6 ms·

The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

173 points by _p2zi 1y ago

jmclnx 1y ago
Nice, there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) which I went to over the last few years. But yes, I agree pretty much with the whole article.
- NegativeK 1y ago
  Thanks for linking this! I've never heard of Gemini before now, and it definitely appeals to a lot of what I want in on the internet.
NegativeK 1y ago
I appreciate the advice at the bottom, but I'd love to hear more about what other people suggest for finding content that isn't algorithm based. Relatively niche but traditional bulletin board forums are good. Recent posts to the top do tend make some threads be attention hogs, but there's a human mod in the loop if the forum is small enough. I suppose chats (usually Discord) also fall into this as well. A smaller community there can be similar to a smaller community on Mastodon, forums, etc. Any other thoughts? How do people discover new blogs? Side note, I think I realized or came to the belief about 10 years ago that large groups of humans suck. Moderation becomes impractical or ineffective; content discovery becomes manipulated like this post is talking about. Similarly, large communities on a monolithic platform have to be monetized -- which results in clickbait of a sorts to maintain engagement.
- jen729w 1y ago
  Small-blog-aggregators like Kottke are a goldmine. The trick, of course, is to remember to follow the interesting people he surfaces. And RSS. It never went away. Just use RSS.
  - NegativeK 1y ago
    Long live RSS.
- apsurd 1y ago
  Private group chats are the new social networks. It's apples and oranges but I think for people that really don't want to be "on social media" the alternative is to keep engagement with close friends on a group-by-group basis. So whatever they share on there is how I get my social-media awareness. It's basically intentionally a very very narrow filter. It has to be. Then, subscribe to paid publications, journalism, podcasts, newsletters.
  - ncr100 1y ago
    Agreed. And I feel society could go further in acknowledging the evolution of social networks. They border on surrogate families, at this point. Q: So, are there terms for the rules which are implicit or explicit, that apply to joiners of these private chat groups? Pseudo-kids?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
intrasight 1y ago
I started using RSS. Not so much of the enshittification there. In fact it is sort of like using the web of 20 years ago.
- renegade-otter 1y ago
  I am all about newsletters and RSS feeds now. The internet is so much nicer. F--k the algorithms.
  - kilroy123 1y ago
    I run a newsletter for this exact reason. No algorithms. Just straight to the users 5 days a week.
- DanOpcode 1y ago
  Yeah, same here for the same reason. I installed FreshRSS in a Docker container on my home-server, found some blogs, and now that's what I'm subscribed to and reading.
wslh 1y ago
Much before. Why SEO, SEM, AdWords, etc are not mentioned?
Apocryphon 1y ago
Ironically I saw this video, which didn’t come up with the thesis, that blogs were the first domino that led to the modern internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Jz4dt_eLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Jz4dt_eLk
whycome 1y ago
The article mentions "Technology Connections titled 'Algorithms Are Breaking How We Think'" I'm a huge fan of the channel, and that video is mostly great and insightful. But his being "puzzled" at the way people use the subscriptions "feed" is kinda surprising. The low percentaged from that feed should lead to asking questions to understand why, instead of assuming people are "doing it wrong". People use subscriptions as a sort of meta bookmarking system. It's also a way of honing their algorithm. People can have a wide variety of interests. Just because someone is subscribed to a channel on anime doesn't mean it's the thing they're looking for at the time they dip into that feed. And some channels just fill the feed up with posts that don't always necessitate the work of pruning it. So, that firehose ends up being a lot of noise. The ideal would be some sort of in-between. Where you can pare down the subscriptions feed based on a current interest. One doesn't need to see the very latest post by a creator of they aren't someone who is chronically online. I think we will still see the emergence of "human algorithms" that personally curate content for you.
- al_borland 1y ago
  Some of it has to do with app defaults. When you load up YouTube it doesn’t go to the subscriptions, it goes to the Recommended page. It has enough of the new videos from subscribed channels people watch, plus enough of the new videos from channels they commonly watch without a subscription, that people have no reason to go to the Subscriptions page. Launching from the Subscriptions is an intentional act by people who are actively trying to avoid the Recommendation page, or where the Recommendation page failed to surface what they wanted. I would not be at all surprised if any using of the Subscriptions page triggered YouTube to adjust their algorithm for that user to see more of what they played on the Recommendation page. They probably see the use of the Subscriptions as a failure of the Recommendation engine. For a short while my YouTube app on my AppleTV was showing Watch Later and Subscriptions when it launched. I loved it. I assume they were just A/B testing, because it stopped doing that after a while.
  - xbmcuser 1y ago
    I have set my history to be deleted for YouTube after just 3 months. This does surface some videos I have already watched but most recommendations are usually more from my subscriptions
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
the_af 1y ago
