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Comment by mxcrossb | Hacker News Reader

Why is social media the poster child for algoritmically driven content? If anything, social media response to scale hasn’t been to use algorithms to drive content from top down, but instead to crowd source that information. Yes Facebook might rearrange your newsfeed. But the information it shows is still driven by the likes and shares of your network. On places like reddit it is driven by upvotes, or hash tags and retweets on twitter. The algorithm is secondary to the user group.

Thus if we really are going to blame social media, it’s because we aren’t more selective about the social networks we embed ourselves in. But this of course is a problem that existed from the dawn of humanity.

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The problem is still that the algorithms cause problems. Social media is also a poster child because we could actually observe the transition in many cases: Early Twitter and Facebook as far as I know had entirely chronological timelines, and then changed that to "increase engagement", with all the side-effects that has. Just some examples:

- boosting things that are already popular increases their measured popularity even more, which both

a) over-emphasizes things that get reacted to quickly, which means e.g. quick outragous headlines get even more benefit over more in-depth coverage than they already do by human nature and

b) over-emphasizes popular sources over niche ones.

- Facebook actually does guesses at audiences, which means liking something can actually mean you decrease it's reach with the intended audience. (the "Facebook mom problem": if you post e.g. about your latest scientific paper and your mom likes it immediately, because that's what moms do, Facebook assumes it's family content and is less likely to show it to professional contacts that are the actual audience)

- for commercial content, Facebook intentionally limits reach among people who explicitly choose to follow you unless you pay for visibility

> The algorithm is secondary to the user group.

Neither is secondary; both are essential to the socio-algorithmic evolutionary process.

The algorithms are intended to optimize toward some user group behaviour. As the user group's choices influence the behaviour of the algorithms, so too do the algorithms' choices influence the behaviour of the user group.

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