8 ms·

The algorithm has been given a job todo. First priority on any platform is engagement and a well functioning, complete human being is not going to be engaged by

• flir 8mo ago
  My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed. I assume the algorithm was shovelling more of them at her because she was rubbernecking. I told her to try a "block every time" approach. It took about two weeks until her feed was (mostly) free of them but it still throws one at her now and again. I offer this as a data point about how hard it is to turn a polluted feed around. But I'm now wondering if "feed cleaning" is a service that could be automated, via LLM.
  • idiotsecant 8mo ago
    I mainly want to clean other people's feeds. There are an enormous amount of people that I need to undergo an algorithm detox.
    • macintux 8mo ago
      Yeah, there's always someone saying "Just delete your Facebook account" as if that solves the underlying "Facebook is actively encouraging divisiveness" problem.
    • Auracle 8mo ago
      My mother-in-laws Facebook feed is full of fake news - from the left, politically. My own mom doesn’t have a Facebook, but she still manages to balance out the universe with fake news from the right on her YouTube feed. The internet is a mistake for a lot of people and I don’t think we can fix that.
  • ipaddr 8mo ago
    How can we complain that everyone is siloed and no one talks to each other and complian that their feed is full of ideas outside of the silo.
    • flir 8mo ago
      Do you think you should have full control over the web browser on the computer you own?
      • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
        “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Having the right to choose what you see doesn't mean you should choose to build yourself an ideological bubble.
        • flir 8mo ago
          I avoid hateful people and pub bores in real life, too. If you use the web without an ad blocker, more power to you, I guess.
          • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
            Assuming that everyone in the other tribe is "hateful people and pub bores" is kind of the problem.
    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago
      What next? The intellectual dark web? I think we can have a free market of ideas or whatever you’re fetishising without it meaning that I can’t sit on the couch and open an app to see some family photos without it being intermingled with some loser saying that trans people should be hanged on the street. And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is where the current political discourse is at. Can I please have the freedom to do that without the lecture?
      • 8mo ago
  • DeathArrow 8mo ago
    I think the feeds depends on the posts you read, even accidentally. My feed is free from extreme left content but I didn't have to block anything. Simply by not reading that kind of content, the algorithm knows I am not interested.
    • flir 8mo ago
      Yes, hence my comment about "rubbernecking". If you tend to slow down for car crashes, the algorithm shows you more car crashes. It amplifies our worst instincts.
      • rightbyte 8mo ago
        That effect also applies when you try to block car crashes. That happened to me years ago with the same genre of videos. Like car crashes and people falling and hurting themself a little bit.
  • jjav 8mo ago
    > My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed. This is what is so difficult in facebook vs. HN. Here if people post angry insulting rants, it gets collectively downvoted to oblivion. That is effective. On facebook there is no equivalent. All I can do is block an individual, but I personally have to do it for every offensive person, which is for practical purposes impossible. Facebooks needs a downvote button and an option to hide any comments which have N downvotes.
    • scotty79 8mo ago
      "I'm not interested" and "Don't show posts from this person" is the dowvote button for the algorithm. If you use those functions liberally your feed gets pretty clean and aligned.
      • michaelt 8mo ago
        Except here on HN, other people take care of the downvoting for me. I only have to reach for the downvote button a few times a year. Whereas on Facebook style algorithmic feeds, you have to "use those functions liberally" and the result is only "pretty" clean.
        • scotty79 8mo ago
          HN model works, people do downvote for you, if you are just like everybody else here. You indicate that by visiting HN. In more universal platform such as Facebook you need to indicate who you are by subscribing to specific groups or downvoting some of the content yourself. Just visiting. Facebook is not enoug. Once you signal who you are you also benefit from other people just like you downvoting content you wouldn't like, for you.
        • flir 8mo ago
          I used to belong to a FB nostalgia group that was being relentlessly farmed by Indonesian accounts. The group members (and even the admins) weren't sophisticated enough to spot what was happening. They were absolutely engaging with the spam. They love AI colorizations too. I don't trust "facebook users" as a group to provide a signal I consider useful.