I agree with the sentiment, and I do have a blog (of which I'm the only visitor as I don't advertise it). However... for me, the communities come first. I mean I do have a goal in my internet usage, and this goal comes before any principled stands (mostly; there are exceptions). So if, for example, the hobby communities around games and crafts I enjoy form in Facebook, what can I do? Facebook sucks as a platform, but I want to be in those communities because I enjoy being part of them. It's a trap, but one where there's no easy way out. As for YouTube: my search history and the algorithm are my main use of YT; I wouldn't dream of turning them off. Because I basically use it for two things, my hobby things (subscribed to several channels I like) and watching cartoon clips with my daughter, all the algorithm ever recommends me is exactly those two things: cartoon clips and things related to my hobbies. Never rage bait, never random nonsense. When I click accidentally on rage bait inducing stuff, I remove it from my watch history; I know this isn't perfect but it works in the sense I don't get recommended that crap. Also, YouTube Premium because I can't stand ads. Yes, I'm aware I'm paying the mafia thugs to leave me alone. It sucks. This is no defense of YouTube, I know it can turn to shit any minute, but at least for me the algorithm works. The one thing that is absolutely driving me nuts is the AI-driven en-slopification of the internet. I wish AI got magically banned from most venues. I want to interact with humans and human-created stuff, not AI spam. I think this is a battle that cannot be won, to my eternal sadness. Again I must repeat I do agree with the sentiment of the blog post, and I wish the internet got de-enshitified again. I'm not sure it's that easy though.
- rmunn 1y ago
  > Also, YouTube Premium because I can't stand ads. Yes, I'm aware I'm paying the mafia thugs to leave me alone. It sucks. uBlock Origin has been able to block 100% of Youtube ads in my experience so far; granted I don't visit Youtube all the time. I also use yt-dlp to download videos so that I can timeshift them and watch them later when I'm not connected to WiFi and yet not burn through my phone data. This also happens to exclude ads, though that's not my primary purpose in using it.
  - rmunn 1y ago
    BTW, I'm aware that yt-dlp is against Youtube's terms of service, but in America, the right to timeshift a broadcast was well-established in the days of VCRs by multiple court precedents. It has never been tested in court whether that right would also apply to Youtube and downloading videos from Youtube for the purpose of timeshifting, but IMHO it would apply, so I'm doing it. Also, while Youtube claims that adblockers are also against their Terms of Service, if you actually go read https://www.youtube.com/t/terms https://www.youtube.com/t/terms you'll see that their claim is not supported by the actual language of their ToS. They forbid you to "access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content" without their express permission. But adblocking is not altering the Content of the service, it's blocking certain videos while letting other videos through. If there was a service that detected "here's a word from our sponsors" parts of the video and removed them, that would be altering Content. But the ads are not part of any given video, rather they're external videos inserted at certain points into the video you're watching. Selectively blocking video A while watching video B is not forbidden by any part of Youtube's Terms of Service. So go ahead and use uBlock Origin with a clear conscience, unless you can find the part of their Terms of Service that actually forbids blocking certain videos while letting others through.
sjdhshjd 1y ago
I’m all for human-written content. But, AI search is here. When you write for hours will it be just to have AI quote or amalgamate it, so you can have a link sit by it that few will click on? Or will you submit it to some old Yahoo-like index, HN, or peer-messaging app that reaches maybe typically 10 people typically or 100,000 once for your 15 minutes of fame? When you write something fairly long, don’t do it for the clicks, unless you need the money. If you have something to say that’s that you think is important, sure, write it, but don’t bet on anything but making a few people mad. Do it because it’s what you want to do. AI can’t take that away from you, yet. I’m sure I’ve recently read something great that was written by AI, though. It’s not all slop. It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon.
- themafia 1y ago
  > it be just to have AI quote or amalgamate it We'd call that simple plagiarism or copyright violation in any other context. > unless you need the money Who doesn't need money? Also shouldn't the people spending the money decide who gets it? > AI can’t take that away from you, yet. AI isn't taking anything. Google is. Consciously. > It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon. Who told you that? Google? You see the flaw in that strategy?
- lurk2 1y ago
  The big losers with AI are people who try to monetize user contributions. Users themselves were already making contributions to Reddit, StackOverflow, and Wikipedia for free. Traditional bloggers (not the Google AdWords people) wouldn’t care where you read your ideas, so long as you were reading them. In this day and age, a blog is like music; if I can’t engage with it for free, I’m probably not going to engage with it at all.
LAC-Tech 1y ago
White Pill: My personal website now gets more traffic than my LinkedIn posts do, and A LOT more traffic than my LinkedIn profile does. The algorithmic black box sites may be good for driving traffic, but that doesn't mean they're good at driving traffic to you.
xyzelement 1y ago
I am friends with a lot of religious people and they are rocking technology right now. They use the internet purposefully - eg following rabbis who have a reputation that they found out about from someone in person. It's very old school and kinda cool to see people use technology and feel elevated rather than denigrated by it.
- startupsfail 1y ago
  This is great to hear. Churches are often in the prime real estate areas, it'd be great, if the attendance / donations would fall to zero. And if these places would be redeveloped into open-for-all urban green islands. Rather than exclusive worship clubs.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - xyzelement 1y ago
    I am unsure what your comment has to do with mine. But I disagree with your value judgement. Open spaces are great - but men and women who believe in something greater than themselves is what makes the world go round. Looking at fertility rates between religious and atheists, we'll need these churches and temples in the next generations.
    - startupsfail 1y ago
