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A month ago, China made effective a new regulation that will force companies like Alibaba, Tencent, or ByteDance to give users the option to turn off recommenda

A month ago, China made effective a new regulation that will force companies like Alibaba, Tencent, or ByteDance to give users the option to turn off recommendations, among other measures targeting algorithms to protect minors and the elderly, ensure fair pricing, prohibit fake news generation, or reduce addiction. Is this the beginning of a world optimized for well-being instead of engagement?

BurningFrog 4y ago
Well-being can't be measured, so it can't be optimized for.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  Oh, well, we might not agree on what the best measure of it is. But we have quite a few contenders.
pyinstallwoes 4y ago
Yes, I’ll make that leap of faith. Let’s keep going in that direction.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
If it really disables recommendations and just displays content in chronological order, it would be quite nice. Although technically the differentiation isn't trivial. Is a simple search optimized for relevancy an algorithmic suggestion? I would say yes, even if it is clear what is meant in spirit of these laws: Suggesting buzzing content to increase engagement. Looking at Google results that clearly favor media outlets compared to any other content, something similar could maybe bring back better search results. I am amazed that Google sabotages their primary product in such a way.
- jleyank 4y ago
  Their primary product is delivering eyeballs to ads, and they’ve boiling-frogged us all to accepting them at the top of the search. Or, maybe income as been added to their legendary search algorithms?
- whoopdedo 4y ago
  Chronological order doesn't mean unbiased. LIFO is an algorithm. The only way to remove bias from the platform would be to deliver 100% of the available content at equal priority. But practical time and space limitations make that impossible. If a provider is nothing more than a dumb pipe moving bits from an input queue to an output queue, then the control of the moderation moves further away from the end user and into the hands of the content creators. Whoever is better and faster at getting their bits pushed into the pipe will be able to censor by brute force any opposing viewpoints. Better search won't change that. If the current state of search is trying to find the one independent needle in a pile of commercially produced hay, imagine how it will be when the farmer didn't hire someone to shovel all the manure out of the barn.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    You could allow the user to design his own algorithm...
  - rakkhi 4y ago
    I like the search hackernews angolia filters: manual upvotes, time, match based on your keywords etc
    - robonerd 4y ago
      It's very basic, isn't it? There's no apparent way to sort the results oldest-first.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Chronological order is the worst. It makes gaming the system easy by spamming as much as possible.
- powerapple 4y ago
  I think there is something lost in translation, the "recommendation" would means "personalization", mostly to do with using user data or behavior for recommendation, but a pure independent ranking algorithms.
DaedPsyker 4y ago
I was actually thinking this morning that I'd like a similar feature for YouTube. It's recommdation system seems to basically regurgitate the very last thing I watched. I'd like a button or option to tone down how much a video influences the recommendation. Not ignore since I obviously wanted to watch it but I don't need 500 videos of various scenes in a film just because one popped in my head and I just wanted to see that.
- causi 4y ago
  Ye gods I miss the days when I could watch "Ben Cooks part 1" and actually have the suggested videos be "Ben Cooks part 2" and "Ben Cooks part 3".
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    In my experience it would recommend "Ben Cooks part 5" after playing "Ben Cooks part 2", for some reason.
- sjtindell 4y ago
  Although sometimes it throws up an obscure clip with maybe 100k-400k views, something random but strangely delightful that it is funneling attention to. And everyone in the comments is new to it, saying “the algorithm brought me here”. I’ve been fascinated by it. They’re almost like reverent worshippers, “all hail the algorithm”. It’s never content that’s heavily curated, like a personality’s page. It’s always like “summer 2004 raccoon eating a dorito”. It brings us together for this brief moment, guides us like a shepherd for the sheep. Like a God, we have little idea of how or why it does what it does (shows us one piece of content or another). I really enjoy those moments.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
"Is this the beginning of a world optimized for well-being instead of engagement?" I am too cynical to believe this. Would be nice though.
- misterbwong 4y ago
  Sadly, I'm with you on this. My immediate reaction after reading that quote was "Who decides what constitutes well-being?" Unfortunately, the answer is whomever is in power.
  - blagie 4y ago
