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Paying attention to the same things as everyone else seems like a bad idea? It means a bunch of non-experts paying shallow attention to things they probably are

Paying attention to the same things as everyone else seems like a bad idea? It means a bunch of non-experts paying shallow attention to things they probably aren't going to go into any depth on and will forget about within days, or it can result in unproductive doomscrolling where everyone worries fruitlessly about the same things. Modern civilization is built on specialization. We don't have to all worry about the same things. We can pick and choose, and the other stuff is Someone Else's Problem. This is why there are specialty sites, like forums and subreddits and Hacker News. However, even Hacker News is awfully broad, showing people lots of stuff they probably don't care about and aren't going to do anything about. RSS feeds and subscription-based following can help if you're careful about curation, but following people has the downside that many people don't stick to the subjects they're experts in and will often repost stuff you don't like because they don't have similar tastes. And this means having custom filtering would not be a bad thing if the providers of the algorithms could be trusted.

witchesindublin 3y ago
"For example in an online forum, the most up-voted posts may be shown on at the top of the page." In the culture of the internet prior to 2010, usually whatever was the most recent post would get the the top spot, and I believe the internet culture at the time was more decentralised and people congregated around certain topics to only discuss that topic. I think this is what is missing from the modern day internet (in part due to the combination of reddit and algorithmic attention seekers), in that people do not talk about the same things to the same people in real life. People usually keep their friends in different groups and talk about different things to each other, and they talk about whatever they want to think about.

witchesindublin 3y ago

"For example in an online forum, the most up-voted posts may be shown on at the top of the page." In the culture of the internet prior to 2010, usually whatever was the most recent post would get the the top spot, and I believe the internet culture at the time was more decentralised and people congregated around certain topics to only discuss that topic. I think this is what is missing from the modern day internet (in part due to the combination of reddit and algorithmic attention seekers), in that people do not talk about the same things to the same people in real life. People usually keep their friends in different groups and talk about different things to each other, and they talk about whatever they want to think about.