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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

#91

Post by TeMPOraL »

cedws wrote: post #22
ph4evers wrote: post #2

Yes totally! I like Reddit because you can pick your own subreddits but even that can be flooded by ragebait/clickbait

Even so, reddit is a huge echo chamber. The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do. And the upvote system encourages groupthink. Votes being hidden on HN I think is excellent.

> The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do.

That's true of any real community in the physical world, too.

I'd go as far as saying that it's impossible to have fully inclusive and 100% objectively fair community that's also interesting, or even a community. It's not how humans operate, it's not what they want from a community, and even trying to enforce this "perfection" would require infinite resources feeding an omnipresent bureaucracy to moderate perfect order and compliance into people.

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

#93

Post by almogo »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #85
joshdavham wrote: post #81

I think a cool idea for future legislation may be to force social media companies like Youtube, Reddit, Instagram, X and Tiktok to allow users to easily disable machine learning-generated recommendations. LinkedIn already has this feature and it's significantly reduced the amount of rage-inducing influencer hot takes that show up on my feed. You can also turn off your watch history to get far fewer recommendations on…

I find Youtube amazing when you never leave subscriptions page (excluding all clutter such as community posts and short videos), just a list of videos from creators you find entertaining.

And contrawise, if you exclusively watch what "the algorithm" feeds you, you'll find yourself drowning in brainrot fairly quickly.

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

#94

Post by deadbabe »

jahewson wrote: post #87
svara wrote: post #13

Social media has really proven that phrase that "the medium is the message", which I remember long ago thinking was a little odd and not obviously true. With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this: We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasonin…

“The medium is the message” goes both ways though. For social media, the inverse is not just “go read a book” but the far more challenging “go write a book”. That’s just not something I’m going to do. I’m certainly not going to find a publisher, get past the gatekeepers, and find a wide enough audience to make the big chunk of time I had to devote to writing worth it.

Write a book, that doesn’t mean sell and mass market a book.

It’s like keeping a blog on the internet no one reads. Liberating.

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

#95

Post by asadotzler »

mifydev wrote: post #72

I've been thinking about this, to get rid of feeds I need something that will allow me to find posts and videos via related keywords. I want to be able to search for information by myself, but in this time, I need to be able to do it at scale. AI Agents that do research for me is a step in the right direction. Also, I think the platforms would resist this by trying to gatekeep information by all means necessary.

I regularly use Twitter's search function with "latest" reverse chrono results, to follow topics without following people, and it works fine. I have a few bookmarked to save the typing and adjust the searches occasionally to refine them, minusing out some word or person, or adding another term to drill in (see advanced search for a decent set of options.)

My point is, search still works. We don't have to take their feed, or even the feed we create following people. We can just search that shit out. And search results bookmarks in a folder work great for managing that.

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

#96

Post by grumpy-de-sre »

gavmor wrote: post #89
grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recommendation for the EU, please force social media platforms to offer support for custom feed algorithms/plugins. If they don't offer them, ban them from the EU market. Long term, once we figure out how to generate feeds that are aren't socially corrosive dumpster fires. Mandate platforms default to using one of a set of approved models (maybe we need a recommendation engine benchmark that scores social divisivenes…

> 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.

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

#97

Post by linuxhansl »

This!

Turned off "Discover" on my Android phone. Was weird first. I felt like I might miss out on something, some important bit of information. "Sometimes it does show me interested things" I thought. And, true, sometimes I get shown a scientific article that would missed otherwise.

But just like when I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts years back, I did not miss any important event.

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

#98

Post by asadotzler »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #21

There will always be something dictating what you think until you really feel interested in actually thinking yourself and develop a critical and exploratory mindset. The active audience of this website probably is predominantly blessed with having this kind of mindset already but the general population probably lacks any incentive for developing it.

The general population figures out all kinds of complex things and loves it when tech provides solutions to those complexities. Commercials suck and Tivo flew off the shelves in part because of 30 second skip. Half of browser users have an ad blocker. No one was handed these by their Big Tech overlords, they sought them out and used them to fix their "feeds". Give people some credit that if we make good tools available, they'll avail themselves of those. The active audience of this website is probably capable of building some of those. So, get to it instead of lamenting the fall.

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

#99

Post by fph »

lysace wrote: post #31

Reddit is unfortunately a major thing in my life. There's an eternal battle between left and right politics in my small European country's relevant subreddits. Not very healthy - it's like a never ending feed of "someone is wrong on the Internet". For the record: "right" here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party. Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I d…

Browse individual subreddits, in this way you avoid most of 'the algorithm'.

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

#100

Post by visarga »

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #45
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.

Just because before people had a concern and were wrong, doesn't mean if we have the same concern now we'll be wrong again.

I think the opposite, just like we used to tell people to "go read a book", now we'll tell people to "spend some time with an AI" to get cultured. The more AI time the better for your education.
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