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The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

tekhne.dev

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Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#31

Post by startupsfail »

xyzelement wrote: post #21

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.

This is great to hear. Churches are often in the prime real estate areas, it'd be great, if the attendance / donations would fall to zero. And if these places would be redeveloped into open-for-all urban green islands. Rather than exclusive worship clubs.

Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#32

Post by whycome »

LocalH wrote: post #28
whycome wrote: post #10

The 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.

That's what the subscriptions feed is. But in practice (when one subscribes to a lot of creators) it isn't always useful.

Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#33

Post by HeavenFox »

whycome wrote: post #10

The 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…

Yeah I don't understand why all YouTubers seem to despise "the algorithm", and some of the creators I follow even created their own rival, Nebula, that does not have "the algorithm". Without "the algorithm" I wouldn't find out about your channel in the first place!

Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#34

Post by foobar1962 »

The "old" internet still exists and is alive and well on what I'll call "single issue" web based forums. Photo.net is still here, as are similar groups for cars, bikes, and rabbit holes I have yet to break my ankle in.

Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. That changes the dynamic IMHO. People post to seek answers to their questions, or to share their knowledge and answer other people's questions. This is the way.

I'd include HN in this group of ye olde internet forums. It does have a mechanism to vote, but it's different and the expectation of the readers are brutal to frivolous posts (of which I have made only couple and paid for dearly).

Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#35

Post by whycome »

gobdovan wrote: post #17
whycome wrote: post #10

The 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 think avoiding algorithms completely is tricky. Even things like podcast guests or suggestions from friends feel as manipulable but in a human way. What works for me is checking if people I respect in a domain also blog or link elsewhere. That is how I found Peter Norvig's blog... or maybe it was on hacker news.

Veritasium is another popular creator that would overlap with the HN audience. It deliberately uses different thumbnails and titles when videos are new. It's a human (afaik) using the A/B suggestions in the back end. So it's like a second degree AI manipulation.

Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#36

Post by jrowen »

We used to use our curiosity to find stuff we liked, which felt more satisfying than any algorithm's statistically-determined aggregation.

Today's kids will still do that, in their own way. I'm not convinced there's anything here other than old man and cloud. We did it our way, in our time. I don't think this generation is actually for-reals-this-time the one where technology finally neutered human curiosity and wrecked it all.

In the days you speak of the internet was the frontier for the curious and early adopters. The rest of the world caught up and now it's a fully commodified and industrialized space. Nostalgically trying to recreate the early internet isn't the way forward. I don't know what is but I know the kids will find it.

Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#37

Post by chongli »

LocalH wrote: post #28
whycome wrote: post #10

The 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.

You say that, but then you probably won’t like it when it happens. Some creators post way more than others. Low frequency posters tend to get swept away by the current.

Some of my favourite YouTube channels post very infrequently (one video every few months) whereas others post every single day. The YouTube algorithm seems to know this and pins the low frequency guys’ new videos right to the top when they come out.

Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#38

Post by mh- »

xbmcuser wrote: post #25
al_borland wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wouldn't sweat it. I've let it keep my watch history since they launched the feature, and it still puts reruns in my recommended feed all the time.

Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#39

Post by rmunn »

rmunn wrote: post #29
the_af wrote: post #19

I 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 happ…

BTW, I'm aware that yt-dlp is against Youtube's terms of service, but in America, the right to timeshift a broadcast was well-established in the days of VCRs by multiple court precedents. It has never been tested in court whether that right would also apply to Youtube and downloading videos from Youtube for the purpose of timeshifting, but IMHO it would apply, so I'm doing it.

Also, while Youtube claims that adblockers are also against their Terms of Service, if you actually go read https://www.youtube.com/t/terms you'll see that their claim is not supported by the actual language of their ToS. They forbid you to "access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content" without their express permission. But adblocking is not altering the Content of the service, it's blocking certain videos while letting other videos through. If there was a service that detected "here's a word from our sponsors" parts of the video and removed them, that would be altering Content. But the ads are not part of any given video, rather they're external videos inserted at certain points into the video you're watching. Selectively blocking video A while watching video B is not forbidden by any part of Youtube's Terms of Service.

So go ahead and use uBlock Origin with a clear conscience, unless you can find the part of their Terms of Service that actually forbids blocking certain videos while letting others through.

Re: The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

#40

Post by jchw »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #30

I'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 th…

> Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010

That's what's kind of insane, community forums took maybe 20-30 people to feel "active", but you can't get a big enough slice of attention from that many people to actually use forums, even though the Internet has grown massively. Discovery is really hard: it used to be that community websites were able to claw their way up Page Rank, but these days it's just hard to compete with major websites and SEO slop. Even if you manage to snag a few people, they are very likely to drop off quicker, and the "feel" is a lot different when they're all social-media-brained anyway. The proof is in the pudding: most forums are dead, and forums that are still alive are mostly ancient and very obviously less influential and smaller than they once were. People are too distracted by things that actively claw away attention, and people who are drawn in by social media tend to bring a bad kind of energy to traditional forums anyways.

It is true that you have bigger audiences nowadays with modern social media. Part of that is just the fact that the Internet is bigger (somewhere between 2x to 3x bigger) but another major part of that is the consolidation. Though, it's also worth noting that comparing YouTube subscribers to blog readers may not give the best representation. Entirely different concepts, for entirely different media.

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