Comment by Uehreka
2 days ago
> You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content.
The algorithm doesn’t show you “more of the things you engage with”, and acting like it does makes people think what they’re seeing is a reflection of who they are, which is incorrect.
The designers of these algorithms are trying to figure out which “mainstream category” you are. And if you aren’t in one, it’s harder to advertise to you, so they want to sand down your rough edges until you fit into one.
You can spend years posting prolificly about open source software, Blender and VFX on Instagram, and the algorithm will toss you a couple of things, but it won’t really know what to do with you (aside from maybe selling you some stock video packages).
But you make one three word comment about Brexit and the algorithm goes “GOTCHA! YOU’RE ANTI-BREXIT! WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THAT!” And now you’re opted into 3 bug ad categories and getting force-fed ragebait to keep you engaged, since you’re clearly a huge poltical junky. Now your feed is trash forever, unless you engage with content from another mainstream category (like Marvel movies or one of the recent TikTok memes).
> The algorithm doesn’t show you “more of the things you engage with”,
That’s literally what the complaint was that I was responding to.
You even immediately contradict yourself and agree that the algorithm shows you what you engage with
> But you make one three word comment about Brexit and the algorithm goes up
> Now your feed is trash forever, unless you engage with content from another mainstream category
This is exactly what I already said: If you want to see some content, engage with it. If you don’t want to see that content, don’t engage with it.
Personally, I regret engaging with this thread. Between the ALL CAPS YELLING and the self-contradictory posts this is exactly the kind of rage content and ragebait that I make a point to unfollow on social media platforms.
The issue is that it's not symmetric: the algorithm is biased towards rage-baity content, so it will use any tiny level of engagement with something related to that content to push it, but there's not really anything you can do to stop it, or to get it to push less rage-baity content. This is also really bad if you realise you have a problem with getting caught up in such content (for some it's borderline addictive): there's no tools for someone to say 'I realise I respond to every message I see on this topic, but really that's not good for me, please don't show me it in the first place'.
OK sure, if you want to be technically correct, “the algorithm shows you what you engage with” in some sense, but not any useful sense. There’s no proportionality.
As I said above, if you engage heavily with content you like that is outside of the mainstream categories the algorithm has been trained to prefer, it will not show you more of those things.
If you engage one single time, in even the slightest way, with one of those mainstream categories, you will be seeing nothing but that, nonstop, forever.
The “mainstream categories” are not publicly listed anywhere, so it’s not always easy to know that you’ve just stepped in one until it’s too late.
You can’t engage with things you like in proportion to how much you care about them. If something is in a mainstream category and you care about it only little bit, you have to abstain from interacting with it at all, ever, and don’t slip up. Having to maintain constant vigilance about this all the time sucks, that’s what pisses me off.