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".
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)
Capital A Algorithms maximizing engagement are very much on the "wanting" side. Firing off an angry response to a political opponent's belittling post is rarely ever really /enjoyable/.
The moderation is very strict so the ragebait is limited to people ruining (cheap) wedding dresses with colored soap and screwing toilet-seats to the trunks of junked cars, or whatever. A vast flood of videos that only exist because anybody watching them will be disappointed and angry.
If the TikTok mod team slacked up for a second you'd see nothing but culture-war political ragebait and hate speech. It hovers on the edge even now.
As an example, one person posted that they were working on end-to-end encrypted messages. That was really cool, nearly instant follow. This person identifies as a furry and posts a lot more content related to their furry identity than E2E encrypted messages. I'm not really into the furry scene, even as a spectator. Nothing against this person - I'm happy they can be who they are. I just wish there was a way that I could tune into the once in a while updates about the tech project without the part that is of no interest to me. That person may be equally annoyed with my feed if I posted regular updates of my love for mac n cheese.
Importantly, the +1/-1 that I give should be used only for my feed with no feedback to the poser. My -1 does not mean I disapprove and I certainly don't want it to hurt anyone. I don't want it to influence others' feed. A -1 needn't mean that I never see something like that, but a "hell no" should.
Such a system would allow me to follow more people and be exposed to different ideas that come from more exposure. It's then up to me to tune my feed to match my interests and available time.
When you upvote content (+1) you make your connection stronger to those who posted that content and also those who also upvoted it. When you downvote (-1), your connection to the poster and other upvoters becomes weaker. The content in your feed is ranked base on how strongly you are connected to those who upvoted the content.
For example, I upvoted the OP post on LinkLonk: https://linklonk.com/item/3406294698351951872. If you upvote that item then you will get connected to me and to two RSS feeds that posted that content: the blog's feed (https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom) and the the HN's feed of newest items (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss). As a result you will start to see other content from those RSS feeds and from my "main" channel more prominently in your recommendations.
Users can post/submit links under different user channels. So if your hypothetical E2E person were to post E2E stuff under their "E2E" channel while keeping the furry stuff under their "furry" channel then you would only get connected to their E2E channels if you only +1'd content from that channel.
It's amazing how many technologists have a strong preference for truth in so many areas, but choose not understanding things they find disgusting and why they find them disgusting.
By being able to declutter my feed of things I don’t find interesting, I am likely to follow more people and hashtags, exposing me to more voices. With some effort and luck that includes more diverse voices.
Alternatively, I could just not follow people that have a low signal to noise ratio (per my interests) and I could block or mute those that frequently post uninteresting things to hashtags that I follow. I think this approach exposes me to less diversity.
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 US. People aren't saying, "protect me from what I want" -- they are saying, "protect others from what they want, but leave me alone." Which is, of course, entirely hypocritical.
FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality.
"quality" here meaning accuracy of the targeting, not a comment on the content.
But I think the reason they push against this is that is risks people losing interest as the sort of people I follow aren't strong/consistent content creators. They're just people I know personally and want to stay in touch with. Twitter wants to be a firehose of stuff that fires me up. Instagram wants to be endless TV channels of constant content. Whereas I like being able to get up to date on everything my friends have posted, and then go back to what I was doing.
And they aren't totally wrong? I have a qanon-er in my family; she's carefully curated her media sources to guarantee a pure, steady stream of nutjob garbage. The thing is, censoring twitter/facebook/youtube makes no difference - these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look. At least on youtube there's a chance the algorithm will show some non-bullshit.
I don't know what "the answer" to any of this is, but I suspect we all need to be a bit more tolerant of online stupidity.
Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame. It's incredibly easy to like/dislike/hide-like-this content. My feeds are fantastic. I suspect the people complaining about their feeds actually like garbage and even more so like to complain.
But the news media suffer from a huge punditry to hard facts ratio problem.
Today's first-screen news stories on major outlets that didn't begin as a press release or punditry:
* Fox: "Remains of missing toddler Quinton Simon found in landfill, mother charged"
* Washington Post: "Covid deaths skew older, reviving questions about ‘acceptable loss’"
* New York Times: "Antiwar Activists Who Flee Russia Find Detention, Not Freedom, in the U.S." "Exhumed Grave Near Kherson Shows Occupation’s Brutality"
* New York Post: nothing.
