I also hate the way “algorithm” has taken over the public consciousness. You can find people unironically saying “I don’t want any algorithm in my social media feed”, which is a nonsensical statement.
I think it’s the same concept as when people say that they don’t want any chemicals in their food. You know what they mean, but in a technical sense the statement is nonsensical.
People are onto something though - there’s been a noticeable shift from social media just showing you your feed in a chronological manner to it showing you personally tailored content that shuffles on each refresh and aims to hook you into endless doomscrolling. I understand perfectly well what’s an algorithm, but good luck explaining to people that it’s not that specific thing.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way. I’m not sure if they are immune to doomscrolling and actually have gotten it to work in a way that serves them and doesn’t involve doomscrolling, or if they are doomscrolling and okay with it. But for me, I really wish I could go back to the chronological feed era.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.
Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.
One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?
It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.
Letting the user decide? If the user decided that they liked fly fishing 8 stars and mother-in-law 0 stars, then the algorithm would show mother-in-law once a week at best and fly fishing 8x out of 10 posts.
When I started using Odysee instead of YouTube, my page was full of “women vs men”, woke culture and onlyfans-esque videos.
I realised, subscribing to a creator actually made a big difference in this case, to get them on you page, because it’s not a feed (controlled by an algo), but a simple, categorised list, with the “Following” on top.
In contrast to that, the YouTube’s algorithm tended to create relations between videos (using who knows how many criteria) and showed them along with videos from the subscribed and more-often-viewed channels.
It used to show some pretty useful results and it would be a crime for me to downplay its usefulness.
Sadly, by the time I left YouTube, it had started putting the doomscroll content on my page, which is probably another reason for why I stopped using it.
I would call it: Another great mechanism, ruined by capitalism.
Other day me and my mom was talking about how TV has all shifted to be nothing but reality TV… and then she said even youtube is becoming the same way… im like uh… thats because thats because you are watching it thus it is giving you more…
I also hate the way “algorithm” has taken over the public consciousness. You can find people unironically saying “I don’t want any algorithm in my social media feed”, which is a nonsensical statement.
Depends how broad your definition of algorithm is. Is sort by upvotes an algorithm? I say no but sort by hot is.
So it is possible by this definition to have a feed without any algorithm.
I think it’s the same concept as when people say that they don’t want any chemicals in their food. You know what they mean, but in a technical sense the statement is nonsensical.
Yeah, I don’t like that one, either.
People are onto something though - there’s been a noticeable shift from social media just showing you your feed in a chronological manner to it showing you personally tailored content that shuffles on each refresh and aims to hook you into endless doomscrolling. I understand perfectly well what’s an algorithm, but good luck explaining to people that it’s not that specific thing.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way. I’m not sure if they are immune to doomscrolling and actually have gotten it to work in a way that serves them and doesn’t involve doomscrolling, or if they are doomscrolling and okay with it. But for me, I really wish I could go back to the chronological feed era.
Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.
One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?
It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.
Letting the user decide? If the user decided that they liked fly fishing 8 stars and mother-in-law 0 stars, then the algorithm would show mother-in-law once a week at best and fly fishing 8x out of 10 posts.
Losing content of one poster and getting double content of others isn’t a solution though.
It tends to be hit or miss.
When I started using Odysee instead of YouTube, my page was full of “women vs men”, woke culture and onlyfans-esque videos.
I realised, subscribing to a creator actually made a big difference in this case, to get them on you page, because it’s not a feed (controlled by an algo), but a simple, categorised list, with the “Following” on top.
In contrast to that, the YouTube’s algorithm tended to create relations between videos (using who knows how many criteria) and showed them along with videos from the subscribed and more-often-viewed channels. It used to show some pretty useful results and it would be a crime for me to downplay its usefulness.
Sadly, by the time I left YouTube, it had started putting the doomscroll content on my page, which is probably another reason for why I stopped using it.
I would call it: Another great mechanism, ruined by capitalism.
Other day me and my mom was talking about how TV has all shifted to be nothing but reality TV… and then she said even youtube is becoming the same way… im like uh… thats because thats because you are watching it thus it is giving you more…
So what should we call the thing that we don’t want in our social media feeds that controls what we see?
Engagement based personalized recommendations.
Catchy. Can’t imagine why “algorithm” caught on instead.
Manipulation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system
Jazz hands.
An algorhythm
Let’s not tell them that by definition both a shopping list and a recipe are algorithms.
Isn’t a shopping list more like a data structure? A recipe would be an algorithm. I don’t know, I could be wrong.
Can you put some milk on the algorithm please?
Dont’ worry, the kids will learn about real algorythms when they grow up