[dbspin]

Absolutey rock hard disagree. I'm old enough to remember when twitter and facebook used to both have a chronological feed without algorithmic sorting. Facebook (trash today of course) was an incredibly useful way to find out what your friends were doing on a given day by just reading the chronological feed. You could also trivially see which events were going on in your locality and which friends were attending. At the same time (2005 - 2012) Twitter was an incredible resource for real time news and reactions to what was happening. Without clickbait, commercial promotion or flame (culture) wars. The web pre-agorithm was gradually being subsumed by feed readers like Google Reader, where you'd browse longform articles and blog posts from people you'd found or been recommended by friends. There was no shortage of content. What was absent was 'brainrot', engagement bait, and all the vapid fluff that the 'algorithms' (tweaked entirely and completely to maximise engagement and advertising consumption - not to your preference) provide.

[lukan]

To quote the sibling content:

"And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm."

Apparently people understand different things by "algorithm". I also use the general one and not "algorithm" as a special algorithm that tries to find things I might like based on my past interactions, but mainly tailored to keep my engagement high so I watch more ads"

I would like the possibility of creating and tweaking my own algorithm for my feed.

[Certhas]

Yes, algorithm (as used today) has different meaning in different contexts.

People here are wilfully ignoring the proper context and meaning of the term as used, even though no one has any trouble understanding what is meant. You even spelt it out perfectly, demonstrating that there isn't any genuine miscommunication happening:

> "algorithm" as a special algorithm that tries to find things I might like based on my past interactions, but mainly tailored to keep my engagement high so I watch more ads".

[fireflash38]

Treat the word algorithm as a "magic black box". Because that's what it is, 90% of the time. It could be that chronological sort. It could be a rage engagement sort. People don't know. It's not a consistent thing either, since pretty much every social site out there that people use is constantly tweaking it, A/B testing it, or having it modify itself to an extent (that is, I assume randomness is built in).

I do think the internet would be a better place with more openness about those magic black boxes, even if it's just an ability to tweak it yourself without having to do some arcane incantations and rituals (ever gotten your YouTube recommendations completely fucked? How do you unfuck them?).

[dbspin]

You've missed two key points

> I would like the possibility of creating and tweaking my own algorithm for my feed.

This would be really useful, and I think actually should be a right - like data portability. However it doesn't address the issue with the default view not being linear, and hence breaking the utility of such services as a public or community notice board.

> "And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm."

An algorithm is being used to serve content in that context, but content is not being removed, substituted, inserted or filtered by an algorithm in (the platonic version) of displaying a linear chronological feed. The are the issues which 'the algorithm' has been criticised for in the modern context. If we can acknowledge that's the intended usage here then we can move beyond semantics.

What happened on Facebook in 2012 is that Facebooks product changed from being one that served the affordance 'connecting people', to one that effectively divided people and charged to connect them in more limited ways. The impact of that one change (on FB and mirrored on other services) in creating the sensitisation and polarisation which followed, as well as removing the one major utility of social networks beyond pure entertainment, cannot be overstated.

[kalleboo]

I also remember when Facebook originally added their algorithmic timeline.

At the time everyone was complaining that Facebook was just "people posting their lunches" and from that PoV I thought it was a great addition to promote the things people found important in their lives instead of the noise.

Of course that didn't last long.

[dbspin]

I was in college at the time, and the wall went from incredible social affordance to spambait advertising platform essentially overnight. It's likely that the 'people posting their lunches' weren't leveraging the platform to its best utility. Either way the change literally made the kind of passive socialising use I've described above impossible. No replacement has emerged in the years since, which really surprises me. Since location aware social networks existed in the mid-2000s, which is now, checks notes - twenty years ago.