Posted by I thought the Echo Chamber Club was the low-point. …In the end, I was right.
Note: this post was originally put in a draft in 2019. I am publishing it now, incomplete and unedited, five years later to make public the information I gathered when the site was live for the purpose of archiving it.
Preface: In the interest of transparency, the following post is written exactly as I originally intended in the format of a review. While it has been heavily edited for clarity, the overall structure remains the same. When drafting, I often write in a “running commentary” in the Overview as I go through the tool or website, commentary I quickly cut in the first revision. I have decided to include some of the original “running commentary in this review for reasons that should become clear.
Background:
Outside Your Bubble” a feature by Buzzfeed that appeared at the bottom of some popular news articles as a module that offered the option of seeing what people on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. were saying about the article. Buzzfeed described the feature as “an attempt to give our audience a glimpse at what’s happening outside their own social media spaces;” “a response to the reality that often the same story will have two or three… conversations…around it on social media, where people talk to the like-minded without even being aware of other perspectives on the same reporting (“Helping You See Outside Your Bubble”)
Overview
One screen option shows a set of different perspectives on the same issue — in this case, Twitter’s declaration that they would crack down on abusers on their site.
You can then see a screen with a short summary of a social media post and the text of the post itself underneath
To use it, the introductory Buzzfeed article just “scroll down to the bottom of this article” and hyperlink the article, which turns out to be the article on Twitter cracking down on abusers. Scroll down to the bottom and you will see this box
Again. Then click on a particular tab and you can scroll through different opinions.
What immediately becomes clear as I went through this demo that it doesn’t matter what tab click. Every tab leads back to the exact same six or so social media posts. This is bad design. Every tab or button on a application has to justify its existence by performing a task that no other tab or button can do. Otherwise, this can annoy the user because it takes up time to figure this out (even if only seconds) and feels like a cheap trick to pretend your app does more than it actually does.
I apologize for putting this evaluative content so early in the review but it must be said in case any of you do want to try this tool and become frustrated at this point. I promise it is not just you!
In fact, this is such bad design I was surprised Buzzfeed would release it even as beta version and went back to see how far away publication was from these beta release.
EDIT FROM VERSION FROM THIS DRAFT AFTER I GAVE UP TRYING TO WRITE A REVIEW.Design suggestion: If each tab shows the same thing, then would it not be better to have a single tab labeled “Scroll” or “Take a Look” above the summaries? The other option would be to have each tab refer to a different node within a topic. For example, each tab could lead to a different social media platform. Or algorithmically calculate which networks of users are more likely to interpret a political article. If they did that it would, ironically, be taking advantage of the very filter bubbles they are trying to undo but that’s frankly inevitable anyway. Sentiment analysis is a fickle mistress indeed (believe me I know) but it’s not like it’s impossible.
BACK TO ORIGINAL FORMAT
In order to find instructions on how to use the app to look at more than these five Tweets on more than just the one demo article, I clicked through _______. The only other article I found was in a January 2018 follow-up, The Next Step for Outside Your Bubble.
This paragraph contains the link to see examples of the function added to dozens of Buzzfeed’s most popular sources. EDIT FROM ORIGINAL DRAFT REVIEW: I appreciate that Buzzfeed did not exempt themselves from their own experiment and let their readers see what people were saying about the article on social media on some of their top articles. BACK TO ORIGINAL OVERVIEW: Click on the link and you will see this interface:
These do not seem what one would expect to be Buzzfeed’s more popular articles, but I do not know anything about Buzzfeed aside from the fact they steal Tumblr gifs.
Click on the top story and scroll to the bottom of the page, as instructed.
Okay what the fuck let’s pause the Overview right here what am I missing?
Later: wait after running through the links again, I clicked on this same article and caught this when scrolling up:
This was followed by a few paragraphs on how the writer struggled with depression and mood disorders. I have not reproduced these paragraphs because it may be triggering to some readers and I feel weird bringing up the person’s mental health recovery story in what is now transitioning into a really bad review. To confirm my suspicions, I clicked the next story on the 15 Top Inspirational quotes or whatever. Guess what was under #15 on the list was?
Wait, so the link leads to pages that mention Outside Your Bubble or appear on the Outside Your Bubble Facebook group?
Let’s go back to the link on this page:
DID NOT LINK TO DOZENS OF THEIR MOST READ STORIES.
Why would you hyperlink “dozens of our most-read stories” with what are clearly not your most read stories? And why would you say that your goal is to “inform readers about the larger conversation happening around a story” when your push is to draw readers into a particular social media space. I mean if that’s where you are focusing your energy okay but you can’t act like you are adding a sense of transparency and hope that people just don’t click the link or investigate the articles.
Also that is such bad webpage design like chill.
These same (three? Four? Articles) all linked to each other.
None of these ever provided the actual function. The common end of this was that
All Roads Lead to the Facebook Page
The ultimate traffic guide lead to the Facebook fan page of the _______.
Review:
Can’t give a bad review to a tool that don’t exist.
I am not going to pretend I was not really mad at first. Like mad. Not simply critical or harsh, like, this
PoliTech 