Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I think this is one of the consequences of the social media shift from “follow the people you like and we’ll give you a feed of them” to “we’ll programmatically determine what you, specifically, would most likely enjoy.”

When you are mostly just shown content that you’ve agreed to see, there’s less of an issue when you see something that offends your particular sensibilities, values, etc. because you agreed to see it, or you went looking for it.

But when the potential content you’ll see can include literally anything, there is a real incentive for the platform to make that content as neutral as possible. Because if you’re shown something that you really don’t like, you’ll stop scrolling and the engagement stats will go down.

View on HN

> I think this is one of the consequences of the social media shift from “follow the people you like and we’ll give you a feed of them” to “we’ll programmatically determine what you, specifically, would most likely enjoy.”

It's a shift from social media to entertainment media. Even Zuckerberg said it himself, his apps are NOT social media anymore.

The core issue is that now the internet is full of non-technical people so you're not getting the critical mass to make self-hosting a thing. So you absolutely need a platform. And when there's a platform, there is social pressure that the admin should ban certain types of content. Once people decide to ban some content, it's a matter of time before the tides shift and you have a huge crowd screaming "I never thought that Leopards would eat MY face!".

That doesn't make sense. If the algorithm worked, you get none of offending contents. And the algorithm usually works on most platforms.

The problem, clearly, is that there are people who can't accept the public preference of contents. It's just that. They want ragebaits, politics, rich guys talking, whatever it is, to be more popular and influential than whatever being targeted this week. That is the root cause of this problem.

The algorith works by showing you angering and radicalizing content. Angry people scroll longer. Frustrated people scroll longer. And people who feel bad a out themselves scroll longer and but fad diet stuff. Which makes ad price go up.

Algorithm works, because it prevents people from consciously curating own feeds.

I don't see much logical integrity in that comment...

For the algorithm to work it needs to have data, and to get that data it needs to show you a variety of things.

I can imagine that some people don’t want to see extreme content, even briefly in order to train the algorithm. Hence the drive toward making all content neutral.

If I create a new Instagram account, and the first 5 things I see are various extreme things (of different "ideological stripes"), I'm closing the app, not waiting for the algorithm to adjust itself to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com