11–20 of 225 posts
The shock people experience when you tell them any sorting, especially sorting chronologically, requires an "algorithm" is disappointing.
You may as well tell them tomatoes are actually a fruit.
The shock people experience when you tell them any sorting, especially sorting chronologically, requires an "algorithm" is disappointing.
The shock people experience when you tell them any sorting, especially sorting chronologically, requires an "algorithm" is disappointing.
If you wanted to give the social media companies the benefit of the doubt, you would say "they just want to have a feed that the user enjoys and the best metric they have to tune their algorithm is is engagement". If you didn't want to give them the benefit of the doubt, you might say "They want to surface a feed that keeps you hooked so they make the most money on ads, so they use the metric of engagement".
I also completely agree with Tim that a marketplace of algorithms is the best way to solve this problem. If users can choose their algorithm, they can choose between the "sugar high" content that is optimized to maximize engagement and time-on-platform if thats what they want. If they'd rather choose one that maximizes for other metrics, they are free to do so. Examples of metrics that a given user might prefer: "A monthly survey that the user fills out that asks how good the recommendations are" or "a daily survey asking questions related to mood/mental health/etc".
Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors. That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the…
https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...
The tl;dr is that if you actually want to move toward a society of free and equal human beings and eliminate oppression, "free speech for all" is not how you go about it. One side of the political spectrum supports equality and emancipation, the other is opposed to it. Therefore the speech of one side must be tolerated and supported; the speech of the other must be squelched and restricted.
The internet has had its time to experiment with free speech for all, and now we have Nazis. Social media companies saw greater value in muzzling the Nazis than they did in hewing to outdated libertarian internet values.
People also want heroin and we use literal impact on society to curtail use. Freedom of reach is what we’re talking about limiting; right and left seem to both demand they have access to my beliefs, and leverage big corp as a tool to hide their political agenda to that effect as government social programs are accountable to public oversight.
I mean I’m pretty much convinced at this point human languages lack the nuance to make any conclusions of sound logic at this point except in contexts they came up in; Anglo social norms. The correctness of a colloquialism comes along with a command to use it in a certain emotional way.
We’re just engaged in spiraling emotional pettiness; how dare you offend thy sensibilities, good sir!
Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors. That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the…
Read Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" to see why this is the case: https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr... The tl;dr is that if you actually want to move toward a society of free and equal human beings and eliminate oppression, "free speech for all" is not how you go about it. One side of the political spectrum supports equality and emancipation, the other is opposed to it. Therefore the speec…
> Therefore the speech of one side must be tolerated and supported; the speech of the other must be squelched and restricted.
This is actually how you get Nazis. You know, the real ones that existed before the internet. Not 4chan weebs trolling boomers online, but the ones that would jail or kill you for having the wrong opinion or wrong affiliation.
Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors. That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the…
Read Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" to see why this is the case: https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr... The tl;dr is that if you actually want to move toward a society of free and equal human beings and eliminate oppression, "free speech for all" is not how you go about it. One side of the political spectrum supports equality and emancipation, the other is opposed to it. Therefore the speec…
I believe this to be based on a faulty assumption: people do what they want. While it may be true that at the reptile-brain level we do want what the Algorithm feeds us, that statement is equivalent to saying that someone who is addicted to opiates wants to feed their addition. It's only true at the most shallow of levels.
The article at large seems to realize that, but I think what is needed is to distinguish "want" as what we as rats in the Skinner box want and "want" as what we humans who do not wish to be prey to that Skinner box. That is the promise of platforms without the Algorithm, just that it wont try to take advantage of users.
(As a side note, I am an advocate for using capital 'A' the Algorithm to refer to the content-aware, black-box recommendation engines that run social media sites. That let's us continue to talk about lowercase 'a' algorithm to refer to sorting and such)