  • mlrtime 8mo ago
    I did this on reddit to try and get a useful /r/all and it ended up being mostly cats. I never look or vote on cat pictures but by just removing political serial posters, thats what I got.
  • DANmode 8mo ago
    They offer controls in the three-dots menu that say: + Interested Show more this like this in my feed and - Not Interested Show less things like this in my feed They even allow clicking those repeatedly on the same post.
• javascriptfan69 8mo ago
  I genuinely think we will look back at the algorithmic content feed as being on par with leaded gasoline or cigarettes in terms of societal harm. Maybe worse since it is engineered to be as addictive as possible down to an individual level. Then again maybe I'm being too optimistic that it will be fixed before it destroys us.
  • idiotsecant 8mo ago
    If anything the algorithmic dopamine drip is just getting started. We haven't even entered the era of intensely personalized ai-driven individual influence campaigns. The billboard is just a billboard right now, but it won't be long before the billboard knows the most effective way to emotionally influence you and executes it perfectly. The algorithm is mostly still in your phone. That's not where it stops.
  • blibble 8mo ago
    I think it's worse, cigarettes never threatened democracy the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if there's an recommendation algorithm involved treat the company as a traditional publisher because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the content vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's friends), which should qualify for section 230
    • nobody_r_knows 8mo ago
      [dead]
    • jballanc 8mo ago
      The problem with this is that section 230 was specifically created to promote editorializing. Before section 230, online platforms were loath to engage in any moderation because they feared that a hint of moderation would jump them over into the realm of "publisher" where they could be held liable for the veracity of the content they published and, given the choice between no moderation at all or full editorial responsibility, many of the early internet platforms would have chosen no moderation (as full editorial responsibility would have been cost prohibitive). In other words, that filter that keeps Nazis, child predators, doxing, etc. off your favorite platform only exists because of section 230. Now, one could argue that the biggest platforms (Meta, Youtube, etc.) can, at this point, afford the cost of full editorial responsibility, but repealing section 230 under this logic only serves to put up a barrier to entry to any smaller competitor that might dislodge these platforms from their high, and lucrative, perch. I used to believe that the better fix would be to amend section 230 to shield filtering/removal, but not selective promotion, but TikTok has shown (rather cleverly) that selective filtering/removal can be just as effective as selective promotion of content.
• decimalenough 8mo ago
  > The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out. No, it gets dumped on pretty much everybody. My Insta consists of travel and food pictures, and the people I follow are friends IRL and a very few travel/food influencers. So my feed consists of friends, travel/food content, dirty jokes thanks to my buddy who keeps sending them, and an ever increasing proportion of ads. But both my "suggested reels" and the search view are exactly what the OP was complaining about: a non-stop parade of thirst traps by "content creators" pitching their OnlyFans accounts.
  • foxglacier 8mo ago
    I mostly use Facebook by clicking on email notifications which are always real posts or comments by my real life friends. Some of them are a bit political but I just ignore those. I just tried scrolling down the homepage and mine doesn't have any extreme political crap. However, it does have local political crap about the popular local issues (mostly bike lanes). Most of it is just harmless stuff like dashcam videos of bad local drivers, historic photos of my city, local issues like city infrastructure problems, curiosities like rare animals or space photos, and ads - tons and tons of ads. I think it probably depends what you've engaged with indeed.
  • jamincan 8mo ago
    I find Facebook and Instagram are both completely polluted by that type of content. Facebook used to be trying to feed me right-wing rage bait and I think actively blocking finally cleared my feed of most of it and now it's all thirst-trap stuff. At least it's figured out I'm gay compared to Instagram.
