Algorithmic feed where a company chooses the algorithm and objective function
And we pretend that "Share of time is a perfect metric for happiness," then this might make sense.
But... time spent isn't a perfect metric for happiness, and there is another option: 3) Algorithmic feed where the user has more control of the algorithm and objective function.
@mekkaokereke How do you suggest measuring those alternative metrics? It’s certainly an interesting concept for FOSS, but these recommendation models improve with the number of data points.
@mekkaokereke My time on fediverse supports part of the linked article: I log off faster - but I am also happier with my experience despite spending less time on it. I bet part of the reason is how I purposefully obscure my interests to SoMe sites, so their algorithms actually are very ineffective at recommending what I want to see. But that won't change - and I really like it here.
@mekkaokereke It's really unhelpful how ambiguity (and arguably misuse, which becomes it's own stupid side argument) of the term "algorithm" detracts from core issues here.
When folks say they don't want "algorithmic" X, they usually mean they don't want it driven by an optimization engine whose behaviors are emergent rather than something they explicitly chose (and which is usually optimizing a metric contrary to their interests).
@mekkaokereke However my inclination is to give up the word "algorithm" here. I don't care if it's a misuse or not. Lots of folks are deeply angry with the concept of having their social relationships mediated by engagement optimization engines called "algorithms", and I feel like we'd do much better avoiding the word when providing choices for how folks can organize their own feeds.
My more aggressive take is that the tech industry deserves to have their word taken away from them in any but purely technical forums.
The public were subjected to algorithms without much or any explanations as to what's going on or even notice that much was happening in the first place. They then noticed a lot was actually going on, so they grabbed whatever word was around for it and used it.
Tech didn't need to do that to people. So tech loses the word now.
@maegul@mekkaokereke That's the "crypto means crypto" position and I love it, but I wouldn't market new e2ee support in a service to users as "we're adding crypto!"
@dalias@mekkaokereke the chronological feed with “boosting” or “retweets” is one of the worst “algorithms” (really “heuristics”) there is when it comes to surfacing outrage…. and maybe 80% of “engagement” is outrage on some platforms. I use a machine learning algorithm to filter my RSS feed and there is not a lot of outrage but that is because I filter on explicit preference and not predicting “clicked”, “commented”, “shared”
Optimizing to maximize engagement alone is harmful for many other reasons. But the "enragement is the peak of algorithmic engagement optimization!" is not true.
Like most ML systems, it says more about who set the objective function, than it does about the objective nature of human behavior.
And let's be real with it: a lot of what folks call out as negative "algorithmic enragement," is Black people calling out systemic injustice. 🤷🏿♂️
@mekkaokereke@UP8 This. 👆 Folks upset that social media is showing too much "enragement" almost inevitably mean it's showing injustices they want to pretend don't exist.
@dalias@mekkaokereke does that achema explain the people who are outraged because they think climate change science is a selfish meme or there is a “caravan” threatening the US or who think mask mandates and vaccines are evil? Robert Jay Lifton in https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmentation/dp/0465064213 found that 1980s environmental activists had a lot in common with evangelical Christians.
The people that use social media the most by far are young Black and brown people. The people whose happiness has decreased the least with the rise of smartphones and social media, are young Black and brown people.
On the other hand, Fox watchers were always enragable and easily gullible. Whether they were mad at "welfare queens" (a lie), or "Young Black super predators" (another lie), or "Black identity extremists" (more lies), or "hypersexualized Black rapists (more lies)."
@dalias@mekkaokereke the asymmetry of the left vs right is one of construction (another world is possible) vs inertia (let current business interests mostly drive things).
if leftists copy the ‘othering’ forms of the right they at best will be talking to themselves and not engaging in the terribly difficult process of building something new and better. ‘Othering’ is not a neutral act but definitely takes a side.
It's silly to pretend that "leftists" are able to escape the views of the majority, or that "leftists" learn anything or benefit at all from having far-right people in their social media feeds. I've talked about this before.
I have an encyclopedic knowledge of the far-right and racists, as do most Black folk.
Most trans folk online can tell you who founded [redacted transphobic site] and [other redacted transphobic site].
We're in no danger of becoming just like the right.
🙂"It has been reported" doesn't make it true. It's also been reported that shoplifting caused drug stores to close on SF, and we now know that's a lie.
You may not have known what the so called "Facebook whistleblower" was talking about before she blew her whistle, but I don't need to wait for Karen Hao to write up what she's talking about to understand it.
Honestly, I don't need to get into a back and forth with you on this. You can continue to believe it if you want.
@hramrach@mekkaokereke@dalias i’d think most advertisers don’t want to be next to content that is hateful, disturbing or even controversial. A platform wanting to attract advertisers in 2023 might want to turn the temperature down.
