[andrewmutz]

I completely agree with the article. There is a vast soup of user generated content that could be displayed and there's always an algorithm of some sort employed, even if that algorithm is "show me only content from people I explicitly follow and sort it chronologically".

If you wanted to give the social media companies the benefit of the doubt, you would say "they just want to have a feed that the user enjoys and the best metric they have to tune their algorithm is is engagement". If you didn't want to give them the benefit of the doubt, you might say "They want to surface a feed that keeps you hooked so they make the most money on ads, so they use the metric of engagement".

I also completely agree with Tim that a marketplace of algorithms is the best way to solve this problem. If users can choose their algorithm, they can choose between the "sugar high" content that is optimized to maximize engagement and time-on-platform if thats what they want. If they'd rather choose one that maximizes for other metrics, they are free to do so. Examples of metrics that a given user might prefer: "A monthly survey that the user fills out that asks how good the recommendations are" or "a daily survey asking questions related to mood/mental health/etc".

[omeze]

I think this “marketplace of algorithms” idea (aka algorithmic choice) is a bit naive. Imagine using an app for the first time. What algorithm do you choose? Now remove your technical context and imagine reading through the top 10 algorithms to make a choice of which one to select. Twitter actually has quite a few knobs for curation (eg you can apply Regexps to filter content), and Id be very interested in knowing how many users actually use those features. Id guess its a rounding error.

[andrewmutz]

I envision it not as a configurable app, but instead each approach to algorithmic feeds is a separate app/website. All the apps have all the underlying fediverse/activitypub data available for them to serve up, but each has a different approach to curating content. Users would just choose the type of experience they want by choosing different apps/websites.

[hackerfromthefu]

Its very easy, you have a configuration setting with the list of algorithms and a short textual description. Users try them and quickly change off ones they don't like till they settle on one they like best.

[edanm]

There is in a sense a marketplace of algorithms, or at least, a marketplace of user experiences. That's the actual marketplace. It's the reason Facebook is losing marketshare to Tiktok.

[int_19h]

There is, but it's extremely skewed by social graph lock-in.