I think the EU should flex their regulatory muscle and forbid algorithmic feeds on by default unless the networks break european society as the US is broken.
I don’t know how much of a difference it would make, as then we just become the algorithm.
I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to go “look at my shiny car/wife/house”, and I would use it to lose friends and alienate people.
These online environments do not foster any kind of human connection.
Blue sky allows you to have many different kinds of feeds and I can say the difference in adrenaline level and mood is palpable depending on the feed I use.
News items - frustration at the state the world is in.
Urban bicycle feed: annoyance at the atrocities of the inept drivers.
Feed with cycle side trip pictures: fun.
Rust projects, Electronics: the curiosity of learning.
Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.
Bluesky has felt like the healthiest experience I have ever had with social media. I don't really use any algorithmic feeds (though I have been toying with building my own), just my following feed.
I find the algorithmic topical feeds nicely solve the problem of discovery for me. There’s a lot of people who are experts in their fields, totally different to mine (e.g. astronomy, physics, photography etc) which makes it interesting for me.
Yeah, I'm sure they're useful! I have just found myself in a neat community, and I have > 700 followers and followers (mostly mutual), so I haven't really felt a need for discovery. I usually just find people through replies to people I know already at this point.
> Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.
Oh yeah I remember how this worked on Twitter. Make a post that annoys some anonymous blocklist maintainer, and suddenly you're blocked by a whole swath of accounts. Sometimes just following the wrong person or liking the wrong post is enough. No accountability for these decisions and no way to reverse them, or even figure out whom to approach to reverse them.
Sounds awfully exclusionary for a service that purports to be inclusive. It encourages the formation of authoritarian cliques, as tends to happen in any left-wing group sooner or later.
I was always polite and respectful on Twitter and still wound up on a blocklist. So did many others. There was no notification or explanation provided and no recourse, I just suddenly found myself blocked from various accounts to the extent it degraded the utility of the platform.
Lots of people on the left love to be little commissars, and this sort of thing provides a perfect opportunity.
The implication of your statement is "you probably did something to deserve it, comrade" which is very much in keeping with that mentality.
If they blocked you, evidently you didn’t clear the bar for them, and even if it was some completely lunatic reason - you have to respect their right to not talk to you, however lunatic it looks for you.
Now, if their blocklists were popular - either they weren’t lunatics or there was a crowd of lunatics. Now, why would you worry about not talking with a crowd of lunatics ?
But, regardless - again - nobody is entitled to an interaction with those that don’t want it, directly or by proxy.
Baffles me, why is it so hard to understand this ?
* Bluesky is from the same people that launched Twitter and, optics aside, just the same ideology. There is no real deep divide on values. It is about locking up people in echo chambers, information filtering and ultimately ripping out people's ability to organize around a common good.
There is only one danger for the 0.1%. The 99,9%.
* The people that got disturbed by Twitter's boosting of extremists and nazis, now took refuge to bsky. Only to get ripe for the next iteration. But see how many people are still on X, increasingly less aware of the abnormality they are drowning in.
This playbook of cultural engineering should be super clear by now. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.
* How to sell it? Invest in narratives that bend the notion of free trade in order to instill rigid beliefs about Free Markets. Now look at the free markets. :) It only takes you a few million bucks and a dinner to set your company free.
Like parent hinted at, "social media" means the opposite for society.
I can not argue about the values of people I do not know personally. I only said that the tool they made seems to be okay in my experience, which I shared.
“Free markets” is an uneducated nonsense. An entirely unregulated market evolves into monopoly. Even without corruption.
Social media for me is just a tool (HN is also social media btw). I find it useful and it meaningfully interacts with the other aspects of my life. When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.
As for the hierarchy: it had always existed and for better or worse the humans and other animals are wired for it. Likewise, they are wired for maintaining the total perceived fairness of the system - so the system eventually autocorrects the extreme imbalance. Often brutally, though.
> I only said that the tool they made seems to be okay in my experience,
I could understand that! I wanted to make a general comment, to warn people that although things feel fine now, they should imho pay caution to what these things devolve into. There doesn't even need to be any particular evil scheming from people involved. We usually focus on tech solutions. While blindness to cultural forces is generally what leads us into problems. It is a self-feedback loop in which societal fracturing and extremism is fostered.
> When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.
I feel the same. But most people, not only the young, are hooked to social media. For the young, they are essential for social validation, and thus they are easily pried on by people with less morality than you likely do.
> HN is also social media btw
Sure, but it is in a different class. HN at least does it best to be the least dopamine awarding. It is hard to read, and it is difficult to see if someone replied to a question or remark you made.
Traditional fora, mailing lists, HN--they are far more benign than what we are talking about.
