes from users [13]. One of the key aspects of Reddit is
On Reddit, users from tens of thousands of communities create and that it is organized into hundreds of thousands of topic specific
promote internet content, including pictures, videos, news, memes, subreddit groups. Each post is voted on by users to impact its “hot”
and creative writing. However, like most social media feeds, sub- score and current placement [14]. One thing Facebook, Twitter,
scribing to a very small subset of available content creates filter Pinterest, and Reddit have in common is that they all use a feed-
bubbles. These bubbles, while created unintentionally, skew percep- based subscription model. Content is prioritized with algorithms and
tions of reality. This phenomena provides an impetus for researchers be scrolled through. While displaying content in lists has advantages,
to design techniques breaking out of filter bubbles. Virtual real- non-linear spatial arrangements better support finding emergent and
ity provides opportunities for new environments that contextualize creative connections among content [8, 15] and conceptualization
social media among multiple perspectives. We present one solu- through visual thinking [10]. In 3D environments, meaningfully
tion to the filter bubble problem: Blue Link City, which enables spatialized information is ideal for learning activities [12]. This
contextualized exploration of Reddit. spatialization helps people remember and learn automatically, which
we find to be better than linear feeds. Social media exploration
1 I NTRODUCTION AND R ELATED W ORK is a personally meaningful form of creativity where more diverse
On Reddit, users from tens of thousands of communities create and experiences can be considered more creative [7]. We suggest that
promote internet content, including pictures, videos, news, memes, helping contextualize content mitigates filter bubble effects.
and creative writing. As consumers of content, users can sub-
scribe to specific communities that match their tastes. However, 2 B LUE L INK C ITY
this potentially creates a “filter bubble”, where the targeted con- To create the cityscape structure, we start with data from Reddit,
tent users enjoy fosters skewed perceptions of what most people construct a graph that connects related subreddits in a force-directed
believe. Like most social media, Reddit uses subscription-based graph, use an interactive application to create the city, and finally
feeds that present content in linear lists, ordered based on upvotes export the structure into the virtual environment. For data from
and recency. Researchers have previously identified filter bubbles Reddit, we used data from Woolf [16]. In this scheme, all subreddits
on Twitter [6], which provides similar feeds. The filter bubble are represented as nodes, with edges between them representing
problem also contributes to larger concerns about machine learn- co-occurring comments from users. When a user comments at least
ing algorithms and their potential to unwittingly reinforce social five times in two subreddits, a score of 1 is added. For example, there
inequality [11]. This project seeks to call attention to the filter bub- are 621 users who commented five times in both /r/guns /r/firearm,
ble problem and presents our approach for mitigation. We discuss making an edge with a weight of 337 between nodes /r/guns and
and demonstrate an alternative to linear feeds for consuming social /r/firearms. Using this data, we construct a graph in an interactive
media. Blue Link City is a virtual reality environment that maps web application that uses a D3.js visualization (Figure 1 a) to author
communities from Reddit into a virtual cityscape. a cityscape. We mapped each node to a subreddit, and represented it
as a building. Once we were satisfied with our organization of the
1.1 Presence in VR and Casual Browsing city, we snapped the nodes in position to city blocks. We included
In Virtual Reality research, presence [2] is the subjective feeling relatively large spacing between buildings to create a grid where the
of being lost in the moment or the reality of the system. Casual virtual user can navigable through the city, and the overall effect
web browsing creates a similar sense of presence. Elsweiler et al. results in city blocks with a mix of larger and smaller subreddits.
describes Casual-Leisure contexts as having separate goals than stan- We import the building structures into Unity to generate a
dard Information Behavior Models [5]. They found that people seek cityscape (Figure 1). The city structure takes advantage of net-
out mood boosters in everyday situations, accepting many informa- works [1] to support serendipity, while enabling non-linearity [8] in
tional outcomes rather than having a particular goal or informational the arrangement of curated subreddits. Each building represents a
need. We emphasize the exploring for the experience use case from subreddit. For each building, we place text titles of the name of its
Elsweiler et al., which typically refers to exploring novel physical subreddit at the top. Buildings display new content when looked at
spaces where the goal is to learn about the space. In this leisurely (via head tracking) for more than three seconds. New posts appear
context context, the focus is about the experience itself instead of an from the top of the building towards the ground. Each post wraps
informational goal. around the building and shows a title and thumbnail image or “self”
text. The size of building are mapped to the number of the subred-
1.2 Reddit and Other Social Media Feeds dit’s subscribers. Subreddits with few subscribers are narrow and
Reddit is a link and text sharing social media site where individual short, while those with many subscribers are wide and tall.
posts are constantly shifting in importance and prominence based
2.1 Interaction and Exploration
* e-mail: {rhema,nic,andruid} @ecologylab.net
† e-mail: [email protected] For hardware, we have used both a Leap Motion controller connected
‡ e-mail: [email protected] to an Oculus Rift (see Figure 1 b) and the Oculus Touch controllers.
We developed a bimanual gesture technique for navigation in 3D
2018 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces environments, which we describe very briefly in this work. To
18-22 March, Reutlingen, Germany translate, users clasp the fingers in each hand together and pull their
978-1-5386-3365-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE hands toward or away from the HMD. Spreading hands wider makes

619
 (a) (b) (c)

Figure 1: In (a), the top shows initial force direct graph with the bottom showing a top down. For (b), we show the Leap Motion navigation. In (c),
we show a portion of Blue Link City, with a spatialized Reddit as a social media cityscape. In the VR application, users can fly around and browse
content up close, or from a distance. Demos and videos of the Blue Link City authoring tool and environment are available at bluelinkcity.com.