      That's an interesting argument, about believing in something greater than themselves. But what, if that belief happens to be outdated? This had happened before. I'm not into demographics planning. But I do have two kids, girls. I certainly want them to have as much autonomy as they could have. A religious argument regarding "fertility rates" that need to be increased is not aligned with that. I love green spaces. So I simply want to see churches gone, because they compete for the same (very limited) resource. Using the privilege of being grandfathered in. If they'll move their activity online, it'll not be the case. So I'm happy to see this happening.
ExMachina73 1y ago
https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb
- lurk2 1y ago
  Context?
unangst 1y ago
Our collective (‘free’) doomscrolling comes with an actual cost: we are the product being served. Reminds me of the last line of R.E.M.’s ‘Radio Song’ (1991)… “Now our children grow up prisoners All their life, radio listeners” < https://open.spotify.com/track/5UBeN0XvvIvnEjyp6uThr4?si=V_Qvd8xlQUugbcLa8SMyfQ https://open.spotify.com/track/5UBeN0XvvIvnEjyp6uThr4?si=V_Q...>
foxfired 1y ago
I've been steadily watching my Google traffic plummet as AI overviews continue summarizing my content. My search impressions have remain the same though. However, RSS! People have literally emailed me to tell me that they are unsubscribing from my newsletter but "Don't worry, I follow you through RSS." My traffic is larger than ever thanks to RSS. I syndicate the full content, not just a summary, yet people still click and visit my tiny blog. Google traffic, mainstream social media, all of them don't care about my blog. But from time to time, random people send me an email, and that makes up for it.
freddie_mercury 1y ago
I'm not sure "we" traded anything. Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs. Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010[1]. And Technology Connections is only a moderately popular channel. If you look at the bigger channels like Mark Rober it is more like 350x. What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video. It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people. Nothing stops people from writing blogs today. They'll probably even get roughly the same (small) number of readers that blogs pulled back in 2010. [1]: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1999770,00.html https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist...
- jchw 1y ago
  > Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010 That's what's kind of insane, community forums took maybe 20-30 people to feel "active", but you can't get a big enough slice of attention from that many people to actually use forums, even though the Internet has grown massively. Discovery is really hard: it used to be that community websites were able to claw their way up Page Rank, but these days it's just hard to compete with major websites and SEO slop. Even if you manage to snag a few people, they are very likely to drop off quicker, and the "feel" is a lot different when they're all social-media-brained anyway. The proof is in the pudding: most forums are dead, and forums that are still alive are mostly ancient and very obviously less influential and smaller than they once were. People are too distracted by things that actively claw away attention, and people who are drawn in by social media tend to bring a bad kind of energy to traditional forums anyways. It is true that you have bigger audiences nowadays with modern social media. Part of that is just the fact that the Internet is bigger (somewhere between 2x to 3x bigger) but another major part of that is the consolidation. Though, it's also worth noting that comparing YouTube subscribers to blog readers may not give the best representation. Entirely different concepts, for entirely different media.
foobar1962 1y ago
The "old" internet still exists and is alive and well on what I'll call "single issue" web based forums. Photo.net is still here, as are similar groups for cars, bikes, and rabbit holes I have yet to break my ankle in. Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. That changes the dynamic IMHO. People post to seek answers to their questions, or to share their knowledge and answer other people's questions. This is the way. I'd include HN in this group of ye olde internet forums. It does have a mechanism to vote, but it's different and the expectation of the readers are brutal to frivolous posts (of which I have made only couple and paid for dearly).
- jrowen 1y ago
  Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. Those types of forums are great, but just as a counterpoint, I get a lot of that type of value from Facebook Groups as well. There are niche specialty interest groups with people of different skill depths conversing on probably just about anything. It's mixed in with the rest of your Facebook feed most of the time so it is a categorically different experience/"community" than an independent forum but I don't think the "like" mechanics materially affect the discussion in those places.
- lurk2 1y ago
  > Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. I’m not convinced. 4chan doesn’t have any of these mechanisms, so the proxy just becomes the number of replies you receive. The chief benefit of forums is that they are smaller. This is good if the original base of users is good, and untenable if they are bad—and they usually are bad. I always hated forums when I was younger and was glad when Reddit killed them. Of course, Reddit brought its own problems, but even in the state it is in today I find it infinitely preferable to forums.
jrowen 1y ago
We used to use our curiosity to find stuff we liked, which felt more satisfying than any algorithm's statistically-determined aggregation. Today's kids will still do that, in their own way. I'm not convinced there's anything here other than old man and cloud. We did it our way, in our time. I don't think this generation is actually for-reals-this-time the one where technology finally neutered human curiosity and wrecked it all. In the days you speak of the internet was the frontier for the curious and early adopters. The rest of the world caught up and now it's a fully commodified and industrialized space. Nostalgically trying to recreate the early internet isn't the way forward. I don't know what is but I know the kids will find it.
- lurk2 1y ago
