Comment by mhh__
4 days ago
The algorithm is genuinely very good. That's why I deleted it.
It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop.
I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...
It's a proper Skinner box. Very well made. And in millions of people's pockets too.
Someone who remembers good old Skinner. Cool!
the tiktok algo is genuinely impressive. What's cool is that the engineers published some works explaining how it functions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07663
It's an interesting read if you're into recommender systems or AI in general. What amazes me is that despite this published work google and meta still can't produce a decent social media algorithm, so it's either incompetence or malice.
Google can't even produce a decent search engine. I've switched to yandex.
same here. I found myself loosing an hour of just scrolling through short videos, most of them really good and ones that I liked. I had to delete the app because it was working too good.
Same reason I never touched prismatic after its first load.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Prismatic served the news. You can only get so addicted to Reuters!?
Back in the day when I was using Windows Mobile (2002-2008) there was an app (RSS basic) that was pulling the news from various websites (I had added BBC, CNN, some with IT news, etc.). Before I would leave home I'd sync it, and it would give me 'many' news articles, just the text ofc.
At some point I got addicted into reading news, so out it went. So yes, anything that gives you dopamine hits (cat videos, semi-naked men/women, news of the world), must go!
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Fox manages to do ok.
https://youtube.com/shorts/3FISFq_sCH8
Can't watch YT shorts because their algorithm is too good also ...
I disable them with a browser addon (and Revanced on mobile) because I seriously never want to watch a 30 second video on Youtube. Having to scroll past useless snippets when I'm looking for something had borderline-ruined Youtube for me.
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