alt Hacker NewsPeople 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.
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You know you can talk to your relatives, right? If Facebook is your only source for whether your second cousin had a baby, maybe they’re not that important in your life. Which is fine - not everyone can be. But I think Facebook is a way of keeping up with people that you’re barely friends with, and maybe that’s not necessary.
I think what we want are relatively dumb algorithms, ideally open source and tweakable by the user (e.g. select chronological or prioritised).
I suppose you could build a scraper to do it but a platform like Facebook take steps to make it difficult. Maybe we're almost at the stage where a personalised AI assistant could parse your feed on the fly and reconstruct it into something user-friendly (a much smarter algorithm to build a dumber one!)
I'd like to have the old social media back, but then again it depends if anyone is still posting content.