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0 pointsPaulHoule1y ago0 comments

The problem with time based feeds is this.

You can read x articles a day; your system ingests y articles a day.

x=y is perfect but requires close-to-perfect balance (if x=0.9y to 1.1y maybe you can adjust your reading habit to your your feed)

if x>y then your system isn't showing you enough, if y<x you are going to miss things you subscribe to based on some arbitrary or random characteristic.

With an algorithmic feed of some kind you choose to read x items a day, your system shows you the best x items a day out of y based on some set of criteria and constraints.

These things are common sense but seemingly nonsensical to a lot of people. For instance our impoverished rights-based discourse (see [1]) about "free speech" presupposes that 100% of people can read 100% of what everybody else posts, realistically platforms can only show people some fraction of what gets posted so one thing is going to get more visibility and other things get less and that's a choice -- it could be random but it's still a choice. (As Rush would put it, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice")

I think the discussion is so impoverished that we never hear that an algorithm could choose to do anything other than maximize profits for a platform, when in fact that is just one thing an algorithm could do out of countless options.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-...

0 comments

palata1y ago

> With an algorithmic feed of some kind you choose to read x items a day, your system shows you the best x items a day out of y based on some set of criteria and constraints.

And the whole point of the people who want RSS is that they disagree with the idea that "the algorithm" shows the best x items.

The whole point is that they don't want "the algorithm". And your answer is "Have you heard of the algorithm? I think it's a solution to your problem".

thuanao1y ago

For most people y > x. You're choosing what posts to see even if the feed is chronological. For a chronological feed, x is the most recent posts you happen to see when checking your feed reader. And x will skew towards people who post at the same time of day you tend check your feed reader. People who post more will also take a larger distribution of x.

Any algorithm would seem to be an improvement on that, right? For example, an algorithm that sampled evenly from all sources. That would at least mean x was distributed across all your sources, so people who post more didn't crowd others out.

ryukafalz1y ago

> if x>y then your system isn't showing you enough

We've grown used to having a practically infinite amount of things presented to us all the time, but I've come to believe recently that limiting the amount of posts you see can be a fine (and maybe healthier) choice. There's value in being able to say "I'm caught up, I'm done", it can be a natural stopping point.

I'm not as good about limiting myself like this as I would like to be, but it is a goal of mine.

PaulHouleOP1y ago

The total amount of content available is y>x.

Some arbitrary process has to reduce the 1,000,000,000 pieces of content produced today to maybe 10 or 100 you can handle.

The very concept of "news" ("fake news" is bad because it is news not because it is fake) is an act of violence against the fabric of reality because a huge number of things happened today, but CNN reported the same 10 of them 100 times. They could maybe cover 1000 different news stories (still a fraction of maybe 100,000 things that happened) but that's a non-starter because someone who watched the network at 3pm would have a totally different impression than someone who watched it at 5pm.

beej711y ago

> Some arbitrary process has to reduce the 1,000,000,000 pieces of content produced today to maybe 10 or 100 you can handle.

In my case, I'm the process that does the reduction by subscribing to specific feeds. (Not sure if that's "arbitrary", but I could see it argued either way.)

I admit I miss some content that I would probably like to see. :) But that's just life how it's always been.

As my wife put it, "You don't have enough years in your life to read all the good books, so stop wasting time with bad ones." That's how I think of it. A handful of high-quality, low-volume feeds is great. (But I also follow HN and my curated Lemmy feed, so I get some of the firehose.)

The only "news" I have in my feed is local news. Any interesting national news hits HN or Lemmy.

Again, that's just me. I respect your different usage pattern.

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