alt Hacker NewsDo not confuse the medium with the method. Recommendation systems are the root of what plagues us. Democracy was born because of the social media of its time. Social media good. Current implementations bad.
I miss chronological feeds.
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I think we want algorithmic feeds, we just want humane ones instead of adversarial ones. Give me a feed that prioritizes close friends and family first, important milestones over trivialities, impactful news over ragebait. Give me a highly curated version of Reddit with HN quality moderation. Most people would be very happy with that, but it runs counter to the advertising incentives and engagement metrics which drive the industry.
I would say that the ability for plausible-looking online personas to infiltrate and influence people's thought processes is the root of what plagues use, and a chronological feed wouldn't fix that!
Optimising for engagement, centralised controls, pervasive data collection and mining, and addictive design need to go as well. Might be easier to ban the entire thing and let us get back to blogs.
Yeah, I agree: social media is great. Commoditized, commercialized social media, not so great.
Never forget, folks: we can all go back to mailman and phpBB, or the modern equivalent, at any point in time. Many of us do! There are still wonderful subject-driven forums out there, not quite inundated by the dreaded "&fbid disease"...
Mailing lists were and are fine. The algorithmic feed took over because it’s more addictive, simple as.
The medium causes the type of message.
The feed is root of the problem.
The feed is an integral part of social media.
We’re allowing them—companies, states, whoever—to feed us individually-targeted generated propaganda.
People claim they want chronological feeds but hardly anyone actually does. With a chronological algorithm that incentivizes users to post slop more often to get noticed. In reality most social media users want priority given to major life events. Like if I haven't logged in to Facebook in a few days I'd prefer to see the announcement that my second cousin in Italy just had a baby prioritized at the top of the feed, ahead of the picture of what my neighbor cooked for lunch.
No, social media categorically bad. Even with no recommendations, it lets insane people form communities. It poisons kids’ minds. Especially with regard to kids, it moves all social discourse to the online space and sort of makes it mandatory that everyone is “opted in” because otherwise you get left out which is social suicide during your formative years. A social media ban is not a panacea though. Smart phones themselves should be banned for anyone under 18.
I agree the world was better with chronological feeds.
But humans prefer to spent more time on enraging/outrageous content.
So in a competitive social media environment - the platform with the most engaging content will win.
When TikTok launched short form Video - instagram’s choice was to copy or lose.
To be honest, I think this is looking for an easy villain to blame to avoid asking the hard questions about social media. I remember when 10-15 years ago everyone was sure the problem was pseudonymity; they said "make people attach their real names to their comments and Greater Internet Fuckwad Syndrome will go away". We mostly lost pseudonymity--Facebook forces real names and a bunch of people on Xitter use them even though they don't need to--and it didn't help one bit: turns out people are perfectly happy to be toxic under their real identity.
"Get rid of algorithmic feeds" strikes me as similarly wishful thinking.
Yes, recommendation systems are (most of) the root.
But chronological feeds don't solve it (plenty of research on this).
Recommender systems that don't optimize for division are a more meaningful solution, ala https://bridging.systems/ (lots of work by others too).
This, e.g., bridging-based ranking, is same approach that underlies Community Notes.