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They are so insistent that most people want the entertainment use case for social media, they informed their protocol architecture design by that. No, no one wa

They are so insistent that most people want the entertainment use case for social media, they informed their protocol architecture design by that. No, no one wants that. Everyone is already sick of centralized social media services forcefully shoving recommended content from unknown people down their throats. They just want a chronological timeline of posts made by people they explicitly followed. No ads, no recommendations (Instagram's "mute recommended content for 30 days" is straight mockery btw), no prompts, no nothing, just updates from people you followed. And that's already solved by ActivityPub. Everything becomes much, much simpler when you don't need some kind of pool of "all posts in the universe" to choose from.

capableweb 4y ago
> forcefully shoving recommended content from unknown people down their throats. They just want a chronological timeline of posts made by people they explicitly followed So... You're saying you like AT Protocol/Bluesky then? Because if that's what you're trying to say, your post kind of reads like you don't like it, but then what you want is exactly what they are trying to provide...
- grishka 4y ago
  My understanding from this and earlier blog posts is that they want an algorithmic timeline where people can choose their algorithm. Those "feed generators" are the pluggable algorithms they promised and they do need global indexes (BGS's) to be able to inject out-of-network content to your feed. It all checks out. Yes you can get a chronological feed of accounts you follow, but that seemingly isn't what they see as the most important use case.
  - CodexArcana 4y ago
    One of those will be chronological. That's still an algorithm...
  - sbarre 4y ago
    The beauty of this being decentralized and open source is that, in theory, there would be a large number of possible algorithms (including "no algorithm") for users to choose from. There's an earlier blog post that talks about the "algorithm marketplace" that is worth looking up. I don't think this team "sees" any use cases for sorting feeds right now. In the current beta there are two feeds, your followers which is chronological (and the default) and "What's Hot" which is a haphazard very much placeholder timeline of the "most interacted with" posts, and I think that just means "13 likes or more, then chronological" at the moment. It's super basic and not at all the priority for them. From all I've seen in my time in the beta, the most important use case they are working towards is "let everyone pick their own way of sorting/filtering/moderating their timeline".
biofunsf 4y ago
> forcefully shoving recommended content from unknown people down their throats... Unpopular opinion for HN: I like recommend content. Especially with TikTok where the vast majority of content I consume (and I think most others) is generated by non-friends. Crafting the perfect list of who to follow is tough work so when the algorithms can do it I'm happy. Of course, the recommend content needs to be good and interesting to me. I suspect most people's frustration with it is the result of getting bad recommend content. Though for some people recommend content might be particular bad for you if your interests are more niche. But I also agree that I wish you could turn recommend content off. If it's recommendations are bad, I agree it shouldn't be shoved down your throat, but also please don't force a recommend content free world on the rest of us.
- grishka 4y ago
  You're mixing two distinct use cases here: entertainment and staying up to date on your friends' lives. I think these should be served by different services because they're so fundamentally different.
  - hoidofyolen 3y ago
    Bluesky has both: a following feed in chronological order and an algorithmic feed that shows you stuff new to you. they're also releasing custom algorithms soon so that you can plug in whatever algorithm you want instead of being limited to just theirs.
Covzire 4y ago
"everyone" doesn't buy ads or make political donations. After WW3, there will be only cockroaches and recommendation algos left.
afavour 4y ago
> Everyone is already sick of centralized social media services forcefully shoving recommended content from unknown people down their throats. The wild success of TikTok suggests you’re wrong. HN can be an echo chamber at times.
- anaganisk 4y ago
  [flagged]

capableweb 4y ago

> forcefully shoving recommended content from unknown people down their throats. They just want a chronological timeline of posts made by people they explicitly followed So... You're saying you like AT Protocol/Bluesky then? Because if that's what you're trying to say, your post kind of reads like you don't like it, but then what you want is exactly what they are trying to provide...

grishka 4y ago
My understanding from this and earlier blog posts is that they want an algorithmic timeline where people can choose their algorithm. Those "feed generators" are the pluggable algorithms they promised and they do need global indexes (BGS's) to be able to inject out-of-network content to your feed. It all checks out. Yes you can get a chronological feed of accounts you follow, but that seemingly isn't what they see as the most important use case.
- CodexArcana 4y ago
  One of those will be chronological. That's still an algorithm...
- sbarre 4y ago
  The beauty of this being decentralized and open source is that, in theory, there would be a large number of possible algorithms (including "no algorithm") for users to choose from. There's an earlier blog post that talks about the "algorithm marketplace" that is worth looking up. I don't think this team "sees" any use cases for sorting feeds right now. In the current beta there are two feeds, your followers which is chronological (and the default) and "What's Hot" which is a haphazard very much placeholder timeline of the "most interacted with" posts, and I think that just means "13 likes or more, then chronological" at the moment. It's super basic and not at all the priority for them. From all I've seen in my time in the beta, the most important use case they are working towards is "let everyone pick their own way of sorting/filtering/moderating their timeline".

biofunsf 4y ago

> forcefully shoving recommended content from unknown people down their throats... Unpopular opinion for HN: I like recommend content. Especially with TikTok where the vast majority of content I consume (and I think most others) is generated by non-friends. Crafting the perfect list of who to follow is tough work so when the algorithms can do it I'm happy. Of course, the recommend content needs to be good and interesting to me. I suspect most people's frustration with it is the result of getting bad recommend content. Though for some people recommend content might be particular bad for you if your interests are more niche. But I also agree that I wish you could turn recommend content off. If it's recommendations are bad, I agree it shouldn't be shoved down your throat, but also please don't force a recommend content free world on the rest of us.

grishka 4y ago
You're mixing two distinct use cases here: entertainment and staying up to date on your friends' lives. I think these should be served by different services because they're so fundamentally different.
- hoidofyolen 3y ago
  Bluesky has both: a following feed in chronological order and an algorithmic feed that shows you stuff new to you. they're also releasing custom algorithms soon so that you can plug in whatever algorithm you want instead of being limited to just theirs.

Covzire 4y ago

"everyone" doesn't buy ads or make political donations. After WW3, there will be only cockroaches and recommendation algos left.

afavour 4y ago

> Everyone is already sick of centralized social media services forcefully shoving recommended content from unknown people down their throats. The wild success of TikTok suggests you’re wrong. HN can be an echo chamber at times.

anaganisk 4y ago
[flagged]