  I remember figuring out how Google operators worked (back when they still did) and using them to find mp3s, PDFs, and old servers. The younger people I see on social media are mostly all on the plantation but at least some of them have found creative ways to use it for their own purposes (e.g. evading word filters or building their own communities on direct platforms like Discord or WhatsApp). I see this a lot on Reddit, too (although I’m not sure if the crowd there is young anymore). I think the key issue is that a lot of kids see the internet primarily as something they can make money off of, so they go to the platforms that promise a ready-made audience. When I was younger having anything I put on the internet get even a few hundred views would have had me elated, whereas for an aspiring professional content creator, getting a few hundred views just means that you failed. For those who don’t have these kinds of aspirations, the new meta is group chats; Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter. The advantage here is that the messaging space is highly competitive and users are not going to tolerate receiving their messages in non-chronological order the way they do with their feed; this makes private messaging somewhat future-proof against the worse excesses of social media while still being more accessible than something like IRC.
  - jrowen 1y ago
    With each generation things change, the goalposts get moved. What was cutting edge for us is the default state of the world for them. And things are definitely moving faster than ever before. But human nature does not move that fast. It's arguable that we are largely the same as pre-tech humans. I guarantee that the biological property of human curiosity did not materially shift between our generation and the next. Every generation expresses the sentiment that some form of technology has ruined today's kids because we had it so much harder, we had to do X, whatever. Our parents were saying the same about us. And every time the kids find a way to innovate. I am so so weary of any claim that somehow this time the cycle has been broken. Occam's razor says no, that's just how you feel when you get older. We already know this. To me it's the height of hubris and folly to actually believe "well they really broke the mold with us and now we're doomed."
dangus 1y ago
Especially on this forum, it feels like articles 80%+ identical to this one are posted very frequently. At this point, the web dying in a sea of enshittification is perhaps so much of a trope that people are quite aware. We are surrounded by examples of sometimes mainstream products and services that reflect the way people are shifting their thinking and swinging the pendulum. This survey isn't 100% the same exact topic, but I think that it's an illustration of my point that well over half of Americans say that social media has a negative impact. [1] People know the present state is bad and I think they are starting to take their dollars and eyeballs elsewhere. It's just anecdotal, but the amount of people I know who fully pulled the plug on deleting social media accounts would have seemed incomprehensible 10 years ago. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/15/64-of-americans-say-social-media-have-a-mostly-negative-effect-on-the-way-things-are-going-in-the-u-s-today/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/15/64-of-ame...
lutusp 1y ago
The article makes many good points, it's written by someone who knows how to write an essay, and it mentions Linux. Technology-adept people will always have ways to avoid the prevailing swamp of dark patterns, but that's not corporate America's target anyway -- that target is people who constantly react to things, who don't exercise agency, who don't possess any measurable degree of autonomy. That fact results from our broken educational system. In school, people are trained to surrender their autonomy early on. People aren't being taught how to think, they're being told what to think. And if we don't fix that problem, no later interventions have any hope of succeeding. Few things have simple causes, but this is an exception. Most people are brainless consumers because that's public education's goal. It's not an unintended side effect.
- tavavex 1y ago
  You're talking about a specific educational system ("our" system, "public education's goal"), but what the article is talking about is global. And the world's educational systems vary a lot. Now, yes, the effect is more pronounced in the US, which is probably where some blame can be placed on the educational system. But what can explain the remaining 95% (population-wise) of the world? Maybe the algorithmic curation that's talked about here is enough on its own to prime the average user to behave a certain way. Or maybe humans are just like that and prefer it that way, and we're returning to the mean now that the internet is owned by average people. Either way, this seems to have a lot more complexity and I'm not sure if it can ever be solved at this point.
SnuffBox 1y ago
Yet another internet manifesto that just ends up being "Use FOSS" and little else. Laughed at using Linux to "to make technology fun again"; Using Linux isn't going to turn you into a cyberpunk rebel who has beaten the powers that be. I must also say I dislike the obnoxious "Look at how quirky I am!" 90s web badges on an HTML5 page.
cdavies7 1y ago
> Use RSS reader apps... With that, you've created your own algorithm. I've been thinking about this for a while. How could we both choose our feed sources and tailor our own algorithm? I'm tinkering with this idea at https://www.thecrux.is/ https://www.thecrux.is/
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
I was blown away when I learned that humanity is mining more coal right now than at any point in history. Even though coal mining is supposed to be superseded by renewables. The “small web” is (citation needed) bigger and healthier than ever. Yep, big algorithm feed apps are huge. That doesn’t stop the small stuff from being more huge than it was way back, decades ago, when it was the big game in town. It’s nice to take off the rose colored glasses and look at the present sometimes. The web is awesome - no hacks needed to make your site look amazing; awesome animations or frosted glass effects in one line of CSS; static site generators desperate for you to use their code to write what you care about; blogs with RSS feeds even though RSS is dead. If you believe these awesome things don’t exist you’ll live in that world - but it does actually exist, so you’ll be very much missing out.

