[ramon156]

They'd find another method. Why are we allowing this in the first place?

I don't have an answer to fix this whole mess, but it starts with our attitude towards addiction. We've built a system that rewards addiction in all sorts of places. Granted, every addiction is different, and I'm of the opinion that it's not (drug = bad), it's how you use it and react to it. We can control the latter, but we choose to ignore it because we're too busy with anything else. This is a tale as old as time...

[ToucanLoucan]

> Why are we allowing this in the first place?

Exactly what I keep coming back to.

For me, it feels like you could cut this problem down substantially by eliminating section 230 protection on any algorithmically elevated content. Everywhere. Full stop.

If you write or have an algorithm created that pushes content to users, in ANY fashion, that is endorsement. You want that content to be seen, for whatever odd reason, and if it's harmful to your users, you should be held responsible for it. It's one thing if some random asshole messages me on Telegram trying to scam me; there's little Telegram can do (though a fucking "do not permit messages from people not in my contacts" setting would be nice) but there is nothing at all that "makes" Facebook shovel AI bullshit at people, apart from it juices engagement, either by genuine engagement or ironic/ragebaiting.

And AI bullshit is just annoying, I've seen "Facebook help" groups that are clearly just trawling to get people's account info, I've seen scam pages and products, all kinds of shit, and either it pisses people off so Facebook passes it around, or they give Facebook money and Facebook shoves it into the feeds of everyone they can.

It's fucking disgusting and there's no reason to permit it.

[Terr_]

> algorithmically elevated

I don't see a good way to make a definite legal distinction between the icky stuff versus normal an unobjectionable things which are, technically, also forms of elevation-by-algorithm:

    rank_by_age(items) // Good
    rank_by_age_and_poster_reputation(items) // Probably   
    rank_by_on_topic_ness(items, forum_subject)
    rank_by_likes(items)
    rank_by_engagement_likelihood(items) // Bad?
    rank_by_positive_sentiment_toward_clients(items) // Bad

[ToucanLoucan]

Really, I see one right here:

    rank_by_age(items) // Good
    rank_by_age_and_poster_reputation(items) // Probably   
    rank_by_on_topic_ness(items, forum_subject)
    rank_by_likes(items)
    <-- here -->
    rank_by_engagement_likelihood(items) // Bad?
    rank_by_positive_sentiment_toward_clients(items) // Bad

Age is deterministic. When was the thing posted?

Poster reputation is deterministic. How many times has this poster received positive feedback based on their content?

On-topic-ness is deterministic, if a bit fuzzy. That said I think the likes will reflect this, if you post a thread about cooking potatoes in the gopro subreddit, your post will be downvoted and probably removed via other means in which case it's presence in the feed is already null.

Likes are again, deterministic. How many people upvoted it?

In contrast:

Engagement likelihood is clearly a subjective, theoretical measure. An algorithm is going to parse a database for other posts like this, see how much attention it got, and say "is this likely to drive engagement." That's what I'm talking about.

And positive sentiment towards clients I can't quite read? I'm guessing you're referring to like, community sponsors but I'm not 100% certain. But that almost certainly is a subjective one too, and even if not, it's giving people with money the ability to put their thumb on the scale.

[Terr_]

I don't think "deterministic" is the right term to capture this concept. An if-statement which bans posts containing a political phrase would be 100% deterministic, or one which prioritizes anything from a username on a list.

> On-topic-ness is deterministic, if a bit fuzzy.

If you permit that exception (even for good reasons) then it reveals how the original "algorithmic elevation" is too vague and unenforceable.

All someone needs is a ToS footnote like "this forum is provided for truthful international news and engaging with $COMPANY in a positive way." Poof, loophole. Anything the moderator (or moderator-algorithm) decides is "untrue" or "negative" becomes off-topic and can be pushed down.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Eliminating section 230 protections would heavily disfavor any kind of intellectually stimulating content, because it's hard for a platform to scalably verify that nobody's making defamatory claims. But pointless clickbait, heavily filtered Instagram models, etc. don't really have liability concerns on a video-by-video level. To me it seems like this makes the problem worse.

[roughly]

It’s not eliminating section 230 entirely, it’s eliminating it for algorithmically promoted content. If you have a site that has user content and you present that content in a neutral fashion, section 230 applies. If you pick and choose what content to present to users (manually or by algorithm), you’re no longer a neutral platform, and shouldn’t be getting the benefit of 230.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I understand that. My point is that this would mean algorithmic feeds can only contain vapid, pointless content with no liability concerns. To me, it doesn't improve the world to require that Instagram and Youtube exclusively serve slop, even if that might cause some number of people to abandon them for non-algorithmic platforms with better content.

[ToucanLoucan]

Literally every social media site I'm aware of has had, in varying strengths and at varying times, many still currently, a movement among users asking for a fucking chronological ordered feed. Just, what the fuck my friends are saying, in the reverse order that they said it, displayed in a list.

Not only is this seemingly the most desired feed among end users, it was also the default one. MySpace didn't have a choice in the matter, they had to show a chronological timeline, because they didn't have a machine-learning algorithm nor a way to make one. They could tweak it based on engagement metrics but on the whole, it was just here's what all your friends have posted, in reverse order, scroll away. And then eventually you'd hit the end where it's like "you're up to date" and then you go on with your fucking day.

But of course platforms hate that. They want you there, all day, scrolling through an infinite deluge of bullshit, amongst which they can park ads. And we know they hate this, because not only have platforms refused to bring back chronological feeds, they actively removed them if they existed at one time. Not only is this doable, it's the most efficient way that requires the least compute from their servers, but platforms reliably chose the inverse... because it makes them more money.

Also specifically on this:

> My point is that this would mean algorithmic feeds can only contain vapid, pointless content

The vast majority of these sites is vapid, pointless content RIGHT NOW, even if it attempts to convince you it isn't.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Literally every social media site I'm aware of has a chronological ordered feed of people you've chosen to follow. Facebook does, Instagram does, Youtube does. It's just not the homepage, and most people don't care enough about what feed they get to go navigate to it every time they open the app. Would it be nice to make them let you put it on the homepage? Sure, I'd support that.

[roughly]

The current state of affairs is that Youtube and Instagram have brought back fascism and the measles, so if the complaint here is "it's impossible to moderate algorithmic content at scale and so the platforms would become incredibly risk averse," I think I'd take that alternative. I also don't think effectively forcing a breakup of the current online media monopolies is a bad thing either - if you can't actually mitigate the damage of your platform because you're too big, then maybe you shouldn't be that big.

[pjc50]

> If you write or have an algorithm created that pushes content to users, in ANY fashion, that is endorsement

Yes. People make free speech arguments about this, but the list and order of stuff returned by algorithmic non-directed (+) lists is clearly a form of endorsement. Even more so is advertising, which undergoes a bidding process. Pages which show ads should be liable if those ads are fraudulent, especially if they're so obviously fraudulent that casual readers suspect them immediately.

(+) Returning a list of stuff in a user-specified query, on the other hand, is not endorsement. Chronological or alphabetical order or distance-based or even random is fine.

Note that section 230 is, of course, US specific and other countries manage without it.

[aaomidi]

In the span of how long it takes for law to catch up to what’s going on, YouTube and Facebook has been around for a tiny amount of time.

[bluefirebrand]

They have been around long enough to have done unknowable damage to entire generations of humans

[aaomidi]

As usual unfortunately laws are reactive.

[greenhearth]

"Free market" and "entrepreneur spirit" fetishism and fear of collective social action against individual drives.