Comment by noirscape

I think there's not much inherently wrong with algorithmic curation; the problem is more that the algorithms that make up your average social media feed aren't set up to favor the most enjoyable experience for the user, but as you say, for the platform. It's to appeal to advertisers and to keep you engaged first, showing you interesting posts is fairly low on the list of goals[0].

Another problem is how opaque they tend to be; people have a mental model of how a feed should look like (not gonna describe the entirety of it, but a basic example would be "only the people I follow"), and most of the pushback tends to come from when an algorithm decides to break that mental model. (Such as for example showing you a random person you don't follow because the algorithm thinks you might like them, since someone you actually followed has engaged with their posts, to piggyback from the previous example.)

I think a really basic "no more than the X highest engagement posts from each followed user from the past 24 hours" option could do a lot as a basic heuristic to prevent people who no-life their social media from taking over the feed of someone who also wants to see what other people they follow are posting. (X can be any number but should probably go down the more people you follow.)

For a global feed, you don't need an algorithm, mostly because no amount of algorithmic curation can fix what's essentially looking into a firehose of posts - you'll probably find something you either like or conclude that it's not worth looking at to begin with.

[0]: Because anger and outrage is way easier for people to spread organically, algorithmic social media tends to overfocus on spreading it even more as that's what drives up engagement the best and that's what advertisers want. The fact that this creates a paradox where ads (that want lots of engagement) often risk ending up next to really heinous shit on those social media (what actually gets engagement) is an interesting side effect.