173 points by _p2zi 1y ago

Nice, there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) which I went to over the last few years. But yes, I agree pretty much with the whole article.

NegativeK 1y ago
Thanks for linking this! I've never heard of Gemini before now, and it definitely appeals to a lot of what I want in on the internet.

NegativeK 1y ago

I appreciate the advice at the bottom, but I'd love to hear more about what other people suggest for finding content that isn't algorithm based. Relatively niche but traditional bulletin board forums are good. Recent posts to the top do tend make some threads be attention hogs, but there's a human mod in the loop if the forum is small enough. I suppose chats (usually Discord) also fall into this as well. A smaller community there can be similar to a smaller community on Mastodon, forums, etc. Any other thoughts? How do people discover new blogs? Side note, I think I realized or came to the belief about 10 years ago that large groups of humans suck. Moderation becomes impractical or ineffective; content discovery becomes manipulated like this post is talking about. Similarly, large communities on a monolithic platform have to be monetized -- which results in clickbait of a sorts to maintain engagement.

jen729w 1y ago
Small-blog-aggregators like Kottke are a goldmine. The trick, of course, is to remember to follow the interesting people he surfaces. And RSS. It never went away. Just use RSS.
- NegativeK 1y ago
  Long live RSS.
apsurd 1y ago
Private group chats are the new social networks. It's apples and oranges but I think for people that really don't want to be "on social media" the alternative is to keep engagement with close friends on a group-by-group basis. So whatever they share on there is how I get my social-media awareness. It's basically intentionally a very very narrow filter. It has to be. Then, subscribe to paid publications, journalism, podcasts, newsletters.
- ncr100 1y ago
  Agreed. And I feel society could go further in acknowledging the evolution of social networks. They border on surrogate families, at this point. Q: So, are there terms for the rules which are implicit or explicit, that apply to joiners of these private chat groups? Pseudo-kids?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

intrasight 1y ago

I started using RSS. Not so much of the enshittification there. In fact it is sort of like using the web of 20 years ago.

renegade-otter 1y ago
I am all about newsletters and RSS feeds now. The internet is so much nicer. F--k the algorithms.
- kilroy123 1y ago
  I run a newsletter for this exact reason. No algorithms. Just straight to the users 5 days a week.
DanOpcode 1y ago
Yeah, same here for the same reason. I installed FreshRSS in a Docker container on my home-server, found some blogs, and now that's what I'm subscribed to and reading.

wslh 1y ago

Much before. Why SEO, SEM, AdWords, etc are not mentioned?

Apocryphon 1y ago

Ironically I saw this video, which didn’t come up with the thesis, that blogs were the first domino that led to the modern internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Jz4dt_eLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Jz4dt_eLk

whycome 1y ago

The article mentions "Technology Connections titled 'Algorithms Are Breaking How We Think'" I'm a huge fan of the channel, and that video is mostly great and insightful. But his being "puzzled" at the way people use the subscriptions "feed" is kinda surprising. The low percentaged from that feed should lead to asking questions to understand why, instead of assuming people are "doing it wrong". People use subscriptions as a sort of meta bookmarking system. It's also a way of honing their algorithm. People can have a wide variety of interests. Just because someone is subscribed to a channel on anime doesn't mean it's the thing they're looking for at the time they dip into that feed. And some channels just fill the feed up with posts that don't always necessitate the work of pruning it. So, that firehose ends up being a lot of noise. The ideal would be some sort of in-between. Where you can pare down the subscriptions feed based on a current interest. One doesn't need to see the very latest post by a creator of they aren't someone who is chronically online. I think we will still see the emergence of "human algorithms" that personally curate content for you.

al_borland 1y ago
Some of it has to do with app defaults. When you load up YouTube it doesn’t go to the subscriptions, it goes to the Recommended page. It has enough of the new videos from subscribed channels people watch, plus enough of the new videos from channels they commonly watch without a subscription, that people have no reason to go to the Subscriptions page. Launching from the Subscriptions is an intentional act by people who are actively trying to avoid the Recommendation page, or where the Recommendation page failed to surface what they wanted. I would not be at all surprised if any using of the Subscriptions page triggered YouTube to adjust their algorithm for that user to see more of what they played on the Recommendation page. They probably see the use of the Subscriptions as a failure of the Recommendation engine. For a short while my YouTube app on my AppleTV was showing Watch Later and Subscriptions when it launched. I loved it. I assume they were just A/B testing, because it stopped doing that after a while.
- xbmcuser 1y ago
  I have set my history to be deleted for YouTube after just 3 months. This does surface some videos I have already watched but most recommendations are usually more from my subscriptions

