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I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bai

I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem. There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences. Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive.

Lapel2742 11mo ago
> it's how the algorithms promote engagement. They are destroying our democratic societies and should be heavily regulated. The same will become true for AI.
- __MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
  I agree, but focusing on "the algorithm" makes it seems to the outsider like it must be a complicated thing. Really it just comes down to whether we tolerate platforms that let somebody pay to have a louder voice than anyone else (i.e. ad supported ones). Without that, the incentive to abuse people's attention goes away.
- IMTDb 11mo ago
  > should be heavily regulated. By who, exactly? It’s easy to call for regulation when you assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview. Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences. But if picturing that guy running the show feels like a disaster, then let’s be honest: the issue isn’t the absence of regulation, it’s the desire to force the world into your preferred shape. Calling it “regulation” is just a polite veneer over wanting control.
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    I’m surprised at how much regulation has become viewed as a silver bullet in HN comments. Like you said, the implicit assumption in every call for regulation is that the regulation will hurt companies they dislike but leave the sites they enjoy untouched. Whenever I ask what regulations would help, the only responses are extremes like “banning algorithms” or something. Most commenters haven’t stopped to realize that Hacker News is an algorithmic social media site (are we not here socializing with the order of posts and comments determined by black box algorithm?).
    - chasing0entropy 11mo ago
      HN let's you choose what order (active, new, top[actual algorithm]) That's not true of Facebook, new does not show you true posts in order of recency. Reddit still does, bit also injects ads that look like recent posts and actually aren't which is misleading.
      - macintux 11mo ago
        And HN doesn't choose to show you targeted, inflammatory content based on your history. That's a huge difference from Facebook.
        krapp 11mo ago
        Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media don't only want to prevent those platforms from showing targeted inflammatory content, they want to make all algorithmic feeds other than strictly chronological illegal, as well as moderation of any legal content. From that point of view, Hacker News is little different than Facebook. One could even argue that HN's karma system is a dark pattern designed to breed addiction and influence conversation in much the same way as other social media platforms, albeit not to the same degree.
        iwontberude 11mo ago
        At least HN karma is incremental and based on something approximating merit as opposed to being a slot machine where you never know which comment will earn Karma. More effort or rare insight, generally yields more karma.
- vladms 11mo ago
  My view is that they are just exposing issues with the people in the said societies and now is harder to ignore them. Much of the hate and the fear and the envy that I see on social networks have other reasons, but people are having difficulties to address those. With or without social networks this anger will go somewhere, don't think regulation alone can fix that. Let's hope it will be something transformative not in the world ending direction but in the constructive direction.
  - Lapel2742 11mo ago
    They seem to artificially create filter bubbles, echo chambers and rage. They do that just for the money. They divide societies. For example: (Trap of Social Media Algorithms: A Systematic Review of Research on Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Their Impact on Youth) > First, there is a consistent observation across computational audits and simulation studies that platform curation systems amplify ideologically homogeneous content, reinforcing confirmation bias and limiting incidental exposure to diverse viewpoints [1,4,37]. These structural dynamics provide the “default” informational environment in which youth engagement unfolds. Simulation models highlight how small initial biases are magnified by recommender systems, producing polarization cascades at the network level [2,10,38]. Evidence from YouTube demonstrates how personalization drifts toward sensationalist and radical material [14,41,49]. Such findings underscore that algorithmic bias is not a marginal technical quirk but a structural driver shaping everyday media diets. For youth, this environment is especially influential: platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are central not only for entertainment but also for identity work and civic socialization [17]. The narrowing of exposure may thus have longer-term consequences for political learning and civic participation. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/11/301 https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/11/301
