I changed my to a write-only relationship with social media a couple years ago and I'm building an app called POSSE Party to help others do the same thing https://posseparty.com/
Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
181–190 of 332 posts
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#182Hey, every feed. Let's not pretend HN isn't guilty of it, too.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#183[brought to you by a HN ranking algorithm]
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Books can be propaganda, certainly. However, books promote long attention span. Social media generally removes that aspect and focuses on dopamine hits. It’s hard to condition critical thinking when jumping from one truth sentence to another truth sentence without context.
You can brainwash yourself with some wild sh*t if you spend too long in the wrong heads/books. "Go consume this form-factor because it's better" has always bothered me.
Yeah. Just as an exhibit every radicalized leftist "reading theory". Whoo boy talk about epistemic closure.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#185Hey, every feed. Let's not pretend HN isn't guilty of it, too.
The difference is HN is a community curated feed, not an advertiser and for profit curated feed.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#186I built a small service to get all the RSS feeds of hn posts you interacted with: https://hntorss.com/
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#187Say what you will about Bluesky, but having your follower feed just be people you follow is extremely refreshing.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was definitely influenced to write this by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch. I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work. It's also inten…
>by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch. I get what your advice is about but to add some nuance which didn't cover... you should consider that I learned of Alec's Technology Connections channel 9 years ago because the Youtube algorithm suggested it to me . Why did Youtube do that? It was because I had watched Ben's Applied Science excellent video showing vinyl grooves under an electron microscope:…
> Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
This may also be an artifact of the fact that you are the sort of person who seeks out educational content. I.e. you have a high need for intellectual stimulation. That makes you an outlier among all people who use social media.
Personally I think technical people underestimate the negative impacts of the models that drive the algorithms. We are basically training humans via a reward function that maximizes watch time. We are also heavily correlating errors in knowledge because popular stuff gets boosted so much. Correlated errors are bad for rubustness.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#189I just want an algo where I set the reward function instead of “dwell time and view ads”