    • cruffle_duffle 8mo ago
      “right-wing rage bait” Assuming you mean crap like “school book bans”, climate change denialism, or some dude coal rolling… You realize that is actually bait targeted at you specifically right? It wouldn’t work as bait if it was shit you agreed with! It’s actually left-wing rage bait! If you were immersed in the “right wing echo chamber” your flavor of rage bait would be about a school introducing a neutral bathroom policy, or some college student struggling to define what a woman is. Every Christmas you’d see articles about cities banning Christmas lights in town hall and Starbucks no longer using Christmas themed cups. It’s all fucking made up nonsense. No real human acts the way these algorithms portray us. Honestly even ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ are part of the trick. Real people don’t exist on a binary axis. We’re all a weird mess of values and experiences that don’t fit neatly into two boxes. But the algorithm needs two teams, because you can’t sell outrage without an enemy. The first step to detox is seeing everyone as human not as a contrived label.
• rolodexter2023 8mo ago
  escalation is often profitable before it is visibly catastrophic
• vasco 8mo ago
  Should I stop using my phone because some people do crime through the phone so I'm protecting children by not calling anyone?
• DeathArrow 8mo ago
  >These platforms need to be shut down and people with a conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects and their impact on the vulnerable. In places where media is very biased to one political idea, online platforms like Facebook can be a breath of fresh air, people can share their ideas, voice their thoughts and concerns and express their opinions. This is invaluable for democracy and it does have effect in the real life as it shapes the elections. People don't depend just on the media anymore to have an informed opinion and the propaganda is much less effective.
  • dzikimarian 8mo ago
    They could be, but they aren't. When they catch your political bias, they will push your flavor of propaganda to you as heavily as classical media.
  • Auracle 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • randomNumber7 8mo ago
      [flagged]
• elevatortrim 8mo ago
  It is sad to think some of the world’s smartest brains developed these incredibly successful algorithms. They are equally capable of developing something to lift people up.
• shaky-carrousel 8mo ago
  > The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out. Like teenagers. > The people who are in deep likely need years of deprogramming and therapy to recover which they will never get. Like a cult. Current social media is like a cult that preys on teenagers. No wonder they want to ban it for young people. American government trying to forcefully spread its cult via the freedom.gov proxy is the vile cherry on top. This is a quantitative change for Trump. He went from preying on a few kids to preying on all the kids in the world. He must feel ecstatic.
• LogicFailsMe 8mo ago
  Facebook sucks but Reddit's algorithm is even worse. The only positive thing I will say in favor of Reddit is you can turn their algorithm off as Facebook has consistently denied its users a chronological feed of their friends.
  • jamincan 8mo ago
    How do other people use reddit? I'm subscribed to a bunch of subreddits and that's the content I see. Reddit is honestly one of the more positive parts of the web for me.
    • socalgal2 8mo ago
      which subreddits do you frequent? My experience of any coding subreddits is lots of posturing, lots of closing, no few actually useful answers or discussion
      • jamincan 8mo ago
        My reddit feed is predominately my local community subreddit and various hobbies/activities - mountain biking and cycling stuff, outdoors stuff, geology, swimming, some ttrpg stuff - and then interspersed with a few more random things that I try to keep with more of a positive tilt - todayilearned, bestof, EarthPorn - that sort of thing. I do have a few programming subreddits, rust, sveltekit, and adventofcode, which mostly seem more newsy or avenues to help or learn about developments in that area. /r/rust does have an annoying tendency to get posts of some person new to rust telling people who are presumably already familiar with rust about what an amazing and transformative language it is, but those are pretty easy to identify and skip by.
• doginasuit 8mo ago
  I think it is a mistake to think about people as being helpless consumers of the algorithm. The OP's mom no doubt makes some intentional choices in her life that make a difference. It just doesn't help that the algorithm will lean into whatever will get the most engagement.
• 0xDEAFBEAD 8mo ago
  People will engage with and promote that stuff even without a recommendation algorithm. Lots of subreddits are full of ragebait if you look at the most-upvoted posts.
• quantified 8mo ago
  And yet the algorithm has spent the last 3 or more weeks pumping MAGA, county and state Republican party, conservative Christian pages. There's a hand on the dials of "the algorithm"