You may have witnessed feedback in a concert or when your speaker output in a live chat feeds back into your microphone input. A high pitched noise slowly gets louder, then raises exponentially until someone pulls the plug and suddenly a breakdown of signal strength occurs.
You have experienced a bubble.
Being a designer of digital filters, I want to raise awareness of how destructive these bubbles may be to democracy and diversity of opinions - contributing to instability and irrationality.
Stockmarkets, search ranking algos, facebook likes, reddit/mastodon upvoting, opinion polls, “news” in general - all have their respective feedback channels built in.
Feedback is established when past voting results (or price feeds) are visible to those voting in the future.
This may seem benign. It is not. It creates a exponential response. It risks getting chaotic and tends toward bifurcations/splitting. The complexity of not one but many such feedback channels will be explored next.
Social engineering
The net effect of feedback mechanisms in social networks is that the already predominant opinion - which is by necessity the opinion of those with the highest range of influence - is magnified at the expense of minority opinions.
Feedback in social networks thus discourages healthy diversity until critical times when a bubble bursts. In such crisis meaningful learning is unlikely due to shock and trance and society resumes where it left off before the bubble, repeating old errors.
It is ironic that communities dedicated to change use social networks (software) engineered to work against them by incorporating feedback channels exponentially amplifying mainstream views. [2]
Here is an example of reddit circuit braking (sic!) a feedback loop by hiding vote history:
Easy to do, if you know what you are doing. Such protection is used selectively so that some minorities have to fight constant uphill battles and shit storms making it hard to get any society wide traction.
[1] Why stock markets crash by Sornette D. (z-lib.org)
[2] “Herd mentality (also called mob mentality or pack mentality) describes how people can be influenced by the majority.” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Herd_mentality&oldid=1205068418 cit 7 ; Taylor S.J. “Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment” cit 8 ; Chang, K. “‘Like’ This Article Online? Your Friends Will Probably Approve, Too, Scientists Say”