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

the_af 1y ago

I agree with the sentiment, and I do have a blog (of which I'm the only visitor as I don't advertise it). However... for me, the communities come first. I mean I do have a goal in my internet usage, and this goal comes before any principled stands (mostly; there are exceptions). So if, for example, the hobby communities around games and crafts I enjoy form in Facebook, what can I do? Facebook sucks as a platform, but I want to be in those communities because I enjoy being part of them. It's a trap, but one where there's no easy way out. As for YouTube: my search history and the algorithm are my main use of YT; I wouldn't dream of turning them off. Because I basically use it for two things, my hobby things (subscribed to several channels I like) and watching cartoon clips with my daughter, all the algorithm ever recommends me is exactly those two things: cartoon clips and things related to my hobbies. Never rage bait, never random nonsense. When I click accidentally on rage bait inducing stuff, I remove it from my watch history; I know this isn't perfect but it works in the sense I don't get recommended that crap. Also, YouTube Premium because I can't stand ads. Yes, I'm aware I'm paying the mafia thugs to leave me alone. It sucks. This is no defense of YouTube, I know it can turn to shit any minute, but at least for me the algorithm works. The one thing that is absolutely driving me nuts is the AI-driven en-slopification of the internet. I wish AI got magically banned from most venues. I want to interact with humans and human-created stuff, not AI spam. I think this is a battle that cannot be won, to my eternal sadness. Again I must repeat I do agree with the sentiment of the blog post, and I wish the internet got de-enshitified again. I'm not sure it's that easy though.

rmunn 1y ago
> Also, YouTube Premium because I can't stand ads. Yes, I'm aware I'm paying the mafia thugs to leave me alone. It sucks. uBlock Origin has been able to block 100% of Youtube ads in my experience so far; granted I don't visit Youtube all the time. I also use yt-dlp to download videos so that I can timeshift them and watch them later when I'm not connected to WiFi and yet not burn through my phone data. This also happens to exclude ads, though that's not my primary purpose in using it.
- rmunn 1y ago
  BTW, I'm aware that yt-dlp is against Youtube's terms of service, but in America, the right to timeshift a broadcast was well-established in the days of VCRs by multiple court precedents. It has never been tested in court whether that right would also apply to Youtube and downloading videos from Youtube for the purpose of timeshifting, but IMHO it would apply, so I'm doing it. Also, while Youtube claims that adblockers are also against their Terms of Service, if you actually go read https://www.youtube.com/t/terms https://www.youtube.com/t/terms you'll see that their claim is not supported by the actual language of their ToS. They forbid you to "access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content" without their express permission. But adblocking is not altering the Content of the service, it's blocking certain videos while letting other videos through. If there was a service that detected "here's a word from our sponsors" parts of the video and removed them, that would be altering Content. But the ads are not part of any given video, rather they're external videos inserted at certain points into the video you're watching. Selectively blocking video A while watching video B is not forbidden by any part of Youtube's Terms of Service. So go ahead and use uBlock Origin with a clear conscience, unless you can find the part of their Terms of Service that actually forbids blocking certain videos while letting others through.

sjdhshjd 1y ago

I’m all for human-written content. But, AI search is here. When you write for hours will it be just to have AI quote or amalgamate it, so you can have a link sit by it that few will click on? Or will you submit it to some old Yahoo-like index, HN, or peer-messaging app that reaches maybe typically 10 people typically or 100,000 once for your 15 minutes of fame? When you write something fairly long, don’t do it for the clicks, unless you need the money. If you have something to say that’s that you think is important, sure, write it, but don’t bet on anything but making a few people mad. Do it because it’s what you want to do. AI can’t take that away from you, yet. I’m sure I’ve recently read something great that was written by AI, though. It’s not all slop. It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon.

themafia 1y ago
> it be just to have AI quote or amalgamate it We'd call that simple plagiarism or copyright violation in any other context. > unless you need the money Who doesn't need money? Also shouldn't the people spending the money decide who gets it? > AI can’t take that away from you, yet. AI isn't taking anything. Google is. Consciously. > It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon. Who told you that? Google? You see the flaw in that strategy?
lurk2 1y ago
The big losers with AI are people who try to monetize user contributions. Users themselves were already making contributions to Reddit, StackOverflow, and Wikipedia for free. Traditional bloggers (not the Google AdWords people) wouldn’t care where you read your ideas, so long as you were reading them. In this day and age, a blog is like music; if I can’t engage with it for free, I’m probably not going to engage with it at all.

LAC-Tech 1y ago

White Pill: My personal website now gets more traffic than my LinkedIn posts do, and A LOT more traffic than my LinkedIn profile does. The algorithmic black box sites may be good for driving traffic, but that doesn't mean they're good at driving traffic to you.

xyzelement 1y ago

I am friends with a lot of religious people and they are rocking technology right now. They use the internet purposefully - eg following rabbis who have a reputation that they found out about from someone in person. It's very old school and kinda cool to see people use technology and feel elevated rather than denigrated by it.

startupsfail 1y ago
This is great to hear. Churches are often in the prime real estate areas, it'd be great, if the attendance / donations would fall to zero. And if these places would be redeveloped into open-for-all urban green islands. Rather than exclusive worship clubs.
- deleted 1y ago
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- xyzelement 1y ago
  I am unsure what your comment has to do with mine. But I disagree with your value judgement. Open spaces are great - but men and women who believe in something greater than themselves is what makes the world go round. Looking at fertility rates between religious and atheists, we'll need these churches and temples in the next generations.
  - startupsfail 1y ago
    That's an interesting argument, about believing in something greater than themselves. But what, if that belief happens to be outdated? This had happened before. I'm not into demographics planning. But I do have two kids, girls. I certainly want them to have as much autonomy as they could have. A religious argument regarding "fertility rates" that need to be increased is not aligned with that. I love green spaces. So I simply want to see churches gone, because they compete for the same (very limited) resource. Using the privilege of being grandfathered in. If they'll move their activity online, it'll not be the case. So I'm happy to see this happening.

ExMachina73 1y ago

https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb

lurk2 1y ago
Context?

unangst 1y ago

Our collective (‘free’) doomscrolling comes with an actual cost: we are the product being served. Reminds me of the last line of R.E.M.’s ‘Radio Song’ (1991)… “Now our children grow up prisoners All their life, radio listeners” < https://open.spotify.com/track/5UBeN0XvvIvnEjyp6uThr4?si=V_Qvd8xlQUugbcLa8SMyfQ https://open.spotify.com/track/5UBeN0XvvIvnEjyp6uThr4?si=V_Q...>

foxfired 1y ago

I've been steadily watching my Google traffic plummet as AI overviews continue summarizing my content. My search impressions have remain the same though. However, RSS! People have literally emailed me to tell me that they are unsubscribing from my newsletter but "Don't worry, I follow you through RSS." My traffic is larger than ever thanks to RSS. I syndicate the full content, not just a summary, yet people still click and visit my tiny blog. Google traffic, mainstream social media, all of them don't care about my blog. But from time to time, random people send me an email, and that makes up for it.

freddie_mercury 1y ago

I'm not sure "we" traded anything. Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs. Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010[1]. And Technology Connections is only a moderately popular channel. If you look at the bigger channels like Mark Rober it is more like 350x. What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video. It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people. Nothing stops people from writing blogs today. They'll probably even get roughly the same (small) number of readers that blogs pulled back in 2010. [1]: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1999770,00.html https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist...

jchw 1y ago
> Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010 That's what's kind of insane, community forums took maybe 20-30 people to feel "active", but you can't get a big enough slice of attention from that many people to actually use forums, even though the Internet has grown massively. Discovery is really hard: it used to be that community websites were able to claw their way up Page Rank, but these days it's just hard to compete with major websites and SEO slop. Even if you manage to snag a few people, they are very likely to drop off quicker, and the "feel" is a lot different when they're all social-media-brained anyway. The proof is in the pudding: most forums are dead, and forums that are still alive are mostly ancient and very obviously less influential and smaller than they once were. People are too distracted by things that actively claw away attention, and people who are drawn in by social media tend to bring a bad kind of energy to traditional forums anyways. It is true that you have bigger audiences nowadays with modern social media. Part of that is just the fact that the Internet is bigger (somewhere between 2x to 3x bigger) but another major part of that is the consolidation. Though, it's also worth noting that comparing YouTube subscribers to blog readers may not give the best representation. Entirely different concepts, for entirely different media.

foobar1962 1y ago

The "old" internet still exists and is alive and well on what I'll call "single issue" web based forums. Photo.net is still here, as are similar groups for cars, bikes, and rabbit holes I have yet to break my ankle in. Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. That changes the dynamic IMHO. People post to seek answers to their questions, or to share their knowledge and answer other people's questions. This is the way. I'd include HN in this group of ye olde internet forums. It does have a mechanism to vote, but it's different and the expectation of the readers are brutal to frivolous posts (of which I have made only couple and paid for dearly).

jrowen 1y ago
Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. Those types of forums are great, but just as a counterpoint, I get a lot of that type of value from Facebook Groups as well. There are niche specialty interest groups with people of different skill depths conversing on probably just about anything. It's mixed in with the rest of your Facebook feed most of the time so it is a categorically different experience/"community" than an independent forum but I don't think the "like" mechanics materially affect the discussion in those places.
lurk2 1y ago
> Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. I’m not convinced. 4chan doesn’t have any of these mechanisms, so the proxy just becomes the number of replies you receive. The chief benefit of forums is that they are smaller. This is good if the original base of users is good, and untenable if they are bad—and they usually are bad. I always hated forums when I was younger and was glad when Reddit killed them. Of course, Reddit brought its own problems, but even in the state it is in today I find it infinitely preferable to forums.

jrowen 1y ago

We used to use our curiosity to find stuff we liked, which felt more satisfying than any algorithm's statistically-determined aggregation. Today's kids will still do that, in their own way. I'm not convinced there's anything here other than old man and cloud. We did it our way, in our time. I don't think this generation is actually for-reals-this-time the one where technology finally neutered human curiosity and wrecked it all. In the days you speak of the internet was the frontier for the curious and early adopters. The rest of the world caught up and now it's a fully commodified and industrialized space. Nostalgically trying to recreate the early internet isn't the way forward. I don't know what is but I know the kids will find it.