You know, people like to share cat pictures. My predictive model told me, and I confirmed, that users on Hacker News like to talk about cars. Many “hooks” exist
@UP8@mekkaokereke@dalias Except that to have any opportunity to show their ad to the user the user needs to be on the platform in the first place. And the thing that keeps people on the platform is engagement, and the thing that produces engagement the most turns out to be controversy.
It's not that one whistleblower, there has been a number of people corroborating the story.
You keep repeating that the thing that increases engagement the most is controversy, and that's just not true.
If that were true, then why does Twitter not have more engagement now than before Elon took over?
Because the thing that really drives the most engagement, is the content produced by the very people that Elon drove away: young Black, brown, and white women. The stuff that Tik Tok, Snapchat, and Instagram are made of.
Anyway, since you keep repeating that controversy is not what drives engagement on social media which is in contradiction to available data what research backs up your point?
Opinions are fine and well, and that's where everything starts at one point. However, data is in my book more reliable than opinions.
Look, I'm seriously OK if you believe that controversial content is the most engaging. I don't feel the need to convince you, and I can't share research that I've seen that everyone else hasn't.
I can share publicly available and externally verifiable data points. Tik-Tok is the highest engagement social network. It's not close. And the most engaged content on Tik Tok is not controversial stuff.
@mekkaokereke@UP8@dalias From what has been seen of Theads so far it is not about leaving controversial content behind.
It has been widely discussed on Mastodon due to the federation potential.
Pretty bigoted content exists clearly visible on Instagram. Some of it was initially hidden on Threads but some right-wingers complained, and that was the end of it.
It's not surprising, it's run by the same Meta as Facebook after all.
@mekkaokereke@UP8@dalias TikTok is clearly trying to jostle for user base with the other platforms.
They started with short videos, then added long videos to encroach on Youtube space, then texts to encroach on the more traditional social media space.
Not exactly Facebook yet but getting close.
There is some pretty controversial content on TikTok, too. It's difficult to say how much it's encouraged by the platform without some data.
@mekkaokereke@UP8@dalias I understand that not every social medium is Facebook, and that different choices in designing the platform may lead to different results.
At the same time Facebook is one most studied so far, and the results are what they are.
When other results are published it may turn out that other platforms managed to build engagement without stoking controversy. Until then we have what we have 🤷
@hramrach@mekkaokereke@UP8 Regardless of whether "enragement" produces the highest "engagement", "enragement" is intentionally both-sidesism. We don't have to accept or reject content because it's "enraging".
We don't have to judge things on "objective" metrics. We can say the name of the problem, "stirring up right wing hate and trying to make people enraged at vulnerable targets", and acknowledge that it's a completely different thing from people being "enraged" at actual oppressions.
right! and if there's an algorithm curating my feed, i should be able to edit and tweak it, similar to how #pandora let's me fine tune my 'stations' (only with even more options)
@mekkaokereke I don't know. For power users, yes, it could help to have customisability (much as with Twitter we have advanced search operators, until recently third-party clients, etc.). But I suspect the vast majority of users would still stick to defaults, so there'll still have to be that default company-defined algorithm.
This is why I say user defined algorithms are hard to do well.
It's really hard to come up with a good UI and set of features that are lightweight enough for users to understand what's going on, and tweak it to their liking.
But it's really easy for those users to tell you in plain language what they want to see more of / less of, and what they want their experience to be optimized for.
Their whole areas of UX Research between those two things.
@mekkaokereke Agreed. I would like to have a simple, user-controlled algorithm in Mastodon, where I can rank some of the people I follow to always show up at to always show up at the top of my feed, so I never miss their posts. And ranking posts higher than reposts in my feed.
@mekkaokereke If people spend more time on an algorithmic feed...
What if they're not scrolling because they're having a good time? What if they're scrolling until they hit an internal satisfaction quota? Then the algorithmic feed means it's taking longer to find all the posts they like, and they get to them faster if they have a chronological feed.
They only see time spent in the app as a good thing because it's more time to show us ads. They don't actually care if we're having a good time.
@mekkaokereke I’ve always wished for an algorithm that let me see the ongoing threads separately so I could catch up on one without getting interrupted by another. Like this discussion of algorithms, show me all the posts it’s related to in a separate stream.
@mekkaokereke
I think people crave being in total control of what they see and what they transmit, so something like "here's a way for YOU to set your own algorithms" would appeal.
@mekkaokereke this is my personal preference and others may feel differently; but for the most part I think microblogging platforms like Twitter and Mastodon are qualitatively different than platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Microblogs are much more real-time and the value of jumping into old threads is much lower than the latter services.
@mekkaokereke programmable feeds are one of the things I'm most interested in about Bluesky. You can have any number of them and they're programmable and shareable. You can flip right through them on the Home Screen.
