I am friends with a lot of religious people and they are rocking technology right now. They use the internet purposefully - eg following rabbis who have a reputation that they found out about from someone in person. It's very old school and kinda cool to see people use technology and feel elevated rather than denigrated by it.
The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
#22I started using RSS. Not so much of the enshittification there. In fact it is sort of like using the web of 20 years ago.
I am all about newsletters and RSS feeds now. The internet is so much nicer. F--k the algorithms.
I run a newsletter for this exact reason. No algorithms. Just straight to the users 5 days a week.
Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
#23Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
#24Our collective (‘free’) doomscrolling comes with an actual cost: we are the product being served.
Reminds me of the last line of R.E.M.’s ‘Radio Song’ (1991)… “Now our children grow up prisoners All their life, radio listeners” https://open.spotify.com/track/5UBeN0XvvIvnEjyp6uThr4?si=V_Q...>
Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
#25The article mentions "Technology Connections titled 'Algorithms Are Breaking How We Think'" I'm a huge fan of the channel, and that video is mostly great and insightful. But his being "puzzled" at the way people use the subscriptions "feed" is kinda surprising. The low percentaged from that feed should lead to asking questions to understand why, instead of assuming people are "doing it wrong". People use subscription…
Some of it has to do with app defaults. When you load up YouTube it doesn’t go to the subscriptions, it goes to the Recommended page. It has enough of the new videos from subscribed channels people watch, plus enough of the new videos from channels they commonly watch without a subscription, that people have no reason to go to the Subscriptions page. Launching from the Subscriptions is an intentional act by people wh…
I have set my history to be deleted for YouTube after just 3 months. This does surface some videos I have already watched but most recommendations are usually more from my subscriptions
Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
#26White Pill: My personal website now gets more traffic than my LinkedIn posts do, and A LOT more traffic than my LinkedIn profile does. The algorithmic black box sites may be good for driving traffic, but that doesn't mean they're good at driving traffic to you.
Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
#27I've been steadily watching my Google traffic plummet as AI overviews continue summarizing my content. My search impressions have remain the same though.
However, RSS! People have literally emailed me to tell me that they are unsubscribing from my newsletter but "Don't worry, I follow you through RSS." My traffic is larger than ever thanks to RSS. I syndicate the full content, not just a summary, yet people still click and visit my tiny blog.
Google traffic, mainstream social media, all of them don't care about my blog. But from time to time, random people send me an email, and that makes up for it.
Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
#28The article mentions "Technology Connections titled 'Algorithms Are Breaking How We Think'" I'm a huge fan of the channel, and that video is mostly great and insightful. But his being "puzzled" at the way people use the subscriptions "feed" is kinda surprising. The low percentaged from that feed should lead to asking questions to understand why, instead of assuming people are "doing it wrong". People use subscription…
I don't want any algorithms, AI or human, curating my default feed. I want my feed to be a chronologically-ordered listing of the content creators I choose to follow and like. If I want to explore the algorithm, that should still be possible, but it shouldn't be the default.
Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
#29I agree with the sentiment, and I do have a blog (of which I'm the only visitor as I don't advertise it). However... for me, the communities come first. I mean I do have a goal in my internet usage, and this goal comes before any principled stands (mostly; there are exceptions). So if, for example, the hobby communities around games and crafts I enjoy form in Facebook, what can I do? Facebook sucks as a platform, but…
> Also, YouTube Premium because I can't stand ads. Yes, I'm aware I'm paying the mafia thugs to leave me alone. It sucks.
uBlock Origin has been able to block 100% of Youtube ads in my experience so far; granted I don't visit Youtube all the time. I also use yt-dlp to download videos so that I can timeshift them and watch them later when I'm not connected to WiFi and yet not burn through my phone data. This also happens to exclude ads, though that's not my primary purpose in using it.
Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
#30I'm not sure "we" traded anything.
Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs.
Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010[1]. And Technology Connections is only a moderately popular channel. If you look at the bigger channels like Mark Rober it is more like 350x.
What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video.
It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people. Nothing stops people from writing blogs today. They'll probably even get roughly the same (small) number of readers that blogs pulled back in 2010.
[1]: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist...