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I'd put a lot of fault with the internet search and discovery mechanisms, that almost all favor popularity based mechanisms. This works well in a vacuum, but a
by marginalia_nu 3y ago
I'd put a lot of fault with the internet search and discovery mechanisms, that almost all favor popularity based mechanisms.
This works well in a vacuum, but as they start to direct traffic, they feed into themselves to increase the popularity of whats popular, and obscurity of what's obscure; and inevitably create an extreme Pareto distribution where the Internet seems to consist of only a handful of different services.
- spiritplumber 3y agoThe easy fix would be to do something familiar to genetic algorithms - fish out things that are unpopular at random and give them 10% of results. On facebook or the like, do that for things that people DON'T want to see (conservative content for a progressive, for example). This doesn't require a substantive change to the existing algorithms, so it shouldn't break (many) things.
- spacebanana7 3y agoCouldn’t that upset users? Leading them to other platforms or installing ad blocker like solutions to avoid unwanted content.
- spiritplumber 3y agoYes, but it'd also make results more meaningful AND maybe reduce the opaqueness of bubbles. I'm guessing it would be a balancing act.
- quickthrower2 3y agoAll this is shadowed by the SEO industry. What small sites have in their favour is the long tail of new keywords. In tech there are a lot of them. I had a blog that came up in a colleagues search results, I checked and I was place 20 for a decent keyword. I don’t so SEO so there is hope for the little guy!
- thfuran 3y ago>fish out things that are unpopular at random and give them 10% of results. On facebook or the like, do that for things that people DON'T want to see (conservative content for a progressive, for example). I don't think that's nearly as easy a fix as you suggest. Sure, some political views may have reasonable opposing views, but the other side of the story when trying to look up the history of the measurement of the diameter of the earth is probably flat earth garbage.
- spiritplumber 3y agoThat's already happening. OTOH, people who are only ever exposed to flat earth garbage (or, let's say, young earth creationism, or homophobia) might get a glimpse of what the real world looks like, and look into it.