Comment by dkdcio
2 months ago
this feels incomplete without mentioning why everything is trying to keep our attention: paid digital advertisement. remove the incentive for the slopfest and “the algorithm” becomes far less of a problem (see HackerNews)
HN (i.e. crowd sourced ranking) is different from algorithm feeds. It doesn't try to show you things to match your interests, feed is the same for all users. This makes a big difference.
The real difference is the quality of the moderation. A global feed is terrible if it can be gamed.
From the way HN's moderators describe their own actions, there's very little active input to what shows up on the front page.
The stories shown are determined by user input (upvotes and flags). Moderators tend to rescue stories that are excessively flagged and there's also the second-chance queue, but I don't believe they're actively picking winners and losers on the front page.
Also, the HN global feed is heavily gamed. It's very common practice for startups to organize voting rings to front-page their latest blog post or new product announcement. The simple attempts are caught, but it's common information in the startup world about how to organize group voting efforts to tip a story on to the front page without triggering the voting ring detector too much.
the HN feed is an algorithm. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. also all include “crowd sourced ranking” in their algorithms
the difference is the incentive (what the algorithm is optimized for). in most of these feeds it’s for ad revenue, hence the results
Just saying paid digital advertisement feels incomplete without mentioning why digital advertisement exists: most of the public would refuse to pay for services they take for granted such as email services, social media, etc at a level enough that companies would not feel compelled to sell out to third party advertisers. The struggles of Medium exemplify this very well. Ads are like the processed meat of our internet diet.
No. It has been proven by now that even if the public DOES pay, the advertising offers another channel of revenue, which executives loathe to ignore.
Source?
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The Internet was fine in the time where passionate people paid a few dollars for webspace to host their made with notepad best viewed at 640x480 site and didn’t expect „passive income“ from it.
Are you happy with the 90s web or do you want to stream Netflix and chat on Discord while getting paid a 202x salary? You can't have your cake and eat it sadly.
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