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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm.

We're also using an algorithm right now on HN, to sort comments and posts by freshness, votes, and reply count (plus manual moderation fairy dust sprinkled by dang and friends). Some people have even criticized it or dislike it, because everyone has different criteria for things they want to see.

It's easy to forget there's a gray area between "unsorted feed of all posts" and "nothing but insane rage-bait to maximize ad views".

Funny enough, depending on your exact definition of 'algorithm' either essentially everything you can do on a computer is an algorithm or there some weird and annoying exceptions.

For example many definitions include the requirement that an algorithm has to terminate for every input. And I suspect that there are probably some bugs lurking somewhere in the HN codebase that make it go into the occasional infinite loop. So technically it's not an algorithm by definition.

(And even weirder, because I just suspect it might have those bugs, but I don't know for sure, I have to admit that I don't know whether HN is powered by an algorithm.)

I agree with you that for practical definitions we can go by a definition that's essentially: 'by algorithm we just mean "computer program", but we want to focus on the abstract things it's doing, and not details of the concrete implementation.'

In the context of social media, algorithms specifically mean recommendation algorithms that try to curtail the feed for end users. It is much more specific than the abstract definition of algorithms.

Using neural networks IMHO falls outside of the definition of an algorithm, because then it becomes something that not even its authors are able to inspect (understand/explain). (Which in some contexts is a legal requirement.)

Which definition of algorithm are you using here?

The formal definition of algorithm doesn't really require that a human can inspect them, nor understand nor explain, or does it?

> (Which in some contexts is a legal requirement.)

That's another can of worms. Which contexts are you talking about?

Yeah this is a more nuanced view that I find quiet true. Any algorithm has emergent properties that can make the resulting feed be healthy to consume or not. The issue is that these objectives simply don't align with the objectives of these companies. HN deliberately tries to avoid this kind of feed which is why it mostly works.

And from my personal Mastodon experience, "unsorted feed of all posts" also tends to collapse towards ragebait when reposts / retweets / boosts exist.

Instead of having an explicit algorithm to do the work of surfacing ragebait posts, that work is done by the users themselves.

What is notable, though, is that things don't necessarily have to be that way, in my experience, the Polish Mastodon community does far less of this than the English one.

That's so true. Could we then use a new word, say malgorithm to denote algorithms that don't work in the interests of users? Just as with we did with malware?

btw: The Malgorithm does actually exist, and ironically is the name of a electronic music device that applies bit-crushing (undersampling and/or bit resolution reduction) effect to audio signals, that is, it mostly makes the signal sound worse although it can be used creatively, which however occurs very rarely in pop music.

I think the "user-uncontrolled" or possibly "user-oblivious" algorithm (if you believe that the mere controllability is not enough) is a clear enough term.

In common usage, there is a distinction between "an algorithm" and "the algorithm". The latter is often shortened to "the algo".

I’ve never heard this before in my 20+ years of software engineering. Perhaps this is within the context of a conversation.

Yes this is in the context of normal human beings talking about their lives on social networks, not engineers.

Like when people get a random post or video served to them they found interesting they'll say "the algo decided I should see this today"

Content creators will discuss what they need to create for "the algo" to like and promote them.

I'm sorry but your comment comes across as very pedantic. In the context of social media, people mean highly optimized algorithms for maximum retention.

I respectfully disagree, I think it makes sense to stress the distinction. Along the lines of: let's reclaim 'algorithm' from the entities that made the word into a bad thing for so many.

It would be nice to make the term more neutral again. Many people feel like they have no control over the rules of an algorithm they interact with. I like how Bluesky gives complete control back to the user. First step in changing how people feel about the term is showing how it can provide a more pleasant experience and be less of a scary black box.

It is indeed a bad thing when the algorithm's objective is to manipulate the end user. It's dangerous and can (and has) lead to abuse. Also, there's no need to "reclaim" anything. I don't think anyone mistakes criticisms of algorithms in social media to the ones doing sorting in Excel.

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