* Reuters: "Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano erupts for first time in nearly 40 years".
* The Times (of London): nothing, because they have such large ads and banners that the content is hidden.
* South China Morning Post: nothing, again mostly because of oversized banners.
* Le Monde: "The unflinching gaze of Ukrainian drones in Bakhmut"
* CNN: multiple stories, because the first screen has many headline links and small banners.
Some of this is optimizing the use of screen space for revenue, not information.
I have the completely un-researched and un-backed opinion that Twitter changing its prompt from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" in 2009 has had an unappreciated, oversized negative affect on the world.
My timeline is pretty chill.
But when I look what's trending in my country, Twitter is a garbage fire.
That's why I quit. I still log in from time to time to keep my handle alive and check out some crazies...
So now where are we?
I don't know anyone who consistently looks at their own thoughts and opinions from a self-critical eye with the goal of probing their mental models for flaws in the structure for the express purpose of fixing their logical or factual errors, but surely we do gradually over time.
That is probably a very difficult thing to do all at once, although I suppose it does happen little by little. Surely, no matter how rarely or in what brilliant glimpses we get time chisels away our ignorance so long as our ignorance is more pliable than the steel of the chisel of our self-education.
I doubt many adults feel as though they have suddenly sprung fully formed from the womb of childhood, fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of perfection, and yet most of us feel that as of right now, our small flaws aside, we are as close to perfection as we have ever been or possibly ever will be.
I'm basing my opinion on:
- The experience of seeing people move to Mastodon and comment on how much more pleasant they find it (I do think this might be fleeting - more because they're seeing only early adopters than because there's intrinsic 'bitterness' missing on Mastodon, at least compared to 'old Twitter').
- My own experience of Twitter. It just makes me anxious and angry now. Every time. Yet I keep going back! It's transformed from a pleasant place to converse and browse to somewhere where everyone is angry at everyone else all the time. I'm fairly liberal in my opinions, so usually people I see are angry at either right wing folks or other left wing folks being liberal in slightly different ways - but I do also see the retweets of angry right wing tweets with the "hey, isn't this opinion SO WRONG" opinion. This is with the 'chronological' feed. With the 'algorithmic' feed, it's _even worse_: I now get more angry people I don't know on both sides of the spectrum, and I don't see the non-angry normal conversations or life updates from people I do follow (presumably because they're low-engagement).
- I _do_ think about how this affects others, you're right - and I imagine that those with more right wing opinions are in much the same state as me, but more 'opposite', and _even more angry_ because right wing accounts seem to be more likely to be aggressive than left wing ones. So, yes, I am concerned about what others see - but only in as much as I'm concerned about what everyone sees and how the current political climate is descending into an angry selfish madness where no-one is prepared to actually listen to anyone else. I do think this angry selfish madness is more prevalent on the right, especially in mainstream politics.
Maybe my experience is not the majority one, but I think you should take it into account.
yep. this is what many of these people just continually fail to understand.
it’s just not fun being around abusive, abrasive, anti-social people constantly.
its not complicated. it’s not scandalous. it’s not shocking. people don’t enjoy being around anti-social rude people.
when they’re given an alternative where the promise is less shitty behaviors (the current iteration seems to be mastodon) then people go there, and this drives a certain group of people crazy.
what we should be asking is why it bothers them so strongly when some people say “i’m personally going to move away from that rude abrasive person over there.”
why are they so insistent that we spend our free time around abrasive assholes? they’re adamant about this. why?
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.
This sounds like a distinction between say a friend and an enemy. Sounds like a political concept I have heard before.
The problem starts with how you define those two(or any political expression). Because by many definitions, they are contradictory.
Equal chances? Money gives people advantages, so all should have the same money? Even if all would have the same money, some are born smart and some are born dumb. Genetic equalisation?
Pretty much against the idea of "freedom" like I know it.
When people are free, some will party all day, some will work like a dog.