I'm not sure that random users will write their own feeds (looks like you write a program to generate the instructions https://github.com/bluesky-social/feed-generator) but it looks straightforward and I bet people will request specific ones from the community.
It's a very neat idea! Along with composable moderation, etc.
A lot of people can't seem to separate "Jack Dorsey has bad judgement" and "Cryptocurrency is bad" and "You can't leave moderation and user safety for version 2 features" and "Talking to Black people is good actually" and "Prioritizing fashy friends is bad"
from
"Therefore BlueSky has nothing to bring to the conversation"🤷🏿♂️
BlueSky does have a lot of interesting ideas that could improve the Fediverse.
@mekkaokereke The way that this article is framed suggests this belief:
What people do when provided specific options is a more accurate picture of what they want than what they actually say they want.
I don't know if I like that framing. Even an interface is designed to make me scroll for longer, I would never, in a million years, say that I want to be scrolling more. I know on a conscious, reflective level that I would like to be scrolling less overall.
@mekkaokereke This doesn’t show that a curated feed is better, it just means it’s more addictive. It is probably healthier for the users to spend less time on social media.
On mastodon, and on google plus when it was a thing and had a mostly chrinological field, and on facebook when I could convince it to show me a mostly chronological feed… I curate my field by following few enough people that I can keep up with my feed, and feel relief when I know I’m up to date.
@mekkaokereke On the other hand I am fequently frustrated when I can not get back to a post in Facebook’s curated feed when my feed has reshuffled for any reason.
Of course people spending less time and being generally happy to be up to date is not what Facebook wants, but who cares about them? As the providers of the addictive substance their interests are of negative value.
@mekkaokereke Livejournal did this ages ago without an algorithm. You had a chronological feed, but you could break up the people you followed into overlapping groups depending on what you wanted to see at any given time. I don't see the benefit of an algorithm except maybe with something like a music service where you want to find similar work. LJ also allowed you to search users by interest. That was good enough for me.
Some of the [people] you follow might post on [topics] that you're less interested in. Your personal algorithm might rank posts from people on your list lower if they're talking about a topic that doesn't interest you.
@farbel@mekkaokereke I’d benefit from better, per-user filtering on Mastodon. The ability to choose which users a specific filter applies to would help eliminate some timeline noise, without being overly broad.
The ability to see who made a collapsed, filtered post before expanding it (rather than just which filter applied) would also help.
Where I’d maybe benefit from a selectable algorithm is with hashtags. See everything from some, a selection from busy ones.
@MouseAT@farbel@mekkaokereke having recently refactored the streaming code relating to filtering, I think this is an interesting idea, but it'd need some workshopping to solidify exactly what this means / how it'd be implemented.
@Jdreben Thanks. I’m not about to get involved with that particular instance, but I might take a look at the feature, and see if it’s close to what I’d like to accomplish.
@mekkaokereke in my experience, the only reason I spend more time on a non-chronological feed is because I have to sift through tons of trash suggested posts and other garbage in order to make sure I've seen the posts from people I care about. Which is why I've gotten sick of instagram, because I can't trust it as a platform for keeping up with my friends. >_< if that's supposed to be a desirable user experience from their pov then no. They are measuring the wrong metric.
"Our lives are controlled by an algorithm, man. It's just chronological."
I'm not opposed to an algo we control, but we have to decide what we're using these systems for. If it's personal entertainment, use whatever you want. Who cares. If there's a social importance to what humans are collectively thinking about, if we think about the big picture, I am not a fan of any person or corporation having too much influence over that.
@mekkaokereke that’s an interesting assumption to make about why folks left. You didn’t make me scroll for a million years to find what I was looking for, so clearly I was bored. Oof.
@mekkaokereke Seems like there's also a pretty strong sample bias here. They haven't shown anything about the preferences of "people" as a group, they've at best shown what Facebook and Instagram users prefer. And their conclusion from studying Facebook and Instagram users is that they like what Facebook and Instagram do?
This is like concluding "Actually people like the smell of limburger" from a poll included in packages of limburger
@mekkaokereke Wait, you're telliing me the company that routinely experiments on human subjects without their knowledge or consent did a study that "proves" they're better than everyone else? Shocking!
One thing I know very well from back when I used to be on Facebook is that people get pissed off any time they make any change. So maybe they only proved people don't like change. Or look at the numbers involved -- maybe people just don't like being singled out and given a different experience than the rest of their community. There's also the issue that chronological feeds require a different kind of interaction which likely leaves them ineffective if only a few users are using it that way. For example, it's quite common here on Mastodon for people to boost their own toots so their followers don't miss the important ones. People are also more likely to boost in general knowing that a favorite won't put that post in peoples' feeds. If only a small number of users are forced to go chronological in an algorithmic community, they're gonna have a bad time...
Add comment