    Honestly, the older I get, the more I like the vision of a 1930-era utopia. I get up. I have a communal exercise program in the morning. I work for some number of hours, while kids are at school. It's a 32 hour work week, but that's made up for with my 8 hours mandatory education. I'm guaranteed a job, a house, food, and medical care. I'm guaranteed retirement and disability too. There is no advertising. I don't have access to video games, alcohol, drugs, or Facebook. I can describe how I'd set one up, to guarantee personal freedoms and human rights, and reasonable systems of governance, but at the end of the day, I think "whomever is in power" will make better decisions about human well-being than the invisible hand of capitalism. I think China has some elements of the right approach: - Free markets for mass-produced commodities. - Socialized banks, resources, real estate, and other rent-collecting industries. - A hybrid for tech and information
    - brianhorakh 4y ago
      China has a technocratic communisim which embraces capitalism since the 1970s. That includes the learnings and notes from a 5,000 year old administrative bueracracy corps formed by qishihuang of the first ming dynasty. China is doing great (today), however poor planning as recently as the 1970s lead to widespread food shortages and people selling their kids to butchers for cannabalism (so it still has capitalism is my point). I like china personally, it's not a utopia, but it is closer to utopia than anything I have experienced in the usa.
loceng 4y ago
Does this include removing the layer below this layer of the filtering/censoring of what content can reach the masses to begin with? Is it a double standard and/or hypocritical and/or virtue signalling otherwise? "These individual companies aren't capable of doing this for the betterment of society but we are"?
imglorp 4y ago
[flagged]
- trasz 4y ago
  - shrimp_emoji 4y ago
    Lower than all of the deaths caused by Mao? Really? Also, if intent is the greatest predictor of future deaths (as opposed to just tallying past deaths), a chronically tyrannical regime looks way worse than a democracy's bungled retributive invasion.
    - trasz 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - yakz 4y ago
        What does this have to do with the article or imglorp's post? How is this relevant to the discussion at all? What are you trying to say? I don't understand why you are bringing this up. Would you please explain it?
        trasz 4y ago
        It's relevant by showing that the problems pointed out by imglorp, while real, tend to happen in every country of that size, and selectively using them to condemn a country is silly - especially so when done by a state that's objectively much worse in that regard; also note that while most of those problems in China happened in a distant past, in US they are recent (Middle East) or current (imprisoning people without proving them guilty or police shooting random people with no consequences).
    - thethethethe 4y ago
      The majority of western accounts of great Chinese famine come from the book "Hungry Ghosts" which provides almost zero actual evidence of the event other than sensationalized accounts. If you actually look for the sources of data and don't just blindly believe the western propaganda pieces repeating the same figures, this will become pretty obvious. I'm not suggesting that there wasn't trouble, death, and suffering during this period but I'd take the multi million death counts generously extrapolated from incomplete with a bolder of salt. https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/ https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions...
TimPC 4y ago
The law doesn't specify what you get when you turn off the recommendations, largely because there are too many possibilities and it can't adequately define a solution over all products. The net result is companies will likely comply to the minimum extent possible allowing you to turn off your algorithmic feed by turning off your feed entirely. Many products will be useless without this feed so consumers will opt into turning it back on and nothing will change. For example, with facebook, a good user experience would be turning off the algorithmic feed results in a purely temporal one with all your existing filters in place. I highly doubt facebook is going to reimplement a temporal feed to give people a viable option for turning off the feed they want them to use. So my prediction is nothing will change because the algorithms disabled option will intentionally be a very poor experience designed to make you immediately turn the algorithms back on.
- Larrikin 4y ago
  Judges usually hate this "well actually..." reasoning when you try to go against the spirit of the law in the US. I assume in China where they can just jail the CEO on bull shit charges they'll definitely put in a good faith effort.
Proven 4y ago
charcircuit 4y ago
TikTok would suck so much if they blocked you from your Follows recommendation feed and For You recommendation feed. The platform doesn't have a nonpersonalized feed so you will have to search for content you want to watch.
suifbwish 4y ago
Ah china, the picture of freedom
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
> Is this the beginning of a world optimized for well-being instead of engagement? No, it is not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide It's amazing to me how easily people "forget" the actual UN-recognized religious holocaust that is happening right now, while praising its architects.
jquery 4y ago
I strongly dislike the CCP, but sometimes terrible governments can pass good laws. I wish our government was a bit more pro-active in this area.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Well-being can't be measured, so it can't be optimized for.

