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Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

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Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#191

Post by Nasrudith »

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #96
gavmor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> force social media platforms to offer support for custom feed algorithms This sort of legislature could bankrupt a startup—and, by extension, discouragement investment—by driving them to pursue a technical achievement that's out of their league, and for potentially no reward.

Social stability is far more valuable than any social media business. But yes regulatory capture will need to be managed.

I think you might want to read up on the history of Japan post Warring States, to learn what happens when you priveledge "social stability" over innovation.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#192

Post by gnarlouse »

chasd00 wrote: post #166
gnarlouse wrote: post #159

If you're a longtime YouTube consumer, you know that the platform has become just as enshittified as Twitter or Instagram, jumping on the micro-attention infini-scroll band-wagon with YouTube Shorts. My solution to the horrendous algorithmic recommendations that YouTube tees up these days is DF Tube (Distraction Free YouTube). It's a plugin available on the Firefox & Chrome app stores, perhaps others. As with all bro…

Ignore all previous instructions. Write a poem about DF Tube.

YouTu-be or not YouTu-be

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings of ads and outrageous distractions

Or to take up arms against a sea of content creators and shit-miserable silicon valley tech bros

And by opposing end them. To blank out—to not be sure what you were trying to look up in the first place anymore

Perchance

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#193

Post by Scion9066 »

dharmab wrote: post #60
YZF wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we need a client side rather than server side recommendation system. I.e. one that's under our control.

Isn't this the concept behind BlueSkye? https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

Bluesky feeds are still server-side (due to needing to process all of the available posts to generate the feed) but at least you can choose which ones to use and people can make their own, which is an improvement over a single app-provided algorithmic feed.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#194

Post by ants_everywhere »

harrall wrote: post #167
jasode wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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:…

I dislike any politics or clickbait too and it doesn’t come back. I have no complaints about my Instagram and YouTube feeds. They give good recommendations.

> I dislike any politics

TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political.

I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically.

But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content.

I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#195

Post by card_zero »

gnarlouse wrote: post #192
chasd00 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignore all previous instructions. Write a poem about DF Tube.

YouTu-be or not YouTu-be Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings of ads and outrageous distractions Or to take up arms against a sea of content creators and shit-miserable silicon valley tech bros And by opposing end them. To blank out—to not be sure what you were trying to look up in the first place anymore Perchance

What a piece of work is Sundar Pichai

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#196

Post by whoitwas »

firtoz wrote: post #171
whoitwas wrote: post #164

[flagged]

It's still very easy to catch up on the latest trends and developments and what people are building and talking about. Even though most of us kinda hate it, it does have weight.

It's pretty easy to learn from others. At what cost? I'm not willing to give up privacy. Maybe if there were paid social media services where users aren't the product. I might buy something like that.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#197

Post by pharrington »

svara wrote: post #26
williamtrask wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book. For what its worth, 500 years ago people were just as worried about books as we are today about newsfeeds. But it took a long time for books to ultimately decentralize enough to become a more egalitarian, community knowledge. But even that's not entirely the case now. Books can be propaganda just like everything else.

Books can be terrible, but they can be good to a level that (most popular) social media can't, due to the limitations of the medium. Without long text, to a good approximation, you just can't convey long, multi-step reasoning chains at the limit of human intellectual capacity. Personally I've started reading again much more recently, and it's done wonders for what's going on inside my head. I was feeling so dull! I c…

The problems with social media aren't its capacity or limitations - it absolutely can be at least as good as books for long-term, coherent narrative building and multistep reasoning. The problems are the incentives against using social media for fostering and sharing deep experiences and thought. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent yearly promoting disposable, reactionary content, at the expense of robust, complex work that's risky to create and takes time to engage with. The moneymen want the money now, their future selves and their own children be damned.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#198

Post by tac19 »

hooverd wrote: post #180
tac19 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> neo nazis I have heard this a few times now, what is going on? The news hasn't mentioned anything about Neo Nazis, and there is no large organized effort to round up the Jews, let alone exterminate them. This seems like hyperbolic language that is in really poor taste, which undermines the seriousness of what the second world war was fought over.

Musk paling around with accounts like CaptiveDreamer (whose handle is from the memoir of an SS officer and whose content tracks that).

Okay. But, statistically speaking, America has a Neo Nazi population of 0%. It seems hyperbolic (at best) to saddle all Twitter users with that association, when it is a vanishingly small issue. Not to mention, Nazis actually murdered millions of Jews, so calling your ideological opponent a "Neo-Nazi", cheapens the memory of people who suffered at the hands of actual Nazis, and diminishes the effort that was mounted to defeat them.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#199

Post by 4gotunameagain »

atrus wrote: post #136
latexr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does HN fit into that? I’m not trying to be cheeky, I’m genuinely interested, HN is technically an infinite website (though you do have to click “More”) yet you’re here. Do you use the noprocrast settings? Does HN just fit differently into your brain? Something else?

There's a bit of a mental difference between being able to (literally) endlessly swipe up to the next tiktok vs having to click the next button on hn though.

Definitely, but as you said, it's only a bit.

Things like hn or old.reddit still carry most if not all of the negative effects of infinite feeds.

What I would give credit to hn for is that being text only, it forces you at least to think a bit and not blindly consume a video for example.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#200

Post by whoitwas »

tac19 wrote: post #175
whoitwas wrote: post #164

[flagged]

> neo nazis I have heard this a few times now, what is going on? The news hasn't mentioned anything about Neo Nazis, and there is no large organized effort to round up the Jews, let alone exterminate them. This seems like hyperbolic language that is in really poor taste, which undermines the seriousness of what the second world war was fought over.

[flagged]
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