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> And this is where the goals of the platforms and their users are at odds with each other. They can be, but they usually mostly aren't. Showing people what th

> And this is where the goals of the platforms and their users are at odds with each other. They can be, but they usually mostly aren't. Showing people what they like is the best way to get them to come back. I think you need to accept that what you want is different from what most people want. > I want the platform to be a dumb pipe between me and the people I follow. I guess your only hope would be to make it illegal, worldwide, to provide algorithmic feeds. Hacker News uses an algorithmic feed, and that's why we're here talking. https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest exists but it's not very good. You can also browse Reddit chronologically https://www.reddit.com/new/ https://www.reddit.com/new/ but, seriously, don't bother. So, as long as someone can do algorithmic feeds, someone will, and people will use it, even you, because algorithmic feeds are just better than chronological feeds. > I don't want "influencers" to be possible. This one is truly hopeless. We've had influencers at least as long as we've had the written word.

grishka 2y ago
> Showing people what they like is the best way to get them to come back. There are different usage scenarios of social media. You seem to imply that people use it for entertainment, and yes, the companies themselves sure make them optimized for that. But I want to use social media for staying up to date on my friends' lives and nothing else. Most existing platforms actively resist this use case because it doesn't grow metrics. > I guess your only hope would be to make it illegal, worldwide, to provide algorithmic feeds. Well, at least I'm working on two fediverse projects. There are no algorithms on the fediverse. You see posts from the people you follow, in the order in which they were posted, and nothing else. > We've had influencers at least as long as we've had the written word. That's different. Those "influencers" always became such organically, because people voluntarily spread their "content". This is vastly different from the platform itself stepping in and non-consensually shoving this content into millions of faces because its black-box algorithm said so.

grishka 2y ago

> Showing people what they like is the best way to get them to come back. There are different usage scenarios of social media. You seem to imply that people use it for entertainment, and yes, the companies themselves sure make them optimized for that. But I want to use social media for staying up to date on my friends' lives and nothing else. Most existing platforms actively resist this use case because it doesn't grow metrics. > I guess your only hope would be to make it illegal, worldwide, to provide algorithmic feeds. Well, at least I'm working on two fediverse projects. There are no algorithms on the fediverse. You see posts from the people you follow, in the order in which they were posted, and nothing else. > We've had influencers at least as long as we've had the written word. That's different. Those "influencers" always became such organically, because people voluntarily spread their "content". This is vastly different from the platform itself stepping in and non-consensually shoving this content into millions of faces because its black-box algorithm said so.