alt Hacker News> If you present data by algorithm, you are no longer an impartial common carrier and are liable for the content you present
Hacker News is a site that presents data by algorithm. Under your definition, Hacker News goes away, too.
A more accurate framing would be that they’re going after personalized recommendation algorithms. It’s not obvious that offering a recommendation algorithm would mean that the site is no longer an impartial common carrier.
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It would be a lot better if the user just had more control over the recommendation algorithm, either to replace it with an alternative or tune it. For example, I never want to watch YouTube shorts. Every time I see them, I click "show less often" since it is the only way I can express this preference, and still YouTube shows me them.
Obviously YouTube knows that even among people who do this, they still get good engagement out of YouTube shorts, so they keep showing them, but these users have explicitly asked YouTube to not show them.
It would be like a recovering alcoholic whose landlord comes by every week and leaves free samples of booze, because they get paid by the booze company, even though the alcoholic has asked them to stop.
The algorithm is not personalized. It's the same for every user. No issue there.
> Hacker News is a site that presents data by algorithm
Does it though? I mean by "algorithm" in this context we mean "personalized algorithm meant to maximize engagement and retention".
Not e.g. "sort by upvotes and decay by time" or even "filter content based on coarse user location".
Does HN show me a different front page than everyone else based on which articles I have read or upvoted? That would make me feel worse about the site because I don't want a personalized HN feed I want to read what everyone else is reading (which is incidentally why I refuse to give up linear TV).
> Under your definition, Hacker News goes away, too.
It doesn’t have to go away, just switch to chronological sorting.
Hacker news front page would go away but not new or any top ranking. It would be nice to have a hn without the second chance queue imo.
The difference is you can’t prove that hacker news has a bunch of psychologists on staff who are dreaming up ways to make the website addictive.
If you take TikTok to court and go through discovery you’re going to find internal communications of people talking about ways to get people to stay on the app longer, ways to make the content more addictive, ways to maximize ad reach, etc.
Hacker news just tossed a simple upvote downvote system and called it a day.
Plus it has no endless scroll, no graphics at all, limits your comment frequency, has no push notifications, etc.
Goes away, or is liable for the content promoted to the frontpage under the OP's take?
But I'd agree, that it's personalisation rather than just curation that's the issue.
I think even requiring sites to have a "bring your own algo" version (and where ads are targetted to the algorithm, rather than the person) would cure a lot of ills.
As is, even with something like Spotify where you _are_ paying there's no easy way to "reset" your profile to neutral recommendations