4 ms·

Devil's advocate, I'm going to guess you do not want exactly that and you'd be happier with a quality alg. There is far, far too much information out there, an

by jasmer 4y ago

Devil's advocate, I'm going to guess you do not want exactly that and you'd be happier with a quality alg. There is far, far too much information out there, and the things outputted from the things you follow is a 'decent start' but it's not what you want. Systrom is exactly right and better algs is what we need. TikTok is a great social medial platform, it's fun, irreverent, and the alg allows you to find niches in content that would not exist otherwise. I've found this guy who does videos on his sheep herding dogs, it's so fun to watch. Applying a great filter to all of my youtube/news feeds is one of the most meaningful ways to improve my content feed. Yes - we want to make sure people have the option to follow exactly what they want and hopefully to adjust the feed parameters ... but I would love to get rid of the fuzz in my feed. This is decent innovation and it could affect a lot of people, it's fine to be a bit sus but I don't think we should be cynical. You don't have to use it.

fatnoah 4y ago
I guess this is my pessimism about an algorithm really ever working well for me. On FB and other social sites, I'm hesitant to engage any one-off content because my feed becomes flooded with it. I guess if I had more fine-grained control to say that I don't like something and WHY I don't like it, I'd have more confidence that this could be useful .
- riversflow 4y ago
  I mean, Instagram has a “not interested” menu item (behind …), with the additional option 'don’t show posts from ${account}' and “this post makes me uncomfortable”. They also additionally introduced chronologically sorted “following” and “favorites” feeds. I haven’t had a Facebook in a decade, but after hardly using IG for years, I’ve started using it again. These features have honestly improved my opinion of Meta significantly, you can at least utilize it as a tool now.
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    My issue is that the controls aren't fine-grained enough for me. I'm not a heavy IG user, so that doesn't matter as much to me. (DISCLAIMER: The only reason I even have IG is because I worked at FB and my team made a couple components used in IG)
- jasmer 4y ago
  Agreed on FB but TT is another thing altogether. I guess Quality matters.
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    Makes sense. They are different use cases as well. On FB, I'm interested in people, not "content", whereas TikTok is about the content, which does require some means of discovery.
astrostl 4y ago
> I'm going to guess you do not want exactly that and you'd be happier with a quality alg. I'm going to guess that it's possible, if not likely, for me to have higher engagement with an alg while being less happy. A simple way to find out is choice. I like that Twitter has both modes.
falseAss 4y ago
Interest based text recommendation is actually a proved idea in Chinese world, e.g. Toutiao as a personalized news aggregation app (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/is-there-room-for-a-u-s-equivalent-to-chinas-1-news-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/is-there-room-for-a-u-s-eq...), and Zhihu (a Chinese version of Quora) Both apps are quite mainstream & huge DAU versus their English counterparts. The delta ingredient is likely alg.

by jasmer 4y ago

fatnoah 4y ago

I guess this is my pessimism about an algorithm really ever working well for me. On FB and other social sites, I'm hesitant to engage any one-off content because my feed becomes flooded with it. I guess if I had more fine-grained control to say that I don't like something and WHY I don't like it, I'd have more confidence that this could be useful .

riversflow 4y ago
I mean, Instagram has a “not interested” menu item (behind …), with the additional option 'don’t show posts from ${account}' and “this post makes me uncomfortable”. They also additionally introduced chronologically sorted “following” and “favorites” feeds. I haven’t had a Facebook in a decade, but after hardly using IG for years, I’ve started using it again. These features have honestly improved my opinion of Meta significantly, you can at least utilize it as a tool now.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  My issue is that the controls aren't fine-grained enough for me. I'm not a heavy IG user, so that doesn't matter as much to me. (DISCLAIMER: The only reason I even have IG is because I worked at FB and my team made a couple components used in IG)
jasmer 4y ago
Agreed on FB but TT is another thing altogether. I guess Quality matters.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  Makes sense. They are different use cases as well. On FB, I'm interested in people, not "content", whereas TikTok is about the content, which does require some means of discovery.

astrostl 4y ago

> I'm going to guess you do not want exactly that and you'd be happier with a quality alg. I'm going to guess that it's possible, if not likely, for me to have higher engagement with an alg while being less happy. A simple way to find out is choice. I like that Twitter has both modes.

falseAss 4y ago

Interest based text recommendation is actually a proved idea in Chinese world, e.g. Toutiao as a personalized news aggregation app (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/is-there-room-for-a-u-s-equivalent-to-chinas-1-news-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/is-there-room-for-a-u-s-eq...), and Zhihu (a Chinese version of Quora) Both apps are quite mainstream & huge DAU versus their English counterparts. The delta ingredient is likely alg.