Comment by datsci_est_2015
16 hours ago
For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise
That’s the point though. It may seem as if you’re not in control when scrolling, but you can adjust your behavior to get the content you’re looking for almost intuitively. That’s actually something good in my honest opinion.
Why is it good that you need self control to not get slop? Its much better if you can just turn that off and relax rather than having to stay alert to avoid certain content that it tries to trick you to serve you more slop.
Distancing yourself from temptations is an effective and proven way to get rid of addictions, the programs constantly trying to get you to relapse is not a good feature. Like imagine a fridge that constantly puts in beer, that would be very bad for alcoholics and people would just say "just don't drink the beer?" even though this is a real problem with an easy fix.
Basically, I want to set boundaries in a healthy frame of mind, and have that default respected when my self control is lower because I’m tired, depressed, bored, etc.
“The algorithm” of social media is the opposite.
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It’s because content curation is inherently impossible to reach the same level of relevance as direct feedback from user behavior. You mix in all kinds of biases, commercial interests, ideology of the curator, etc, and you inevitably get irrelevant slop. The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more.
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I don’t agree tbh. This is part of how people wind up down extremist rabbit holes. If you’re just lazily scrolling it can easily trap you in its gravity well.
But you can get into extremist rabbit holes independently of control surface. Remember 4chan? Dangerous content is a matter of moderation regardless of interfacing.
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I try to react as “violently” as possible to any slop and low-quality crap (e.g. stupid “life hacks” purposely bad to ragebait the comments). On YouTube it’s called “Don’t recommend this channel” and on Facebook it’s multiple taps but you can “Hide All From…” Basically, I don’t trust that thumbs down is sufficient. It is of course silly, since there are no doubt millions of bad channels and I probably can’t mute them all.