  - carlosjobim 11mo ago
    Is hate, fear, or envy by themselves wrong, or only wrong when misdirected? What if social media and the internet at large is now exposing people to things which before ha been kept hidden from them, or distorted? Are people wrong to feel hate? I know the time before the internet, when a very select few decided what the public should know and not know, what they should feel, what they should do and how they should behave. The internet is not the first mass communications, neither are social media or LLMs. The public has been manipulated and mind primed by mass media for over a century now. The largest bloodshed events World War I and II were orchestrated by lunatics screaming in the radio or screaming behind a pulpit, and the public eagerly being herded by them to the bloodshed. This comment isn't in opposition to yours, it's just riffing on what you said.
- area51org 11mo ago
  We've seen what happens when we pretend the market will somehow regulate itself.
  - nradov 11mo ago
    Just because the free market isn't producing results you like doesn't mean that more regulation would make it better.
femiagbabiaka 11mo ago
I know that some folks dislike it, but Bluesky and atproto in particular have provided the perfect tools to achieve this. There are some people, largely those who migrated from Twitter, who mostly treat Bluesky like a all-liberal version of Twitter, which results in a predictably toxic experience, like bizarro-world Twitter. But the future of a less toxic social media is in there, if we want it. I've created my own feeds that allow topics I'm interested in and blacklist those I'm not -- I'm in complete control. For what it's worth, I've also had similarly pleasant experiences using Mastodon, although I don't have the same tools that I do on Bluesky.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- erwincoumans 11mo ago
  I tried Bluesky and wanted to like it. My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why. Ironically it could be another way of loosing ones voice to an LLM :)
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    > My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why. This happened to me too, 3 weeks ago. The email said why I got flagged as spam, I replied to the email explaining I actually was a human, and after some minutes they unflagged my account. Did you not receive an email saying why?
  - femiagbabiaka 11mo ago
    Well that's the thing -- you might be flagged as spam in the Bluesky PDS, but there are other PDS's, with their own feeds and algorithms, and in fact you can make your own if you so choose. That's a lot of work, and Twitter is definitely easier, but atproto means that an LLM cannot steal your voice.
  - fortran77 11mo ago
    If you follow certain people, various communities will, en mass, block you and report you automatically with software "block lists". This can lead to getting flagged as spam.
glitchc 11mo ago
Do LinkedIn as well. I got rid of it earlier this year. The "I am so humbled/blessed to be promoted/reassigned/fired.." posts reached a level of parody that I just couldn't stomach any longer. I felt more free immediately. N.B. Still employed btw.
- UnreachableCode 11mo ago
  LinkedIn bothers me the least, even though it definitely has some of the highest level of cringe content. It's still a good tool to interact with recruiters, look at companies and reach out to their employees. The trick is blocking the feed with a browser extension.
- nathan_compton 11mo ago
  I have a special, deep, loathing for linkedin. I honestly can't believe how horrible it is and I don't understand why people engage with it.
  - amrocha 11mo ago
    You have a special loathing for a site where you can message professional contacts when you need to? Nobody is forcing you to use the social networking features. Just use it as a way to keep in touch with coworkers.
  - hobofan 11mo ago
    I don't understand how people can be so dismissive of LinkedIn purely for its resume function. For essentially every "knowledge worker" profession with a halfway decent CV, a well kept LinkedIn resume can easily make a difference of $X0,000 in yearly salary, and the initial setup takes one to a few hours. It's one of the best ROI actions many could do for their careers. How dismissive many engineers are of doing that and the justifications for that are often full of privilege.
    - glitchc 11mo ago
      I think this statement is highly dependent on market and geography. I, for one, have mostly received scams. For the occassional real contact, we shifted away from LinkedIn as soon as we could after the basic hello.
chemotaxis 11mo ago
> It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. I guess, but I'm on quite a few "algorithm-free" forums where the same thing happens. I think it's just human nature. The reason it's under control on HN is rigorous moderation; when the moderators are asleep, you often see dubious political stuff bubble up. And in the comments, there's often a fair amount of patently incorrect takes and vitriol.
- LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
  I would be intrigued by using an LLM to detect content like this and hold it for moderation. The elevator pitch would be training an LLM to be the moderator because that's what people want to hear, but it's most likely going to end up a moderator's assistant.
  - Propelloni 11mo ago
    It would just become part of the shitshow, cf. Grok.
    - LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
      Which is why you should cancel your Twitter account unless you're on the same page with the guy who owns it, but I digress. if a site wants to cancel any ideology's viewpoint, that site is the one paying the bills and they should have the right to do it. You as a customer have a right to not use that site. The problem is that most of the business currently is a couple of social media sites and the great Mastodon diaspora never really happened. Edit: why do some people think it is their god-given right that should be enforced with government regulation to push their viewpoints into my feed? If I want to hear what you guys have your knickers in a bunch about today, I will seek it out, this is the classic difference between push and pull and push is rarely a good idea. My social media feeds had been reduced to about 30% political crap, 20% things I wanted to hear about, and about 50% ads for something I had either bought in the deep dark past or had once Google searched plus occasionally extremely messed up temu ads. That is why I left.
LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
One could absolutely push algorithms that personalize towards what the user wants to see. I think LLMs could be amazing at this. But that's not the maximally profitable algorithm, so nobody does it. As so many have said, enragement equals engagement equals profit. All my social media accounts are gone as well. They did nothing for me and no longer serve any purpose. TBF Bluesky does offer a chronological feed, but the well-intentioned blocklists just became the chief tool for the mean girls of the site.
- anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
  Could someone use a third-party AI agent to re-curate their feeds? If it was running from the user's computer I think this would avoid any API legal issues, as otherwise ad and script blockers would have been declared illegal long ago. > but the well-intentioned blocklists just became the chief tool for the mean girls of the site. I've never used it, but yes this is what I expected. It would be better to have topical lists that users could manually choose to follow or block. This would avoid quite a bit of the "mean girl" selectivity. Though I suppose you'd get some weird search-engine-optimization like behavior from some of the list curators (even worse if anyone could add to the list).
  - LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
    Yes, you absolutely can do this and back in the before times Facebook used to have an API that let you design your own interface to it. But now I think that will be treated with as much derision by FAANG as ad blockers because you're preventing them from enraging you to keep you engaged and afraid. Why won't you think of the shareholder value (tm)? But mandating API access would be fantastic government regulation going forward. Don't hold your breath.
rdtsc 11mo ago
> I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. I never signed up for Facebook or Twitter. My joke is I am waiting until they become good. They are still shitty and toxic from what I can tell from the outside, so I'll wait a little longer ;-)
- criddell 11mo ago
  A social network can be great. Social media — usually not. Something like Instagram where you have to meet with the other party in person to follow each other and a hard limit on the number of people you follow or follow you (say, 150 each) could be an interesting thing. It would be hard to monetize, but I could see it being a positive force.
- amrocha 11mo ago
  Your loss. Twitter was an incredible place from 2010 to 2017. You could randomly message something and they would more often than not respond. Eventually an opportunity would come and you’d meet in person. Or maybe you’d form an online community and work towards a common goal. Twitter was the best place on the internet during that time. Facebook as well had a golden age. It was the place to organize events, parties, and meetups, before instagram and DMs took over. Nothing beats seeing someone post an album from last nights party and messaging your friends asking them if they remember anything that happened. I know being cynical is trendy, but you genuinely missed out. Social dynamics have changed. Social media will never be as positive on an individual level as it was back then.
  - Animats 11mo ago
    Reddit may be next. The number of "promoted" items is increasing.
Aurornis 11mo ago
> Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive. I’m not the biggest Twitter user but I didn’t find it that difficult to get what I wanted out of it. You already discovered the secret: You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. Unfollow people who are talking a lot about Brexit If you want to see more of something, engage with it. Click like. Follow those people. Leave a friendly comment. On the other hand, some people are better off deleting social media if they can’t control their impulses to engage with bait. If you find yourself getting angry at the Brexit content showing up and feeling compelled to add your two cents with a comment or like, then I suppose deleting your account is the only viable option.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  I got out of Twitter for a few reasons; part of what made it unpleasant was that it didn't seem to be just what I did that adjusted my feed, but that it was also affected by what the other people I connected to did.
- catlover76 11mo ago
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- Uehreka 11mo ago
  > You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. The algorithm doesn’t show you “more of the things you engage with”, and acting like it does makes people think what they’re seeing is a reflection of who they are, which is incorrect. The designers of these algorithms are trying to figure out which “mainstream category” you are. And if you aren’t in one, it’s harder to advertise to you, so they want to sand down your rough edges until you fit into one. You can spend years posting prolificly about open source software, Blender and VFX on Instagram, and the algorithm will toss you a couple of things, but it won’t really know what to do with you (aside from maybe selling you some stock video packages). But you make one three word comment about Brexit and the algorithm goes “GOTCHA! YOU’RE ANTI-BREXIT! WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THAT!” And now you’re opted into 3 bug ad categories and getting force-fed ragebait to keep you engaged, since you’re clearly a huge poltical junky. Now your feed is trash forever, unless you engage with content from another mainstream category (like Marvel movies or one of the recent TikTok memes).
binary132 11mo ago
>it’s not just X — it’s Y
jjtheblunt 11mo ago
an interesting thing about Twitter, I find, is that plenty of rage bait and narcissism bait surface, but amid very highly technical information which is also published there, and extremely useful (immunology, genomics, and of course computational) to me. i've learned pretty well how to 'guide' the algorithm so the tech stuff that's super valuable (to me) does not vanish, but still get nonsense bozo posts in the mix.
drbojingle 11mo ago
No, there needs to be control over the algorithms that get used. You ought to be able to tune it. There needs to be a Google fuu equivalent for social media. Or, instead of one platform one algorithm, let users define the algorithm to a certain degree, using llms to help with that and then you can allow others to access your algorithms too. Asking for someone Facebook to tweak the algorithm is not going to help imo.
- rcxdude 11mo ago
  IMO there should not be an algorithm. You should just get what you have subscribed to, with whatever filters you have defined. There are better and worse algorithms but I think the meat of the rot is the expectation of an algorithm determining 90% of what you see.
  - drbojingle 11mo ago
    Dude that's an algorithm.
    - rcxdude 11mo ago
      Not in the sense that it's commonly used in this context. It's not a recommendation algorithm pulling from the whole platform based on what you're doing, it's far more controllable, deterministic process which only does what you explicitly request.
anon191928 11mo ago
on the opposite site, you know what they say, "there is no algo. for truth"
ashtakeaway 11mo ago
That's the same algorithm Youtube has and is more blatant. Phone mics and your coworker's proximity does a great job at picking up things you've said even after disabling mic access plus airplane mode just by process of elimination. I'll only use an LLM for projects and building tools, like a junior dev in their 20s.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
carlosjobim 11mo ago
Your facebook feed is now at this URL: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
donbox 11mo ago
Just started using Minifeed (free account). I am still nostalgic about Google Reader.
shevy-java 11mo ago
I eliminated twitter when a certain rich guy took over. Actually, I deleted my account there before, as twitter sent me spam mail trying to lecture me what I write. There was nothing wrong with what I wrote - twitter was wrong. I can not accept AI-generated spam by twitter, so I went away. Don't really miss it either, but Elon really worsened the platform significantly with his antics. > Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive. Yeah, I can relate to this, but mostly what annoyed me was that twitter interfered "we got a complaint about you - they are right, you are a troublemaker". I don't understand why twitter wants to interfere into communication. Reddit is even worse, since moderators have such a wild range of what is "acceptable" and what is not. Double-standards everywhere on reddit.
immibis 11mo ago
I call it AI slop and human slop.

