Comment by AreShoesFeet000
20 days ago
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.
I think your reply has me convinced. You really can’t expect to have such self control all of the time. Damn.
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.
> The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more.
Why not let you choose to get a less addictive algorithm? Older algorithms were less addictive, so its not at all impossible to do this, many users would want this.
14 replies →
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.
4chan has a lot less extremism than people imagine, rspecially compared to platforms like Instagram or Facebook. It's mostly concentrated on certain boards. The reputation of being extremist did more 'in favour' of its extremism than the original userbase and design ever did.
9 replies →
4chan is nothing like TikTok, though yes I agree heavy moderation is necessary for both.