  In centralized countries, not only population, media and economic power are
concentrated, but people give more attention to central locations. While this
is not inherently bad, this behavior extends to micro-blogging platforms:
central locations get more attention in terms of information flow. In this
paper we study the effects of an information filtering algorithm that
decentralizes content in such platforms. Particularly, we find that users from
non-central locations were not able to identify the geographical diversity on
timelines generated by the algorithm, which were diverse by construction. To
make users see the inherent diversity, we define a design rationale to approach
this problem, focused on an already known visualization technique: treemaps.
Using interaction data from an "in the wild" deployment of our proposed system,
we find that, even though there are effects of centralization in exploratory
user behavior, the treemap was able to make users see the inherent geographical
diversity of timelines, and engage with user generated content. With these
results in mind, we propose practical actions for micro-blogging platforms to
account for the differences and biased behavior induced by centralization.
