Comment by perching_aix
5 months ago
> I do not necessarily think algorithmic feeds are the only thing wrong with social media, but it's certainly one of the major problems.
We're more on the same page than I assumed then just based on the post. I do also think it's a (very) significant issue, and I do think there'd be a lot of merit to gain better control of it. I often apply chronological sorting where possible too, or will at least curate my feed using the available features. I've just also come to think that people are "clearly" a lot less nice than I thought, and that maybe we're getting a bit too interconnected and a bit too well.
> Could you elaborate on why you think this is misguided tech-nostalgia? Most of your arguments seem to be true regardless of how you discover content (RSS, social media, link aggregators, ...)
That's kind of my point. I simply think there's a lot more to why social media posts run afoul so often on the internet (and why mass media posts are so distorted) than just the recommendation algorithms.
I address this under your other reply more, but the "feeds of controlled information" interpretation's goal is something actually desirable to me (and to most everyone, I believe). And for that, this is at most a stepping stone, rather than the solution (if such a thing even exists - who knows, I might be living in a dream world). It is under that interpretation that this post read like "misguided tech-nostalgia".
In case you're asking more literally though, what I meant is that the general vibe I caught from this all is that this old-school-ish thing from when everything was better (a while ago), if you switch to it now, things will be better again. And so due to the everchanging social context, I disagree with that - hence the "undropping a mug" example. That is, even if I consider recommendation algorithms as not only just a significant issue but e.g. where things went wrong outright, removing them alone is imo not going to be enough to undo the damage.
I admit I do have a little bit of old web nostalgia, but I know that we live in a very different world now and web platforms and the types of interactions we have online are much more complex now.
That said, specifically for the type of information you'd typically subscribe to in an RSS reader, I still think the web 1.0 approach has its place. I do believe that if you have something to say, standing up a blog with an RSS feed, writing posts there and then potentially linking on social media is the best way. It's also been trivially easy to set up a blog for years.
Likewise with news - I don't think there's anything better to get them than reading a news site or perhaps subscribing to a video channel. All very RSS-friendly.
I'm mostly interested in longer form content, not shorter or ephemeral types of content. And even there, platforms like Mastodon support RSS feeds natively.
But yeah, as we clarified below, the angle for writing the article was the delivery channel for content and whether it is curated by someone or not. For the quality and provenance of the information, that's still on you and that's a very hard problem with no clear solution - and arguably one that will get better with more AI generated content.