emodendroket 4y ago
Oh, well, we might not agree on what the best measure of it is. But we have quite a few contenders.

pyinstallwoes 4y ago

Yes, I’ll make that leap of faith. Let’s keep going in that direction.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

If it really disables recommendations and just displays content in chronological order, it would be quite nice. Although technically the differentiation isn't trivial. Is a simple search optimized for relevancy an algorithmic suggestion? I would say yes, even if it is clear what is meant in spirit of these laws: Suggesting buzzing content to increase engagement. Looking at Google results that clearly favor media outlets compared to any other content, something similar could maybe bring back better search results. I am amazed that Google sabotages their primary product in such a way.

jleyank 4y ago
Their primary product is delivering eyeballs to ads, and they’ve boiling-frogged us all to accepting them at the top of the search. Or, maybe income as been added to their legendary search algorithms?
whoopdedo 4y ago
Chronological order doesn't mean unbiased. LIFO is an algorithm. The only way to remove bias from the platform would be to deliver 100% of the available content at equal priority. But practical time and space limitations make that impossible. If a provider is nothing more than a dumb pipe moving bits from an input queue to an output queue, then the control of the moderation moves further away from the end user and into the hands of the content creators. Whoever is better and faster at getting their bits pushed into the pipe will be able to censor by brute force any opposing viewpoints. Better search won't change that. If the current state of search is trying to find the one independent needle in a pile of commercially produced hay, imagine how it will be when the farmer didn't hire someone to shovel all the manure out of the barn.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  You could allow the user to design his own algorithm...
- rakkhi 4y ago
  I like the search hackernews angolia filters: manual upvotes, time, match based on your keywords etc
  - robonerd 4y ago
    It's very basic, isn't it? There's no apparent way to sort the results oldest-first.
ekianjo 4y ago
Chronological order is the worst. It makes gaming the system easy by spamming as much as possible.
powerapple 4y ago
I think there is something lost in translation, the "recommendation" would means "personalization", mostly to do with using user data or behavior for recommendation, but a pure independent ranking algorithms.

DaedPsyker 4y ago

I was actually thinking this morning that I'd like a similar feature for YouTube. It's recommdation system seems to basically regurgitate the very last thing I watched. I'd like a button or option to tone down how much a video influences the recommendation. Not ignore since I obviously wanted to watch it but I don't need 500 videos of various scenes in a film just because one popped in my head and I just wanted to see that.

causi 4y ago
Ye gods I miss the days when I could watch "Ben Cooks part 1" and actually have the suggested videos be "Ben Cooks part 2" and "Ben Cooks part 3".
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  In my experience it would recommend "Ben Cooks part 5" after playing "Ben Cooks part 2", for some reason.
sjtindell 4y ago
Although sometimes it throws up an obscure clip with maybe 100k-400k views, something random but strangely delightful that it is funneling attention to. And everyone in the comments is new to it, saying “the algorithm brought me here”. I’ve been fascinated by it. They’re almost like reverent worshippers, “all hail the algorithm”. It’s never content that’s heavily curated, like a personality’s page. It’s always like “summer 2004 raccoon eating a dorito”. It brings us together for this brief moment, guides us like a shepherd for the sheep. Like a God, we have little idea of how or why it does what it does (shows us one piece of content or another). I really enjoy those moments.

spaetzleesser 4y ago

"Is this the beginning of a world optimized for well-being instead of engagement?" I am too cynical to believe this. Would be nice though.