So some will get rich. Some will get by, some will starve.
Unless you mean strictly "equal in front of the law", which we supposedly have, but we all know that the one with the more expensive lawer (or any lawer at all) has a big edge. So de facto we are not even equal in front of the law.
The big question is, how and what would you change about it?
I would actually start with free speech, because when people cannot speak freely, they will start speaking in code. And this will just make the whole political discussions even harder, as it will blur the definitions even more. I think this is mainly what we have on the internet. Lots of talk and lots of people thinking they are right, but only little actual communication and adressing the core problems because people are mostly talking about different things.
"They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc."
That is, if you oppose the expansion of government you should have your right to free speech removed.
From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse
Which shows the problem with idea of 'we must remove free speech for hate speech' because one of the originators of the idea intended that free speech should be withdrawn from people he disagreed with in ways that many or even most people in most Democratic states would find abhorrent.
Interestingly enough did you know that the original Nazis came about before the internet ever existed, way back in the 1930's, further did you know Nazis existed prior to the internet as well. It is true, in fact one may argue that there is no real correlation between the existence of Nazis and the internet, just their visibility.
But in a less sarcastic vein, I can only speak from my personal experience, but from what I see the more we try and suppress speech that some do not like, whether labeling it as hate speech, misinformation, or whatever else has produced in fact the exact opposite of the intended result, where more people are willing to tolerate actual Nazi's, question official information more readily and tolerate real racism more because the label became so broadly applied that it lost any meaningful effect.
Finally I also heard one interesting theory that part of the reason one side of the political spectrum is currently struggling so much is because the other side had even their moderate views censored from twitter, whereas another side was treated in a much more lenient fashion. The result was only the most reasonable and centerist voices of one side were shared, whereas the other side had many of their most radical and vocal members airing their views for all to see, which was a turn off to many, whereas the most extermist content on the other side was hidden and squelched.
> 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.
I don't see any evidence for that
> In their view, they have the "correct opinions" ... the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped
This is getting very straw-man
> That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the US
Oh really, is there?
I do think there is value to algorithms which incidentally increase engagement as argued by the article (e.g. capturing and isolating email spam), but there is understandable push-back against an algorithm that is, additionally or not, being optimized for pupils pointed at screen.
But, to make them nice, you need to give them both negative and positive feedback at the very early stage.
If you see something that you don't like? Don't ignore it, hit the "..." and select the "get tae fuk" option. Otherwise it'll keep trying that genre of what ever is popular with a similar persona to yours.
The problem is, the "I don't like this" button is often hidden. (in youtube I'm not sure how well weighted the downvote button is).
For mastodon its hard, whilst the data is out there for most people to grab, the models need to be stored and trained somewhere. Your model is a PII risk. Also, there isn't much info out there on how to make a good recommendation engine (for obvious reasons) Unlike object detection/text to speech/OCR and other freely available models, recommendation models are as valuable as the dataset. This means they are rarely made public.
Is there a way to downvote something on the Youtube "home" page? Before you would click on it to play it? There is a vertical ellipsis, but the only options under that are "Add to Queue" and "Share".
- Not interested
- Don't recommend channel
- Report
Aggressive online activism, regardless of your political direction, is here to stay. So it can and will be used to pressure other instances into blocking yet other instances.
So DuckDuckGo is (mostly) predicated on the idea that if you type "mens running shoes" into a search box you can confidently sell ads for trainers all day, and possibly other sporty goods. The bet Gabriel Weinberg is making is that the accuracy / profit for selling those ads is not significantly worse than using the text plus a thousand data points about that persons pregnant daughter and bathroom habits. Inwoukd love to see some study on that (not sure how - maybe have google return duckduckgo results and see what they buy. Hell I would bet they have already done this !)
Anyway I suspect that I would get as much out of twitter if I just get what David Attenborough reads on twitter (ie a manual curation from someone interesting and well versed in the world)
Sometimes the best algorithm is a much more educated and experienced human
Or even "rhetoric" which is just the term for the art of speaking well, but now has been taken to imply flashy and dishonest tricks of speech.
You may as well tell them tomatoes are actually a fruit.