Lapel2742 11mo ago

> it's how the algorithms promote engagement. They are destroying our democratic societies and should be heavily regulated. The same will become true for AI.

__MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
I agree, but focusing on "the algorithm" makes it seems to the outsider like it must be a complicated thing. Really it just comes down to whether we tolerate platforms that let somebody pay to have a louder voice than anyone else (i.e. ad supported ones). Without that, the incentive to abuse people's attention goes away.
IMTDb 11mo ago
> should be heavily regulated. By who, exactly? It’s easy to call for regulation when you assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview. Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences. But if picturing that guy running the show feels like a disaster, then let’s be honest: the issue isn’t the absence of regulation, it’s the desire to force the world into your preferred shape. Calling it “regulation” is just a polite veneer over wanting control.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  I’m surprised at how much regulation has become viewed as a silver bullet in HN comments. Like you said, the implicit assumption in every call for regulation is that the regulation will hurt companies they dislike but leave the sites they enjoy untouched. Whenever I ask what regulations would help, the only responses are extremes like “banning algorithms” or something. Most commenters haven’t stopped to realize that Hacker News is an algorithmic social media site (are we not here socializing with the order of posts and comments determined by black box algorithm?).
  - chasing0entropy 11mo ago
    HN let's you choose what order (active, new, top[actual algorithm]) That's not true of Facebook, new does not show you true posts in order of recency. Reddit still does, bit also injects ads that look like recent posts and actually aren't which is misleading.
    - macintux 11mo ago
      And HN doesn't choose to show you targeted, inflammatory content based on your history. That's a huge difference from Facebook.
      - krapp 11mo ago
        Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media don't only want to prevent those platforms from showing targeted inflammatory content, they want to make all algorithmic feeds other than strictly chronological illegal, as well as moderation of any legal content. From that point of view, Hacker News is little different than Facebook. One could even argue that HN's karma system is a dark pattern designed to breed addiction and influence conversation in much the same way as other social media platforms, albeit not to the same degree.
        iwontberude 11mo ago
        At least HN karma is incremental and based on something approximating merit as opposed to being a slot machine where you never know which comment will earn Karma. More effort or rare insight, generally yields more karma.
vladms 11mo ago
My view is that they are just exposing issues with the people in the said societies and now is harder to ignore them. Much of the hate and the fear and the envy that I see on social networks have other reasons, but people are having difficulties to address those. With or without social networks this anger will go somewhere, don't think regulation alone can fix that. Let's hope it will be something transformative not in the world ending direction but in the constructive direction.
- Lapel2742 11mo ago
  They seem to artificially create filter bubbles, echo chambers and rage. They do that just for the money. They divide societies. For example: (Trap of Social Media Algorithms: A Systematic Review of Research on Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Their Impact on Youth) > First, there is a consistent observation across computational audits and simulation studies that platform curation systems amplify ideologically homogeneous content, reinforcing confirmation bias and limiting incidental exposure to diverse viewpoints [1,4,37]. These structural dynamics provide the “default” informational environment in which youth engagement unfolds. Simulation models highlight how small initial biases are magnified by recommender systems, producing polarization cascades at the network level [2,10,38]. Evidence from YouTube demonstrates how personalization drifts toward sensationalist and radical material [14,41,49]. Such findings underscore that algorithmic bias is not a marginal technical quirk but a structural driver shaping everyday media diets. For youth, this environment is especially influential: platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are central not only for entertainment but also for identity work and civic socialization [17]. The narrowing of exposure may thus have longer-term consequences for political learning and civic participation. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/11/301 https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/11/301
- carlosjobim 11mo ago
  Is hate, fear, or envy by themselves wrong, or only wrong when misdirected? What if social media and the internet at large is now exposing people to things which before ha been kept hidden from them, or distorted? Are people wrong to feel hate? I know the time before the internet, when a very select few decided what the public should know and not know, what they should feel, what they should do and how they should behave. The internet is not the first mass communications, neither are social media or LLMs. The public has been manipulated and mind primed by mass media for over a century now. The largest bloodshed events World War I and II were orchestrated by lunatics screaming in the radio or screaming behind a pulpit, and the public eagerly being herded by them to the bloodshed. This comment isn't in opposition to yours, it's just riffing on what you said.
area51org 11mo ago
We've seen what happens when we pretend the market will somehow regulate itself.
- nradov 11mo ago
  Just because the free market isn't producing results you like doesn't mean that more regulation would make it better.

femiagbabiaka 11mo ago

I know that some folks dislike it, but Bluesky and atproto in particular have provided the perfect tools to achieve this. There are some people, largely those who migrated from Twitter, who mostly treat Bluesky like a all-liberal version of Twitter, which results in a predictably toxic experience, like bizarro-world Twitter. But the future of a less toxic social media is in there, if we want it. I've created my own feeds that allow topics I'm interested in and blacklist those I'm not -- I'm in complete control. For what it's worth, I've also had similarly pleasant experiences using Mastodon, although I don't have the same tools that I do on Bluesky.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
erwincoumans 11mo ago
I tried Bluesky and wanted to like it. My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why. Ironically it could be another way of loosing ones voice to an LLM :)
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why. This happened to me too, 3 weeks ago. The email said why I got flagged as spam, I replied to the email explaining I actually was a human, and after some minutes they unflagged my account. Did you not receive an email saying why?
- femiagbabiaka 11mo ago
  Well that's the thing -- you might be flagged as spam in the Bluesky PDS, but there are other PDS's, with their own feeds and algorithms, and in fact you can make your own if you so choose. That's a lot of work, and Twitter is definitely easier, but atproto means that an LLM cannot steal your voice.
- fortran77 11mo ago
  If you follow certain people, various communities will, en mass, block you and report you automatically with software "block lists". This can lead to getting flagged as spam.

glitchc 11mo ago

Do LinkedIn as well. I got rid of it earlier this year. The "I am so humbled/blessed to be promoted/reassigned/fired.." posts reached a level of parody that I just couldn't stomach any longer. I felt more free immediately. N.B. Still employed btw.

