Comment by mbanerjeepalmer
9 hours ago
People here seem to fall into two camps:
(A) Studiously prune your feeds like a bonsai. As the author suggest, follow the chain of trust to a small number of voices (for me, something like Stratechery, Simon Willison, Inner Ring).
(B) Realise that RSS is another form of 'tyranny', this time at the hands of the publisher instead of the platform, where the composition of your feeds, and therefore what uses your attention, doesn't correlate highly with what matters to you.
I can feel the pickaxes being unsheathed as I type this but...I have reason to believe my (and others') LLM/embeddings-driven products are a good solution.
Position (A) isn't tenable if FOMO matters. Paraphrasing another comment here: 'Following arXiv is part of the job'.
So let's say you adopt position (B). You recognise that everything that matters to you is distributed across some set of feeds. But only a small proportion of the total material in those feeds matters to you. If you can articulate what matters then you can let an LLM or embeddings model use their attention, instead of yours, on the low-relevance items by filtering them out.
Some options:
- https;//scour.ing
- https://zacusca.net (disclosure: mine, and still pretty janky)
(I think) the thing is that you are not meant to get served content that is specifically for you. (insert this hole was made for me img) [1]) You get someone’s stream of content and you have to decide whether you are okay with the friction between what they are serving and yourself or if you are not and then unsubscribing.
This is the same reason why AI generated music is soulless and isn’t liked. If music can be made especially for you in milliseconds to soothe your mood or to suit your situation it isn’t art, it’s entertainment slop you’re consuming. Art and things created by other people doesn’t have to pander to you, it expresses something they made and you are allowed to observe or interact with it. What caused the creator to create it is what gives it meaning, when you start having to arbitrage your creations with the consumer (to become more appealing for more people) that’s when you start losing credibility and the start of selling out.
A few of the most heinous examples of people selling their dignity for ‘the algorithm’ to recommend their stuff to more consumers are those who impact their content for retention. An easy one is Mr. Beast, entire videos are focused solely around retention. If the team behind that channel finds something that gets them more appeal to their consumerbase they will implement or pivot towards it like there is no tomorrow.
Another scathing example is Jay Z, who - in Moment of Clarity - rapped
“ I dumb down for my audience and double my dollars They criticize me for it, yet they all yell "holla" If skills sold, truth be told, I'd probably be lyrically Talib Kweli Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense But I did 5 mill' – I ain't been rhyming like Common since (Woo!)”
admitting he has compromised his lyrical integrity for money and influence long before “the algorithm” was the all influential thing.
I guess when it comes down to it, it’s easier to make it in the world without integrity, but that definition of making it is more hollow.
1. https://i.imgflip.com/2uyz7f.png
I don't disagree with you. I don't think that LLMs (or any other technology) filtering 'to meet my needs' ought to be my source of art, music or other worthy media. And part of the joy of picking up a printed newspaper or magazine is the sense it has been shaped for a wider audience, not just me, with a stronger shade of objective than subjective.
The point, though, is that if I'm following an ML arXiv feed and I'm interested in recommender systems, I really don't need to trawl through everything on interpretability, image generation etc. to get there, no matter how artful those papers are.
> Art and things created by other people doesn’t have to pander to you, it expresses something they made and you are allowed to observe or interact with it.
And that's why you need to curate as it's an expression of your choice. Both by choosing which feeds to follow and which articles to read. Social media is like being in a public square alone while everyone is shouting at you while feeds are more like being in a gathering. In the latter, everyone is already vetted so you just skip from one interesting conversation to another while recognizing keeping track of everything is pointless.