lurk2 1y ago
I remember figuring out how Google operators worked (back when they still did) and using them to find mp3s, PDFs, and old servers. The younger people I see on social media are mostly all on the plantation but at least some of them have found creative ways to use it for their own purposes (e.g. evading word filters or building their own communities on direct platforms like Discord or WhatsApp). I see this a lot on Reddit, too (although I’m not sure if the crowd there is young anymore). I think the key issue is that a lot of kids see the internet primarily as something they can make money off of, so they go to the platforms that promise a ready-made audience. When I was younger having anything I put on the internet get even a few hundred views would have had me elated, whereas for an aspiring professional content creator, getting a few hundred views just means that you failed. For those who don’t have these kinds of aspirations, the new meta is group chats; Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter. The advantage here is that the messaging space is highly competitive and users are not going to tolerate receiving their messages in non-chronological order the way they do with their feed; this makes private messaging somewhat future-proof against the worse excesses of social media while still being more accessible than something like IRC.
- jrowen 1y ago
  With each generation things change, the goalposts get moved. What was cutting edge for us is the default state of the world for them. And things are definitely moving faster than ever before. But human nature does not move that fast. It's arguable that we are largely the same as pre-tech humans. I guarantee that the biological property of human curiosity did not materially shift between our generation and the next. Every generation expresses the sentiment that some form of technology has ruined today's kids because we had it so much harder, we had to do X, whatever. Our parents were saying the same about us. And every time the kids find a way to innovate. I am so so weary of any claim that somehow this time the cycle has been broken. Occam's razor says no, that's just how you feel when you get older. We already know this. To me it's the height of hubris and folly to actually believe "well they really broke the mold with us and now we're doomed."

dangus 1y ago

Especially on this forum, it feels like articles 80%+ identical to this one are posted very frequently. At this point, the web dying in a sea of enshittification is perhaps so much of a trope that people are quite aware. We are surrounded by examples of sometimes mainstream products and services that reflect the way people are shifting their thinking and swinging the pendulum. This survey isn't 100% the same exact topic, but I think that it's an illustration of my point that well over half of Americans say that social media has a negative impact. [1] People know the present state is bad and I think they are starting to take their dollars and eyeballs elsewhere. It's just anecdotal, but the amount of people I know who fully pulled the plug on deleting social media accounts would have seemed incomprehensible 10 years ago. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/15/64-of-americans-say-social-media-have-a-mostly-negative-effect-on-the-way-things-are-going-in-the-u-s-today/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/15/64-of-ame...

lutusp 1y ago

The article makes many good points, it's written by someone who knows how to write an essay, and it mentions Linux. Technology-adept people will always have ways to avoid the prevailing swamp of dark patterns, but that's not corporate America's target anyway -- that target is people who constantly react to things, who don't exercise agency, who don't possess any measurable degree of autonomy. That fact results from our broken educational system. In school, people are trained to surrender their autonomy early on. People aren't being taught how to think, they're being told what to think. And if we don't fix that problem, no later interventions have any hope of succeeding. Few things have simple causes, but this is an exception. Most people are brainless consumers because that's public education's goal. It's not an unintended side effect.

tavavex 1y ago
You're talking about a specific educational system ("our" system, "public education's goal"), but what the article is talking about is global. And the world's educational systems vary a lot. Now, yes, the effect is more pronounced in the US, which is probably where some blame can be placed on the educational system. But what can explain the remaining 95% (population-wise) of the world? Maybe the algorithmic curation that's talked about here is enough on its own to prime the average user to behave a certain way. Or maybe humans are just like that and prefer it that way, and we're returning to the mean now that the internet is owned by average people. Either way, this seems to have a lot more complexity and I'm not sure if it can ever be solved at this point.

SnuffBox 1y ago

Yet another internet manifesto that just ends up being "Use FOSS" and little else. Laughed at using Linux to "to make technology fun again"; Using Linux isn't going to turn you into a cyberpunk rebel who has beaten the powers that be. I must also say I dislike the obnoxious "Look at how quirky I am!" 90s web badges on an HTML5 page.

cdavies7 1y ago

> Use RSS reader apps... With that, you've created your own algorithm. I've been thinking about this for a while. How could we both choose our feed sources and tailor our own algorithm? I'm tinkering with this idea at https://www.thecrux.is/ https://www.thecrux.is/

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

I was blown away when I learned that humanity is mining more coal right now than at any point in history. Even though coal mining is supposed to be superseded by renewables. The “small web” is (citation needed) bigger and healthier than ever. Yep, big algorithm feed apps are huge. That doesn’t stop the small stuff from being more huge than it was way back, decades ago, when it was the big game in town. It’s nice to take off the rose colored glasses and look at the present sometimes. The web is awesome - no hacks needed to make your site look amazing; awesome animations or frosted glass effects in one line of CSS; static site generators desperate for you to use their code to write what you care about; blogs with RSS feeds even though RSS is dead. If you believe these awesome things don’t exist you’ll live in that world - but it does actually exist, so you’ll be very much missing out.