UnreachableCode 11mo ago
LinkedIn bothers me the least, even though it definitely has some of the highest level of cringe content. It's still a good tool to interact with recruiters, look at companies and reach out to their employees. The trick is blocking the feed with a browser extension.
nathan_compton 11mo ago
I have a special, deep, loathing for linkedin. I honestly can't believe how horrible it is and I don't understand why people engage with it.
- amrocha 11mo ago
  You have a special loathing for a site where you can message professional contacts when you need to? Nobody is forcing you to use the social networking features. Just use it as a way to keep in touch with coworkers.
- hobofan 11mo ago
  I don't understand how people can be so dismissive of LinkedIn purely for its resume function. For essentially every "knowledge worker" profession with a halfway decent CV, a well kept LinkedIn resume can easily make a difference of $X0,000 in yearly salary, and the initial setup takes one to a few hours. It's one of the best ROI actions many could do for their careers. How dismissive many engineers are of doing that and the justifications for that are often full of privilege.
  - glitchc 11mo ago
    I think this statement is highly dependent on market and geography. I, for one, have mostly received scams. For the occassional real contact, we shifted away from LinkedIn as soon as we could after the basic hello.

chemotaxis 11mo ago

> It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. I guess, but I'm on quite a few "algorithm-free" forums where the same thing happens. I think it's just human nature. The reason it's under control on HN is rigorous moderation; when the moderators are asleep, you often see dubious political stuff bubble up. And in the comments, there's often a fair amount of patently incorrect takes and vitriol.

LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
I would be intrigued by using an LLM to detect content like this and hold it for moderation. The elevator pitch would be training an LLM to be the moderator because that's what people want to hear, but it's most likely going to end up a moderator's assistant.
- Propelloni 11mo ago
  It would just become part of the shitshow, cf. Grok.
  - LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
    Which is why you should cancel your Twitter account unless you're on the same page with the guy who owns it, but I digress. if a site wants to cancel any ideology's viewpoint, that site is the one paying the bills and they should have the right to do it. You as a customer have a right to not use that site. The problem is that most of the business currently is a couple of social media sites and the great Mastodon diaspora never really happened. Edit: why do some people think it is their god-given right that should be enforced with government regulation to push their viewpoints into my feed? If I want to hear what you guys have your knickers in a bunch about today, I will seek it out, this is the classic difference between push and pull and push is rarely a good idea. My social media feeds had been reduced to about 30% political crap, 20% things I wanted to hear about, and about 50% ads for something I had either bought in the deep dark past or had once Google searched plus occasionally extremely messed up temu ads. That is why I left.

LogicFailsMe 11mo ago

One could absolutely push algorithms that personalize towards what the user wants to see. I think LLMs could be amazing at this. But that's not the maximally profitable algorithm, so nobody does it. As so many have said, enragement equals engagement equals profit. All my social media accounts are gone as well. They did nothing for me and no longer serve any purpose. TBF Bluesky does offer a chronological feed, but the well-intentioned blocklists just became the chief tool for the mean girls of the site.

anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
Could someone use a third-party AI agent to re-curate their feeds? If it was running from the user's computer I think this would avoid any API legal issues, as otherwise ad and script blockers would have been declared illegal long ago. > but the well-intentioned blocklists just became the chief tool for the mean girls of the site. I've never used it, but yes this is what I expected. It would be better to have topical lists that users could manually choose to follow or block. This would avoid quite a bit of the "mean girl" selectivity. Though I suppose you'd get some weird search-engine-optimization like behavior from some of the list curators (even worse if anyone could add to the list).
- LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
  Yes, you absolutely can do this and back in the before times Facebook used to have an API that let you design your own interface to it. But now I think that will be treated with as much derision by FAANG as ad blockers because you're preventing them from enraging you to keep you engaged and afraid. Why won't you think of the shareholder value (tm)? But mandating API access would be fantastic government regulation going forward. Don't hold your breath.

rdtsc 11mo ago

> I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. I never signed up for Facebook or Twitter. My joke is I am waiting until they become good. They are still shitty and toxic from what I can tell from the outside, so I'll wait a little longer ;-)

criddell 11mo ago
A social network can be great. Social media — usually not. Something like Instagram where you have to meet with the other party in person to follow each other and a hard limit on the number of people you follow or follow you (say, 150 each) could be an interesting thing. It would be hard to monetize, but I could see it being a positive force.
amrocha 11mo ago
Your loss. Twitter was an incredible place from 2010 to 2017. You could randomly message something and they would more often than not respond. Eventually an opportunity would come and you’d meet in person. Or maybe you’d form an online community and work towards a common goal. Twitter was the best place on the internet during that time. Facebook as well had a golden age. It was the place to organize events, parties, and meetups, before instagram and DMs took over. Nothing beats seeing someone post an album from last nights party and messaging your friends asking them if they remember anything that happened. I know being cynical is trendy, but you genuinely missed out. Social dynamics have changed. Social media will never be as positive on an individual level as it was back then.
- Animats 11mo ago
  Reddit may be next. The number of "promoted" items is increasing.

