The political effects of X's feed algorithm
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Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm
#2And this is why the price for Twitter was, in the end, remarkably low.
Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm
#3This person is confused. Trump was a well known pussy grabber for decades. Epstein was anything but a secret, it seems, given how many politicians and celebrities and moguls he rubbed elbows with. Jerry stopping by the island for a lemonade and a spot of lunch with his high school aged girls? Yeah.
It comes down to this: you can have visibility into things and yet those in power won’t care whatsoever what you may think. That has always been the case, it is the case now, and will continue to be in the future.
Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm
#4I deleted my account after many years when X recently made the Chronological Feed setting ephemeral, defaulting back to the Algorithmic Feed each time the page is refreshed.
No away I'm going to let that level of outrage-baiting garbage even so much as flash before my eyes.
Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm
#5And this is why the price for Twitter was, in the end, remarkably low.
dark
Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm
#6"We need more funding into open protocols that decentralize algorithmic ownership; open platforms that give users a choice of algorithm and platform provider; and algorithmic transparency across our information ecosystem."
This sounds like a call to separate the aggregation step from the content. Reasonable enough, but does it really address the root cause? Aren't we just as polarized in a world where there are dozens of aggregators into the same data and everyone picks the one that most indulges their specific predilections for engagement, rage, and clicks?
What does "open" really buy you in this space?
Don't get me wrong, I want this figured out too, and maybe this is a helpful first step on the way to other things, but I'm not quite seeing how it plays out.
Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm
#7I don’t know if I buy the explanation that this was due to the feed algorithm. It looks like an artifact of being exposed to X’s current user base instead of their old followers. When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.
So changing your feed to show popular posts on the platform instead of just your friends’ Tweets would be expected to shift someone’s intake toward the average of the platform.
Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm
#8And this is why the price for Twitter was, in the end, remarkably low.
Yeah, this was always the play looking back in hindsight. Like, I didn't get it, "why would you pay that kind of money for a web forum?!" It wasn't the forum that was important, Twitter (for better or worse) has wormed it's way into the fabric of American discourse. He was basically buying the ideological thermostat for the country and turning the dial to the right.
Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm
#9Oh my. Now that X is affecting people's politics (for the better IMO), suddenly people care about the influence of algorithms over politics...
Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm
#10I don’t know if I buy the explanation that this was due to the feed algorithm. It looks like an artifact of being exposed to X’s current user base instead of their old followers. When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. So changing your fee…
Is this the result of a feedback loop from musk joining or did they just accelerate the overall decline of the platform with him joining? Some might say it was going this way even before he picked it up, but it was certainly an inflection point when he joined either way.
All modern social media is pretty toxic to society, so I don't participate. Even HN/Reddit is borderline. Nothing is quite as good as the irc and forum culture of the 2000s where everyone was truly anonymous and almost nobody tied any of their worth to what exchanges they had online.