Comment by burlesona
1 month ago
Each blog you follow in the RSS model you opted in to. And each post comes from a person, or a publication, who can be held accountable for what they publish.
Ordinary media, like newspapers, books, radio, and TV, have worked this way forever — people publish “channels” and you decide what channels to follow. A channel can be held accountable.
The algorithm model is different. People just publish “content” into the platform, and the platform makes a custom channel for each viewer, inserting content from people you’ve never heard of and didn’t ask to follow. And it optimizes that custom channel for whatever addicts you the most. That’s fundamentally a different beast than opt-in media consumption.
And if that blog is a newspaper or other aggregator? What makes the RSS feed of the CNN front page fine, but not the RSS feed of the YouTube front page?
There's really no difference. Media companies all aggressively optimize for engagement, often to the point of A/B testing headlines.
There’s a huge difference. Everyone sees the same front page on CNN, or HN for that matter. Nobody sees the same page twice on YouTube or TikTok. That’s a fundamental distinction between human curated media (even with A/B testing), versus machine curated media.
People don't all see the same front page on CNN or HN. I just said, media companies all do things like A/B test headlines, they show different content to people based on geolocation, they change what ads people see and they select stories based on what they know will maximize engagement with their specific audiences. The fact that it's partly done by a human editor backed up by dashboards doesn't change what they're doing.
HN also shows different pages to different people. The set of headlines and their ranking is constantly changing, and user settings change whether you see dead/flagged articles or not.
The idea there's some fundamental difference here is people working backwards from the wealth of the operators to some conclusion they'd like to be true, usually one that lets them blame other people for their own decisions. But there's no validity to this.