Absolutely true about focusing too much on tech solutions, it’s often a very tricky problem that is best solved at non-technical layer.
To your other points: I find that people who are addicted never heed the warnings, they just get annoying. Just occurred to me: wonder if the addiction is to some extent internalization of the habit; so that fighting the habit becomes fighting oneself….
About HN being less addictive than the others: that is arguable :-) though it is much less driven by pure emotions than the other forms of exchange, indeed !
I lasted a little bit longer, but it grew shocking to see how eager friends and family were to display how cruel and bigoted they can be.
I sometimes wonder if it’s the addictive, attention seeking nature of social media that encouraged such behavior, or if they simply lacked the courage to be so inhumane in person.
I wouldn’t rule out the radicalising properties of social media either. You don’t have to fly out to the Middle East and join a militia to be turned against Western ideals when Facebook can flood your feed with targeted propaganda for a price.
It does say something about one’s character that they would be targeted by this and would also buy into it, though. You’d hope people might see it for what it is and take a step back.
These people are just as inhumane in person actually. In fact they want to test their opinions on you and see if you signal that you are also in their in group. Stuff like an old creepy guy gawking at a woman and asking you “how about that” is a someone common example of this. Or telling some story about some human condition where the punch line is well they were black and this isn’t surprising behavior given the racist stereotypes they believe in. These guys come out of the woodwork too. Like a total stranger on the bus would be like this, turn over at you unsolicited.
My Instagram account is private and I only follow real life friends and family. I mute (posts or stories or both from) any that post in ways that I don’t find positive. I haven’t had to mute many, but it’s some.
If it wasn’t for the algorithmic feed showing “recommended” posts from accounts I don’t follow and the constant ads, I would have a perfectly healthy and pleasant experience with Instagram.
I really wish they’d let us pay to get rid of ads and configure the algorithm to e.g. only recommend from accounts I follow.
That wouldn't work. 95% of people ordinarily do usually stick with defaults, but not when chasing their (dopamine) addiction.
Imagine there's a toggle you can flip in the Settings of Instagram that was labeled "free oxy", and every morning and evening Meta would FedEx an oxy pill into your mailbox. Everyone would tell eachother about it, and few would be able to resist the temptation.
I'm not sure this model works as it just forbids lists of any kind. Algorithmic is an extremely poor choice of words as any method of selecting posts/messages for a list is an algorithm.
They should just say that algorithm is editorialised and needs to be subject to the same regulations as newspapers (fined for fake news, editor can lose his journalist status).
In some EU countries yes it is. You need recognised journalists that can be disbarred to report news. Exceptions exist for specialised publications, so science journals don't need journalists.
Newspapers can publish all the fake news they want. There's no special carve out for e.g. tabloids. The only constraint they have is they aren't protected by section 230, so they can be sued for things like defamation or libel.
The big one to me is paid content should be clearly labeled as paid content and should be skippable programmatically and in bulk. Things like product placement.
The result of a purely chronological feed is that you have to scroll through 10 posts from the same person and never see anything from people that post good content rarely.
Plenty of people like and enjoy "algorithmic feeds". I can enjoy occasionally scrolling through a feed. Banning it is like banning alcohol because there are alcoholics in society.
> The result of a purely chronological feed is that you have to scroll through 10 posts from the same person and never see anything from people that post good content rarely.
I follow over 700 accounts on Bluesky and strictly use the following feed, and this is not my experience.
Obviously there’s a balance to be struck here. We could legalise fentanyl and tell people to just not use it, but that probably wouldn’t have a very positive impact on society.
At the very least we should acknowledge the negative externalities. Just leaving it up to the market to figure out (especially if we allow the current tech monopolies to exist) will result in serious societal impact.
"The result of a purely chronological feed is that you have to scroll through 10 posts from the same person and never see anything from people that post good content rarely."
But who made the demand, to have everything shown from everyone?
Imagine a social network, where you make your own rules for your feed. That special person who posts rarely, but good will have special visibility. And from that bored family member that basically spams, you will see the message "X has posted 50 pictures and text today" and with a click you can go there.
I'm sure that would work out fine. Just like the GDPR regulation made the web so much better & more private, and the promise of the AI act is boosting innovation in Europe...
The GDPR regulation is great and arguably does make the web more private and better. At the very least, it's better than having no regulations.
I've even been able to successfully use it to remove something private about me from the internet. I don't think I would have even gotten a response had there been no legal precedent.
You can always argue about how some regulations are badly implemented or incomplete but I believe it would be very misguided to believe that no regulations are instead the better alternative.
I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to go “look at my shiny car/wife/house”, and I would use it to lose friends and alienate people.
These online environments do not foster any kind of human connection.