6 ms·
>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platf
by gruez 1y ago
>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.
This is such a HN response. A HN reader might think it's fun to spend a weekend on writing/testing a ranking algorithm, but not the average person. They're just going to use whatever the platform recommends.
- txrx0000 1y agoWe need to ban the platform from recommending at all. It would be like more sophisticated Adblock. There are many providers of Adblock lists, but they can't be provided by the platform itself.
- kiba 1y agoMost people will use the default algorithm. A minority will choose a different algorithm. It's only a partial solution. Really, the correct response is regulatory oversight and taxation on remaining economic rent. They are monopolies, and should be regulated as such.
- philipkglass 1y agoIt's impractical even for tinkerers. YouTube claims to get over 20 million videos uploaded daily and it has well over 10 billion stored videos in its corpus. The metadata alone is tens of terabytes. The usual introduction-to-recommendations approaches out there are going to completely fall over on an item set of this size, even if you have disk space to spare.
- txrx0000 1y agoThe server can deliver a sparsely randomly sampled RSS feed of embedding vectors and metadata. Fetch media after ranking on-device.
- lithocarpus 1y agoIf facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available. I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.
- johnny22 1y agoso how would a user know which one to choose? I already get analysis paralysis as a software dev enough.
- Jensson 1y ago> so how would a user know which one to choose? Word of mouth, that makes peoples needs drive the algorithm rather than profits.
- johnny22 1y agoThat is indeed important, but it's not enough.
- lithocarpus 1y agoSame way people choose what to listen to in other kinds of media most likely. I am constantly asking people who I admire or respect where they get their news/information from because I'm trying to find better ways since the general media landscape is very dismal.