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What's the lesson here? I see 2 suggestions: (1) algorithm engineers try to make inputs as fair as possible, 'promoting' every political initiative perfectly fa

by m52go 8y ago

What's the lesson here? I see 2 suggestions: (1) algorithm engineers try to make inputs as fair as possible, 'promoting' every political initiative perfectly fairly or (2) algorithm engineers train bots to produce output (e.g., election results) they prefer since they're considered morally superior by those involved. While (2) is definitely worse, I don't think (1) is that much better. It's unreasonable to expect an algorithm to be totally impartial and trying will only lead to more unintended consequences. Perhaps this is the true evil of advertising-centric revenue models: they put corporate monopolies in charge of swaying the biggest decisions we as citizens can make, the ones that run our societies and our lives. Privacy, transparency, mental health, etc. for the end user are all important, but in day-to-day life, these considerations pale in comparison to the sheer power these corporations have acquired in steering world affairs. If they just chose more responsible business models, this wouldn't be happening.

quotemstr 8y ago
#1 and #2 amount to the same thing, since the success metric for #1, by necessity, has to be the extent to which it produces the political environment favored by its creators. Fairness is giving weigh according to legitimacy, and we as humans always perceive our own side as being more legitimate. > If they just chose more responsible business models, this wouldn't be happening. No effort on social change that requires that corporations voluntary forego profit (or that requires that individuals forego status) will ever work, nor should it. Everyone talks about what behavior should be, but nobody wants to talk about the sort of incentive structure that would produce that behavior.
- m52go 8y ago
  We're in the first round of digital media becoming a pervasive part of everyone's lives. People are just now realizing how harmful these services are & just how extensive their powers are. At the same time, there are a bunch of new services popping up that offer to spread power more equally with structures that are more distributed by design. I think it will take time (like, maybe a decade or two)...but today's dominant services will die out through a combination of terrible events and user-hostile moves, and new services will emerge that build on the lessons learned. It might seem unthinkable right now, but I think the right dynamics are in place to make it happen in the near-future.
gizmo686 8y ago
I don't think it is as simple as business models. Fundamentally, there is a lot of content out there. So much so, that it is necessary to have some algorithm assist in curation. Any algorithm you choose will favor certain types of content over others (unless you literally choose randomly, in which case you aren't really solving the original problem). The question is what should that algorithm be optimizing for. We have seen what problems optimizing for ad revenue causes; but I see no reason to think that optimizing for some other metric wouldn't produce a comparable class of problems. Ultimatly, the problem of algorithmic curation is a new problem, and no one has a good answer for it. Whatever answer we pick will have significant influence on the public discourse, because so much of said discourse is filtered through the algorithm.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  There's another way of looking at things. The success or failure of a content sharing service is reflective of it's ability to give people what they want to see. If you don't like the content you're getting from a video service, you're going to go swap to another that does. In other words, growth implies content selection is working. But of course this leads to what I think is the real problem: network effects. The reason people use YouTube is because people use YouTube. What I said above is true in a world with sufficient competition, but YouTube has no meaningful competition. They constantly hurt their content creators but the creators stay there nonetheless because YouTube has the users. And YouTube has the users because YouTube has the content creators. --- By focusing on the content curation as the issue, I think we take a monopoly as granted. But there are ways you could help enable competition such as by removing barriers to content delivery. Imagine a public content delivery network where whitelisted providers (just to avoid it being used for unlawful content) can stream from. Pair this with rules against exclusivity for free content delivery services, and some way for content creators who upload the content to the service to cleanly opt in to allow their content to be used by various services for some standard contract (%revenue, one-off fee, etc), and away we go. Very off the cuff idea, but the idea is just to help foster more competition.

by m52go 8y ago

quotemstr 8y ago

#1 and #2 amount to the same thing, since the success metric for #1, by necessity, has to be the extent to which it produces the political environment favored by its creators. Fairness is giving weigh according to legitimacy, and we as humans always perceive our own side as being more legitimate. > If they just chose more responsible business models, this wouldn't be happening. No effort on social change that requires that corporations voluntary forego profit (or that requires that individuals forego status) will ever work, nor should it. Everyone talks about what behavior should be, but nobody wants to talk about the sort of incentive structure that would produce that behavior.

m52go 8y ago
We're in the first round of digital media becoming a pervasive part of everyone's lives. People are just now realizing how harmful these services are & just how extensive their powers are. At the same time, there are a bunch of new services popping up that offer to spread power more equally with structures that are more distributed by design. I think it will take time (like, maybe a decade or two)...but today's dominant services will die out through a combination of terrible events and user-hostile moves, and new services will emerge that build on the lessons learned. It might seem unthinkable right now, but I think the right dynamics are in place to make it happen in the near-future.

gizmo686 8y ago

I don't think it is as simple as business models. Fundamentally, there is a lot of content out there. So much so, that it is necessary to have some algorithm assist in curation. Any algorithm you choose will favor certain types of content over others (unless you literally choose randomly, in which case you aren't really solving the original problem). The question is what should that algorithm be optimizing for. We have seen what problems optimizing for ad revenue causes; but I see no reason to think that optimizing for some other metric wouldn't produce a comparable class of problems. Ultimatly, the problem of algorithmic curation is a new problem, and no one has a good answer for it. Whatever answer we pick will have significant influence on the public discourse, because so much of said discourse is filtered through the algorithm.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
There's another way of looking at things. The success or failure of a content sharing service is reflective of it's ability to give people what they want to see. If you don't like the content you're getting from a video service, you're going to go swap to another that does. In other words, growth implies content selection is working. But of course this leads to what I think is the real problem: network effects. The reason people use YouTube is because people use YouTube. What I said above is true in a world with sufficient competition, but YouTube has no meaningful competition. They constantly hurt their content creators but the creators stay there nonetheless because YouTube has the users. And YouTube has the users because YouTube has the content creators. --- By focusing on the content curation as the issue, I think we take a monopoly as granted. But there are ways you could help enable competition such as by removing barriers to content delivery. Imagine a public content delivery network where whitelisted providers (just to avoid it being used for unlawful content) can stream from. Pair this with rules against exclusivity for free content delivery services, and some way for content creators who upload the content to the service to cleanly opt in to allow their content to be used by various services for some standard contract (%revenue, one-off fee, etc), and away we go. Very off the cuff idea, but the idea is just to help foster more competition.