Sorting requires "doing something", doesn't sound too shocking.
The other part of the post - the abuse? That part is harder. Fundamentally, commercial social networks spend a crapload of money and traumatize working-class moderators all over the world trying to keep spammers, scammers, illegal pornography, hatespeech, and worse off their platforms. I don't know how sustainable it is for hobbyists to implement that.
Realistically, I'm expecting that if Mastodon truly takes off, it will gradually bifurcate: 1) Free instances that are hives of scum and villainy 2) Paid instances that are well-moderated and pleasant
Fortunately, Mastodon servers have the ability to federate with other servers in a "second class citizen" sort of way, so members of group 2 will be able to follow people on group 1, but the mayhem of free instances will be purely opt-in on a per-user basis.
I mean Mastodon has a lot of problems. Its tech stack is a nightmare to admin, and it is notoriously wastefully chatty when it comes to server-to-server messaging. But those faults can be fixed.
The social problem is much harder.
There's the one side that says, "don't do anything opaque, just show me a chrono-timeline, I'll deal with the deluge myself". And another side that says, "you delusional to think you can deal with a deluge".
But maybe there is a third position: don't get into a deluge in the first place. Maybe the answer is actually that we shouldn't be trying to follow thousands of people on social media. Maybe there is no meaningful way to keep track of that many people and still be able to existentially understand them as, ahem, people anymore.
So far, my experience on Mastodon is bearing this out. I have almost exactly 10% of the followership on Mastodon than I do on Twitter. Yet I'm easily having 5x more conversations. The quality of those conversations is very significantly better, but I'll leave that hairy ball of unquantifiability by the wayside for now. So far, "engagement" on Mastodon is 50x better than on Twitter.
Consider diet. If you log everything I ever consume and then measure the probability I consume the same thing again in the next 30 minutes, what are you going to find? You'll be recommending I eat nothing but donuts, hard liquor, and potato chips.
Consider video. If you log everything I ever stream and watch and then measure the probability I stream and watch something similar in the next 30 minutes, you'll be recommending nothing but ChiveTV-style fail videos and short-form hot takes.
But are these the things I actually most want? Humans are complex creatures with desires and preferences that don't always express themselves in terms of quick re-consumption of similar items. If you ask me my favorite film, I'm going to say Apocalypse Now, not an epic fail compilation. But if you measure what I'm more likely to watch on repeat for 8 hours, it's going to be the fail compilation. If you ask my preferred foods, I'm going to say lean meats and vegetables, but if you measure what I'm most likely to repeatedly eat for hours without stopping, you're going to find a bunch of dessert foods and snacks.
The types of things people consume that are most nourishing and satisfying, since they actually provide nourishment and satisfaction, are not things that lead to immediate re-consumption of the same thing. The types of things that lead to immediate re-consumption are things that are insubstantial, don't require thought or reflection, don't lead to satiety, and things that are addictive.
I have no idea what sort of solution to this scales and will satisfy people that don't like gatekeepers, because the reality is, I've found what films and television shows and music albums I've most liked from top 100 lists curated by experts, and I've found what foods best nourish me and lead to the long-term health and physique outcomes I'm trying to achieve by the same method, expert recommendations from people well-versed in science.
You can't automate this, but to work, the public has to trust a curator, and it seems most of the public doesn't trust anyone to do this, or if they do, they'd rather trust the Critical Drinker and Liver King instead of the American Film Institute and FDA.
I see just tweets from people I follow, with their retweets available on a separate tab. No trending, no random tweets. Twitter the way I originally imagined it was supposed to be.
No need for any algorithm beyond what this offers, unless you're really keen on discovering random people to follow, and the people you already follow do not retweet. In which case ... you have my sympathy.
With a boost you want to increase the visibility of a post by somebody else. Probably because you agree with it. Something has to happen with that boost signal, otherwise boosting is pointless. Hence, in some way a boosted or often boosted post is promoted over ones that are not boosted.
As the boosted post gets more eye balls, it will get even more boosts. Not necessarily because it's so awesome, simply because it's the post that is shown more prominently.
