> ability to categorize and rank content
Who has time for this? What about discovering interesting and new content amidst millions of options?
Who has time for this? What about discovering interesting and new content amidst millions of options?
1. The unit of "following" is a subreddit, not an individual account. This means that your feed might contain a lot of content from a popular subreddit, but never of a single person. In fact, an account's karma on Reddit has no bearing on the reach of its posts. This lets me curate my feed based on the type of content, not based on who posted it and how many followers they have.
2. Because of (1), I have another option to the "front page": browsing a specific subreddit of my choice, where I see posts in basically the same order as everyone else. The closest that Twitter has to this is "Topics", but those are not communities, they are Twitter-curated feeds. You can't make a Topic, and you can't post to one. If your niche interest is not a Topic, you're out of luck, and most subreddits have no analogous Topic. Twitter lets you browse a user's posts, but individuals are high-variance. There's no way to say "show me all this person's tweets related to ML, which is why I followed, not when they talk about cooking." The only way around this is if the author has the prescience to make domain-specific alt accounts.
3. Downvotes. Twitter refuses to let you downvote content, which contributes to its toxicity. Whether you are retweeting to support or to criticize, the outcome is the same: you increase the post's reach. The most outrageous tweets get the most coverage. Reddit's downvote mechanism means that you can signal that a post is inappropriate for a subreddit, which means that the posts in a sub are more relevant to my interests.
Twitter has no such option: popular accounts naturally have high reach by default, and the lack of negative signal means that they can only accumulate more reach. The only way to decrease an account's influence is through coordinated unfollowing campaigns, "cancelling" them. Cancel culture isn't really a thing on Reddit because it's not personality-driven.
As for new stuff, this is how I generally do it:
Interact with friends and others near me. We trade all the time, recommend all the time. This is my long standing favorite.
Community discussion. Here, for one. This is a strong second.
Search, and now it may appear a GPT entity may well serve me up stuff I am going to like and need.
See what "the feed" has in it.
Look at what Reddit does: all posts must be submitted to a subreddit, which categorizes it. Each sub upvotes and downvoted that content, which means that the "ranking algorithm" can be dumb as a bag of rocks. At any point, I can choose what content I want to browse without having to "switch algorithms".
The media is preoccupied with "the algorithms", but the problem is with websites that are nothing but a recommendation feed choosing from a formless content soup. It's constantly guessing, the best it can do is "you seem to like this account, I will keep giving you stuff from this person and related people". No concept of interests!
What I do to discover interesting new stuff is to listen to the recommendations of friends, and to check out references or recommendations made from the stuff I already enjoy.
Basically, I do what everyone used to do to find new music, but for all other media as well.