Hey here's a novel idea
Have social media websites be reverse chronological posts by friends/pages you follow instead of what AI thinks you're interested in (and yet somehow not explicitly following, yet you get it in your feed anyway)
Have social media websites be reverse chronological posts by friends/pages you follow instead of what AI thinks you're interested in (and yet somehow not explicitly following, yet you get it in your feed anyway)
It's like if you build a typewriter and give it to a few humans, they'll write on it a few times a week maybe, not that much. Sometimes a supermarket list or a letter to a friend. This is what I'd call "quality engagement". There's a person doing a valuable activity for themselves, where time using the thing isn't relevant.
Then you give the same typewriter to a monkey and every time the monkey finishes a page he gets a banana. He'll stay there all day every day. Lots of engagement and just gibberish on every page.
Advertisers are buying monkey engagement.
And platforms don't care so right now all the typewriters are made for a monkey hand to type all day every day, and you can no longer write your normal letters without feeling annoyed at why it got better for the monkey instead of leaving it alone for you.
(Instagram as you probably know is also owned by Facebook and people are similarly tired of the constant spam)
The fundamental problem is the business model where money is parasitised from people's attention. You want change? Make these companies responsible for the negative externalities they impose on society, just like companies that pollute the commons are held responsible.
We don't need another Tiktok ban; we need industry wide regulation. Shortsighted focus on single companies is simply a distraction from this fact, which only benefits these companies and allows most of them to continue as before.
Which can lead to websites like Reddit making unpopular changes to try to match Facebook's market cap (I think I've read they were specifically trying to do that)
If you create fake metrics everyone else will copy you in a race to the bottom
No other CEO begins the company with "If you need info on people at Harvard, just ask, they trust me, dumb fucks"
Have you not looked at Musk recently? Or is supporting AfD (the German far-right party) and adopting the persona of "kekius maximus" (a right wing meme) somehow less scummy than whatever it is Zuckerberg is doing?
Mind you, Zuck pulls some fucked up crap -and some of it may well be worse. But my point remains ...he's not alone. All of the Social Media platforms are corrupt and toxic and in many cases...Musk, Spez..their owners are as well.
This in turn is why there is so much more money into YouTube than other social media: because there is also highly qualitative content and thus viewers there. YouTube gets insane amounts more money and attention from the industry because of this.
Honestly probably something lame where the recommendations just get weirder and weirder (which I guess is happening now)
I think it would be interesting to do a large scale experiment to see what can happen.
I know people like to hate on X but the feed on there is hugely more interesting, topical, and relevant to my interests compared to what's getting interjected into my Facebook feed.
this account has no friends and just the one group membership so my feed if 100% platform-promoted swill. and it is bad. the current fad is for there to be accounts that repost screenshots of successfull AITA reddit posts to engagement farm.
the sad part is that it works. they get a ton of comments and likes
The annoying part is that if you load the feed url from a bookmark, at least on mobile, it reloads to the home page anyway. So you need to navigate to it manually each time. Never used to be this way. I guess they’ll remove the “feeds” feature soon enough anyway.
On mobile the URL is just facebook.com so there's nothing to bookmark for me. It's still useful though.
Probably depends on your usage pattern. I think most would prefer it, but "engagement" measurements will make it seem like they hate it, because they spend less time on the page. If companies like Facebook actually wanted to know, they'd make the setting "sticky" rather than constantly reset to algorithmic, then measure over 3 - 12 months how many switches to either one and stays there. The fact that you can set your feed to permanently be chronological tells me that Facebook REALLY doesn't want you do use this feature.
"Power users" may prefer the algorithm, due to the volume of posts they'd see, while many casual users prefer reverse chronological and then just check in every other week. Seriously the last year I was on Facebook, that was my usage. Block everything not posted directly by a "friend", sort by date, read the five posts from the past two week and logoff. Took me just a few minutes a week to catch up. I just don't think that usage aligns with Facebooks business model.
People regularly miss posts
For 'social influencers' sure, but normal users don't care about that. Removing the engagement hacked platform that primarily benefits social influencers would be a significant improvement for most users on most social media platforms.
What numbers?
THE NUMBERS!
For the vast majority of people, leaving is not an option, and no, the "you always have a choice" line is simply not correct