Aurornis 11mo ago

> Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive. I’m not the biggest Twitter user but I didn’t find it that difficult to get what I wanted out of it. You already discovered the secret: You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. Unfollow people who are talking a lot about Brexit If you want to see more of something, engage with it. Click like. Follow those people. Leave a friendly comment. On the other hand, some people are better off deleting social media if they can’t control their impulses to engage with bait. If you find yourself getting angry at the Brexit content showing up and feeling compelled to add your two cents with a comment or like, then I suppose deleting your account is the only viable option.

ben_w 11mo ago
I got out of Twitter for a few reasons; part of what made it unpleasant was that it didn't seem to be just what I did that adjusted my feed, but that it was also affected by what the other people I connected to did.
catlover76 11mo ago
[dead]
Uehreka 11mo ago
> You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. The algorithm doesn’t show you “more of the things you engage with”, and acting like it does makes people think what they’re seeing is a reflection of who they are, which is incorrect. The designers of these algorithms are trying to figure out which “mainstream category” you are. And if you aren’t in one, it’s harder to advertise to you, so they want to sand down your rough edges until you fit into one. You can spend years posting prolificly about open source software, Blender and VFX on Instagram, and the algorithm will toss you a couple of things, but it won’t really know what to do with you (aside from maybe selling you some stock video packages). But you make one three word comment about Brexit and the algorithm goes “GOTCHA! YOU’RE ANTI-BREXIT! WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THAT!” And now you’re opted into 3 bug ad categories and getting force-fed ragebait to keep you engaged, since you’re clearly a huge poltical junky. Now your feed is trash forever, unless you engage with content from another mainstream category (like Marvel movies or one of the recent TikTok memes).

binary132 11mo ago

>it’s not just X — it’s Y

jjtheblunt 11mo ago

an interesting thing about Twitter, I find, is that plenty of rage bait and narcissism bait surface, but amid very highly technical information which is also published there, and extremely useful (immunology, genomics, and of course computational) to me. i've learned pretty well how to 'guide' the algorithm so the tech stuff that's super valuable (to me) does not vanish, but still get nonsense bozo posts in the mix.

drbojingle 11mo ago

No, there needs to be control over the algorithms that get used. You ought to be able to tune it. There needs to be a Google fuu equivalent for social media. Or, instead of one platform one algorithm, let users define the algorithm to a certain degree, using llms to help with that and then you can allow others to access your algorithms too. Asking for someone Facebook to tweak the algorithm is not going to help imo.

rcxdude 11mo ago
IMO there should not be an algorithm. You should just get what you have subscribed to, with whatever filters you have defined. There are better and worse algorithms but I think the meat of the rot is the expectation of an algorithm determining 90% of what you see.
- drbojingle 11mo ago
  Dude that's an algorithm.
  - rcxdude 11mo ago
    Not in the sense that it's commonly used in this context. It's not a recommendation algorithm pulling from the whole platform based on what you're doing, it's far more controllable, deterministic process which only does what you explicitly request.

anon191928 11mo ago

on the opposite site, you know what they say, "there is no algo. for truth"

ashtakeaway 11mo ago

That's the same algorithm Youtube has and is more blatant. Phone mics and your coworker's proximity does a great job at picking up things you've said even after disabling mic access plus airplane mode just by process of elimination. I'll only use an LLM for projects and building tools, like a junior dev in their 20s.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

carlosjobim 11mo ago

Your facebook feed is now at this URL: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr

donbox 11mo ago

Just started using Minifeed (free account). I am still nostalgic about Google Reader.

shevy-java 11mo ago

I eliminated twitter when a certain rich guy took over. Actually, I deleted my account there before, as twitter sent me spam mail trying to lecture me what I write. There was nothing wrong with what I wrote - twitter was wrong. I can not accept AI-generated spam by twitter, so I went away. Don't really miss it either, but Elon really worsened the platform significantly with his antics. > Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive. Yeah, I can relate to this, but mostly what annoyed me was that twitter interfered "we got a complaint about you - they are right, you are a troublemaker". I don't understand why twitter wants to interfere into communication. Reddit is even worse, since moderators have such a wild range of what is "acceptable" and what is not. Double-standards everywhere on reddit.

immibis 11mo ago

I call it AI slop and human slop.