misterbwong 4y ago
Sadly, I'm with you on this. My immediate reaction after reading that quote was "Who decides what constitutes well-being?" Unfortunately, the answer is whomever is in power.
- blagie 4y ago
  Honestly, the older I get, the more I like the vision of a 1930-era utopia. I get up. I have a communal exercise program in the morning. I work for some number of hours, while kids are at school. It's a 32 hour work week, but that's made up for with my 8 hours mandatory education. I'm guaranteed a job, a house, food, and medical care. I'm guaranteed retirement and disability too. There is no advertising. I don't have access to video games, alcohol, drugs, or Facebook. I can describe how I'd set one up, to guarantee personal freedoms and human rights, and reasonable systems of governance, but at the end of the day, I think "whomever is in power" will make better decisions about human well-being than the invisible hand of capitalism. I think China has some elements of the right approach: - Free markets for mass-produced commodities. - Socialized banks, resources, real estate, and other rent-collecting industries. - A hybrid for tech and information
  - brianhorakh 4y ago
    China has a technocratic communisim which embraces capitalism since the 1970s. That includes the learnings and notes from a 5,000 year old administrative bueracracy corps formed by qishihuang of the first ming dynasty. China is doing great (today), however poor planning as recently as the 1970s lead to widespread food shortages and people selling their kids to butchers for cannabalism (so it still has capitalism is my point). I like china personally, it's not a utopia, but it is closer to utopia than anything I have experienced in the usa.

loceng 4y ago

Does this include removing the layer below this layer of the filtering/censoring of what content can reach the masses to begin with? Is it a double standard and/or hypocritical and/or virtue signalling otherwise? "These individual companies aren't capable of doing this for the betterment of society but we are"?

imglorp 4y ago

[flagged]

trasz 4y ago
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  Lower than all of the deaths caused by Mao? Really? Also, if intent is the greatest predictor of future deaths (as opposed to just tallying past deaths), a chronically tyrannical regime looks way worse than a democracy's bungled retributive invasion.
  - trasz 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - yakz 4y ago
      What does this have to do with the article or imglorp's post? How is this relevant to the discussion at all? What are you trying to say? I don't understand why you are bringing this up. Would you please explain it?
      - trasz 4y ago
        It's relevant by showing that the problems pointed out by imglorp, while real, tend to happen in every country of that size, and selectively using them to condemn a country is silly - especially so when done by a state that's objectively much worse in that regard; also note that while most of those problems in China happened in a distant past, in US they are recent (Middle East) or current (imprisoning people without proving them guilty or police shooting random people with no consequences).
  - thethethethe 4y ago
    The majority of western accounts of great Chinese famine come from the book "Hungry Ghosts" which provides almost zero actual evidence of the event other than sensationalized accounts. If you actually look for the sources of data and don't just blindly believe the western propaganda pieces repeating the same figures, this will become pretty obvious. I'm not suggesting that there wasn't trouble, death, and suffering during this period but I'd take the multi million death counts generously extrapolated from incomplete with a bolder of salt. https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/ https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions...

TimPC 4y ago

The law doesn't specify what you get when you turn off the recommendations, largely because there are too many possibilities and it can't adequately define a solution over all products. The net result is companies will likely comply to the minimum extent possible allowing you to turn off your algorithmic feed by turning off your feed entirely. Many products will be useless without this feed so consumers will opt into turning it back on and nothing will change. For example, with facebook, a good user experience would be turning off the algorithmic feed results in a purely temporal one with all your existing filters in place. I highly doubt facebook is going to reimplement a temporal feed to give people a viable option for turning off the feed they want them to use. So my prediction is nothing will change because the algorithms disabled option will intentionally be a very poor experience designed to make you immediately turn the algorithms back on.

Larrikin 4y ago
Judges usually hate this "well actually..." reasoning when you try to go against the spirit of the law in the US. I assume in China where they can just jail the CEO on bull shit charges they'll definitely put in a good faith effort.

Proven 4y ago

charcircuit 4y ago

TikTok would suck so much if they blocked you from your Follows recommendation feed and For You recommendation feed. The platform doesn't have a nonpersonalized feed so you will have to search for content you want to watch.

suifbwish 4y ago

Ah china, the picture of freedom

JohnHaugeland 4y ago

> Is this the beginning of a world optimized for well-being instead of engagement? No, it is not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide It's amazing to me how easily people "forget" the actual UN-recognized religious holocaust that is happening right now, while praising its architects.

jquery 4y ago

I strongly dislike the CCP, but sometimes terrible governments can pass good laws. I wish our government was a bit more pro-active in this area.