the translation fast, while putting hands closer together makes it slow. R EFERENCES
The accuracy of the Oculus Touch was much better than the Leap
motion. Overall, we found this to be an effective and natural-feeling [1] P. André, J. Teevan, S. T. Dumais, et al. Discovery is never by chance:
technique for exploration. It is “hyper-natural [3]” in the sensation designing for (un) serendipity. In Proceedings of the seventh ACM
of accelerated swimming beyond natural speeds. conference on Creativity and cognition, pp. 305–314. ACM, 2009.
[2] D. A. Bowman and R. P. McMahan. Virtual reality: how much immer-
In Blue Link City, a user can view subreddit buildings to see sion is enough? Computer, 40(7):36–43, 2007.
fresh content appear. Often, this reveals interesting juxtapositions in [3] D. A. Bowman, R. P. McMahan, and E. D. Ragan. Questioning natu-
the structure of the city and posts. For example, one view shows a ralism in 3d user interfaces. CACM, 55(9):78–88, 2012.
subreddit about a popular show on Reddit (Rick and Morty), is jux- [4] R. Cialdini. Influence. HarperCollins, 2009.
taposed with /r/shittyaskscience and /r/talesfromtechsupport. This [5] D. Elsweiler, M. L. Wilson, and B. Kirkegaard Lunn. Chapter 9
indicates that, in this region of the city, people who comment about understanding casualleisure information behaviour. New Directions
the popular show also have a tendency to joke about science and in Information Behaviour, Emerald Group Publishing, Bingley, pp.
describe horror stories about supporting technology. Another prox- 211–241, 2011.
imal juxtaposition shows that /r/SandersForPresident resides near [6] I. Himelboim, S. McCreery, and M. Smith. Birds of a feather tweet
/r/socialism, which are close but not as close to /r/polotics and together: Integrating network and content analyses to examine cross-
/r/the donald. In this virtual environment, browsing political posts ideology exposure on twitter. Journal of Computer-Mediated Commu-
in nearby buildings juxtaposes content from posts that day from nication, 18(2):40–60, 2013.
multiple and conflicting perspectives. [7] A. Jain, N. Lupfer, Y. Qu, R. Linder, A. Kerne, and S. M. Smith.
Evaluating tweetbubble with ideation metrics of exploratory browsing.
In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity
and Cognition, pp. 53–62. ACM, 2015.
3 D ISCUSSION AND C ONCLUSION [8] A. Kerne, A. M. Webb, S. M. Smith, R. Linder, N. Lupfer, Y. Qu,
J. Moeller, and S. Damaraju. Using metrics of curation to evaluate
Virtual Reality feeds should be spatial. Linear feeds dominate social information-based ideation. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human
media experiences on desktop and mobile platforms, but they also Interaction (TOCHI), 21(3):14, 2014.
strengthen filter bubbles. In positive instances, feeds expose people [9] R. Linder, C. Snodgrass, and A. Kerne. Everyday ideation: all of my
to options they might not have otherwise found [9]. However, feeds ideas are on pinterest. In Proc CHI, 2014.
can lead people to feel that everyone agrees with their own ideas. [10] N. Lupfer, A. Kerne, A. M. Webb, and R. Linder. Patterns of free-form
Cialdini’s work on social proof shows people change their expec- curation: Visual thinking with web content. In Proceedings of the 2016
tations based on how they see others behave [4]. Algorithms [11] ACM on Multimedia Conference, pp. 12–21. ACM, 2016.
and individuals’ choices to subscribe to narrowly-sourced feeds are [11] C. O’Neil. Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases
both to blame. In order to help people overcome filter bubbles, it is inequality and threatens democracy. Crown Publishing Group (NY),
important offer multiple perspectives. In Blue Link City, different re- 2016.
gions of the spatialized community are shown simultaneously. Users [12] E. D. Ragan, D. A. Bowman, and K. J. Huber. Supporting cognitive pro-
can move across these communities in any path while maintaining cessing with spatial information presentations in virtual environments.
a general sense of their orientation. In this way, we argue spatial Virtual Reality, 16(4):301–314, 2012.
techniques are needed for VR for casual-leisure [5] browsing. [13] P. Singer, F. Flöck, C. Meinhart, E. Zeitfogel, and M. Strohmaier. Evo-
lution of reddit: from the front page of the internet to a self-referential
Use big data techniques to populate VR contextualized social community? In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on
media environments. In our VR application, we used a combination World Wide Web, pp. 517–522. ACM, 2014.
of force-directed layout and interaction to arrange the structure of [14] P. Van Mieghem. Human psychology of common appraisal: The reddit
the city. We did not create the content manually, but relied on big score. Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on, 13(6):1404–1406, 2011.
data methods to populate its content. We believe that linear feeds of [15] A. M. Webb, A. Kerne, R. Linder, N. Lupfer, Y. Qu, K. Keith, M. Car-
social media produce filter bubbles. VR environments can mitigate rasco, and Y. Chen. A free-form medium for curating the digital. In
this problem by contextualizing posts among multiple perspectives. Curating the Digital, pp. 73–87. Springer, 2016.
By design, the structure of Blue Link City juxtaposes content to help [16] M. Woolf. Jupyter notebook + code for reproducing reddit subreddit
encourage more creative [7] and contextualized exploration. graphs. https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit-graph, 2015.

620