# Reading Responses (set 2)
## Algorithmic discrimination
"Everyone loves a good deal". However, how do you know the deal you are seeing, really is a good deal? Well if you are buying online, it is likely that you won't know. As explained by [Christo Wilson](https://cbw.sh/) in his [*Measuring Price Discrimination and Steering on E-commerce Web Sites*](http://personalization.ccs.neu.edu/Projects/PriceDiscrimination/) paper, most websites will go through different factors, cookies for example, before giving you a price when you desire to buy something online. On the other hand, Wilson writes about how a member of a booking website might be able to book a hotel room at a lower price than a non-member. In my opinion, this is normal if a person is a member on a website it is likely that they will return to the same website more often, therefore it seems normal that they have more benefits than non-members of the website. Many businesses do that, a good example of that are airlines. If you are a member of an airline's loyalty program, then you will likely find a cheaper ticket, or even have complimentary upgrades.

What [Fiona Rutherford](https://www.buzzfeed.com/fionarutherford) and [Alan White](https://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite) wrote about in their [*This Is Why Some People Think Google's Results Are "Racist"*](https://www.buzzfeed.com/fionarutherford/heres-why-some-people-think-googles-results-are-racist) is in my opinion very interesting because it describes a phenomenon that is not made on purpose by Google or any search engines, but is just the fault of the algorithm. If a photo is on many different websites, it is likely that it would show up first on the Google search engine when you type a keyword that is related to it. This is why Burai said that she did not know what Google could do about it because society creates google in a way. Therefore people would need to change their mindset in order to change Google's search results.

## Haters
As explained by [Joseph Reagle](https://reagle.org/joseph/), in the [*3QS: How To Tame The Twitter Haters*](https://news.northeastern.edu/2016/07/25/3qs-how-to-tame-the-twitter-haters/) interview, people on [Twitter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter) hate on others without being anonymous. Which in my opinion is nothing new. People have always gathered together and hate on others. For example, [Ku Klux Klan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan) members have had secret meetings where they could hate on people of color. In my opinion, they feel that they can hate freely on others because they have a community that agrees with their views. Twitter works in a similar way, it is likely that most of your followers agree with what you are tweeting. Therefore if you tweet something it is likely that your followers will back you up. So, when someone tweets something hateful, even under their real name, their followers will back them up. This, unfortunately, can lead to an [echo-chamber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)) where people are surrounded with others who have the same views and opinion, and therefore increase their beliefs in that very subject. This is how I think people join groups that promote hate speech, they do not realize it, they are just stuck in an echo chamber and their opinion on a certain subject increases significantly.

## Shaped
The less you share the better. This is can be true, especially online. In [*Reading the comments*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_the_Comments), [Joseph Reagle](https://reagle.org/joseph/) talks about a young boy who suffered from harassment at school after his coming out. Thankfully he managed to find help online where a lot of people supported him and sent him nice messages. He said that this helped him to overcome all the bullying he suffered in real life. On the other hand, this is not always the case. When expressing feelings online, people can also have bad intentions and instead of helping others, they might judge them and [cyberbully](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberbullying) them.
In my opinion, posting about personal issues online when looking for support from others is great. Yet, one should not share their intimate issues on any platform. For example, I do not think [Twitter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter) would be a great social media for someone to talk about their coming out, since it is known for having users who have a history of cyberbullying. I would tend to think that for a matter like this, someone should go to certain online forums, where they could exchange with other people who have been through the same thing, and where cyberbullying is moderated.

## Collapsed context
"[Twitter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter) is basically just you having a conversation with yourself hoping that someone else will join in". This comes from a tweet published by the parodic account of Bill Murray ([@BillMurray](https://twitter.com/BiIIMurray?lang=en)). Which in my opinion, I find accurate and ironic at the same time. Most "basic" users of Twitter crave for followers, but just tweet about their day to day lives. Of course there are some accounts that are posting important news, or important personalities that often tweets interesting things etc... Yet, 99% of Twitter users only use it to tweet meaningless things. As [Alice Marwick](http://www.tiara.org/) and [danah boyd](http://www.danah.org/) wrote in their research paper, [*I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience*](http://www.tiara.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Marwick_boyd_TweetHonestly.pdf), "Twitter is a medium, like telephony or email, that can be used for many different purposes:". This is why in my opinion Twitter is a great social network. Because on the same timeline you can find memes, funny posts, important news, updates about the people you are interested in. Most importantly, news are often on Twitter before being shared on mainstream media, since a tweet just takes a few seconds to be written and shared and that there is no need for a great layout, unlike an online newspaper.

## Pushback
Haters gonna hate. This is a sentence that is often found in online comment sections, often just below a negative comment. In my opinion, the "never read the comments" necklace that is described in [Joseph Reagle](https://reagle.org/joseph/)'s book, [Reading the Comments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_the_Comments), is somewhat true. I cannot remember the last time, if ever, I wrote a comment online about something that I was satisfied of. I usually write comments when I need to complain, for examples when I use [Uber Eats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_Eats), I only write reviews when something is wrong and never when something is great. This is why, I believe, that reading the comments can be sometimes bad, because it is most likely that people will use comments to give negative feedback because they feel the urge to complain. This takes me to the article written by [Ricardo Gomez](https://gomez.ischool.uw.edu/) and [Stacey Morrison](http://www.slmorrison.com/), in which they talk about *Pushback* from the digital world. I think that this has a reason to do with that a great part of the comments in the digital world are filled with negativity, and this is likely to reflect on people's mood in the real world.