This simple snowball effect has viral potential, hence it's just as corruptible as Twitter. It can and will be used agenda-driven. Power always consolidates, hence soon you'll have the elitist layer with large followers boosting each other's posts. The other 95% gets zero traction or engagement.
The other downside of boosts, retweets, quote tweets is that it discourages writing your own original posts. More than 80% of what Twitter calls tweet activity is simply retweets, not new tweets.
Finally, if you want organic social media, people to follow should never ever be automatically recommended. This triggers the exact same snowball effect.
I don't really see a way around this unless you explicitly try to prevent people from posting things that have been posted before. IIRC, retweets were originally just normal tweets that people tacked the letters "RT" in front of. It was an emergent social pattern that got reified into a feature.
If boost were removed, users would re-invent it.
This is the most ignorant and idiotic[1] take I've seen on something like this.
Don’t try to deny it, if it wasn’t what you wanted you wouldn’t be smoking so much, would you?
Don’t try to deny it, if it wasn’t what you wanted you wouldn’t be drinking alcohol so much, would you?
Don’t try to deny it, if it wasn’t what you wanted you wouldn’t be taking oxy so much, would you?
Don’t try to deny it, if it wasn’t what you wanted you wouldn’t be seeing ads so much, would you?
> These ML models know what you want and that’s what they show you.
No, they don't. This is 100% wrong, and coupled with the previous comment, shows a complete lack of knowledge in this area.
These ML models don't know what you want.
They know what you engage with. What you engage with isn't necessarily what you want. And ANY suggestion otherwise is wrong. Simply put, engaging with something doesn't necessarily mean you want to see more of it.
[1] Yes, that's a hard stance to take, but I stand by what I said. But you read this comment, which means you wanted it. Don’t try to deny it, if it wasn’t what you wanted you wouldn’t read any part of it, would you?
If smoking had no side-effects, I certainly wouldn't care if my family smoked. But I'm trying to get the one dying from pneumonia to understand that smoking suppresses her immune system. Trust me: she wants that cigarette though; someone doesn't go that far out of their way to hide the lighter and the pack if they don't want to.
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!
The fact that it's what people choose. This isn't difficult.
That, or just use a separate ActivityPub client developed with this feature in mind. After all the point of it all is open and standardized APIs.
An algorithm for sorting an array sorts it correctly 100% of the time, at least it is supposed to
http://envisage-project.eu/proving-android-java-and-python-s...
Something that ranks your feed is a heuristic, a rule of thumb that works right frequently.
It can be and often is what people fear-- what they DON'T want. It's a pretty good survival technique, in general, to pay attention to things that threaten you.
Companies monetize this human tendency, same as any other.
Playing on people's wants may waste their time or make them dull, but playing on their fears also harms them by producing constant stress.
Take that nice little austrian post-card creator living in bavaria i follow on twitter. Every now and then a political rant, but nothing.. oh No... oh No No No..
I realize there is also another 'curated' timeline setting, but you can always switch it off.
There are all kinds of problems with Twitter, but I'm surprised to see so many people saying 'the algorithm' is one of them.
The main problem I experienced with their 'curated' feed was that the news was so old. If I'm watching Twitter its because there is a news event happening.
So many times I'd see a tweet "Minister resigns!" and I'd think - "Another one, this is the end of the government!" only to discover Twitter has surfaced a tweet from 24 hours ago.
We are talking about filtering and sorting. There is no need to be more abstract than that.
There's something unsettling about putting these two terms next to each other.
Whatsapp is I think a common carrier by any sensible definition - and yet look at the anti-social effects ascribed to it - murders in India, right wing election issues in Brazil.
There is no algorithm controlled by whatsapp on who someone adds to their group and shares pro/anti political messages. There is just the real world social graph being imprinted on the technology
And I think this is the problem - people.
Tech does not mindlessly control us, it simply provides us with our bubbles.
I think I am violently agreeing with tim bray.
Or to be more clear, Google ("Don't Be Evil") was founded in the same year that John Perry Barlow published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996). Barlow is dead and so is his dream. The Empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.
Which is to say, federate the web all you want, but a Hamilton is inevitably going stomp on your Jeffersonian dream (and vice-versa).
