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Comment by kiostech | Hacker News Reader

I think if we can let user control algorithms themselves, to a certain extends it does really help us to gain higher quality of information.

e.g sentimental analysis , fake news filter ...

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I know there is a certain sense of hypocrisy in me saying this but maybe we don't need algorithms for everything.

Users can self-select. We can always just yell at Timmy who shares too much or outright unfollow him on Facebook if we don't want to see what they share.

I suggested that just because someone posts something on their Facebook wall, it doesn't mean I will see it. (This was around 2009). People often looked like I was saying something insulting. I think they'd understand things the other way around but I guess they don't see themselves as noise. There is some user education that the network needs to do.

In any case, be it Facebook or SharePoint or 37 signals, there should be zero obligation for anyone to look at things you post.

If you are having a baby shower and don't invite me personally and just write on your wall, that means you don't want me there.

I still believe in a 100% non-intelligent newsfeed. Ben Evans is wrong and I'd even say malicious for dismissing the idea of a reversed chronological newsfeed.

The only reason this is a problem is Facebook desires to inflate the number of connections. Let people cull their newsfeed and they will. Set expectations for posters that their posts may not get to everyone and they will understand as well.

Hm. Facebook not using algorithmic feeds tuned to your liking is hardly a reason to rule them out entirely. People’s eyeballs keep coming back, so Facebook’s news feed works great for Facebook. It’s an incentive or strategy issue more than a technology issue.

I agree. Facebook's News Feed is a culmination of years of research in retention and attention management. While that isn't really what most users want, it's exactly what Facebook has optimised the News Feed for.

We'd all benefit from a very different system which would structure things as we need it to, but that's sadly not what our economy incentivizes corporations to be right now.

Will the learning curve of "self-select" too steep to certain users ?

There's a hard limit to what I as a user can reliably express in terms of explicit rules. I have a cousin I was pretty close to growing up. She mostly uses Facebook to post anti-vaccine nonsense and occasional bits of thinly-veiled pro-Trump propaganda and BS "stories" from the alt-right. I "unfollowed" her a long time ago, but it would have been nice to see all the updates she posted when her dad had a stroke.

I need an algorithm for that. There's no good way for me to say, "I don't want to see all the stupid shit she posts, but please show me important stuff" because I lack the ability to rigorously define "important stuff". And it's unreasonable to treat her unwillingness to personally text those updates to every single person she knows.

Can't you just rigorously define the unimportant stuff? Like that which is related to vaxxiinwa, Trump or politics in general?

Not really. I could spend time and energy building filters that matched current known patterns, but those filters probably won't be very good. Suppose instead of a stroke it had been a gun accident. I'm not confident I could successfully anticipate and build a filter good enough to recognize that it wasn't a political post about the NRA and gun rights.

Ultimately, that line of thought ends with me developing my own algorithmic feed, which I don't really want to do and isn't scalable anyway.

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