Comment by armchairhacker
2 days ago
No doubt the specific algorithms used by social media companies are bad. But what is "non-algorithmic" curation?
Chronological order: promotes spam, which will be mostly paid actors. Manual curation by "high-quality, trusted" curators: who are they, and how will they find content? Curation by friends and locals: this is probably an improvement over what we have now, but it's still dominated by friends and locals who are more outspoken and charismatic; moreover, it's hard to maintain, because curious people will try going outside their community, especially those who are outcasts.
EDIT: Also, studies have shown people focus more on negative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias) and sensational (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_(neuroscience)#Salien...) things (and thus post/upvote/view them more), so an algorithm that doesn't explicitly push negativity and sensationalism may appear to.
> Chronological order: promotes spam, which will be mostly paid actors.
If users chose who to follow this is hardly a problem. Also classical forums dealt with spam just fine.
> Also classical forums dealt with spam just fine.
Err... well, no, it was always a big problem, still is, and is made even more so by the technology of our day.
Not really? On something like Xenforo2, there's a setting that makes a new account's posts invisible until that account is manually approved by a mod - in conjunction with the spam prevention tools - https://xenforo.com/docs/xf2/spam/#content - we really don't need to do much work.
Because all new accounts need to be verified by an actual human, we can filter out 99% of spam before other users see it, and between a dozen mods for a community of 140k people we only need to spend ~15 minutes a week cleaning out spam.
3 replies →
How will users choose who to follow? This was a real problem when I tried Mastodon/Lemmy/Bluesky, I saw lots of chronological posts but none of them were interesting.
Unfortunately, classical forums may have dealt with spam better because there were less people online back then. Classical forums that exist today have mitigations and/or are overrun with spam.
What used to happen is there would be human-powered networks ("if you like me, check out X/Y/Z"), rather than algorithm-powered networks. Sadly, the existence and dominance of algorithm-powered networks has withered humans' networking muscle. We can probably build it back though.
> Also, studies have shown people focus more on negative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias) and sensational (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_(neuroscience)#Salien...) things (and thus post/upvote/view them more), so an algorithm that doesn't explicitly push negativity and sensationalism may appear to.
This is exactly why it's a problem. It doesn't even matter whether the algorithm is trained specifically on negative content. The result is the same: negative content is promoted more because it sees more engagement.
The result is more discontent in society, people are constantly angry about something. Anger makes a reasonable discussion impossible which in turn causes polarisation and extremes in society and politics. What we're seeing all over the world.
And the user sourced content is a problem too because it can be used for anyone to run manipulation campaigns. At least with traditional media there was an editor who would make sure fact checking was done. The social media platforms don't stand for the content they publish.
It isn't just social media. I'm been identified as a republican and the pervious owners of my house democrats, and since forwardinu has expired I get their 'spam' mail. There names are different, but otherwise the mail from each party is exactly the same 'donate now to stop [other parties'] evil ageneda. they know outrage works and lean into it.
Fact checking with traditional media was always pretty spotty. Even supposedly high quality publications like the NY Times frequently reported fake news.
I've been curating my own feeds manually for decades now. I choose who to follow, and actively seek out methods of social media use that are strictly based on my selections and show things in reverse chronological order. Even Facebook can do thus with the right URL if you use it via the web[1].
You start with almost nothing on a given platform but over time you build up a wide variety of sources that you can continue to monitor for quality and predictive power over time.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
> But what is "non-algorithmic" curation?
Message boards have existed for a very long time, maybe you're too young to remember, but the questions you're raising have very obvious answers.
They're not without issues, but they have a strong benefit: everyone sees the same thing.