The assumption is that centrally managed social media is bad because their algorithm is bad. But actually, they are bad because they are centrally managed and force one algorithm onto you. I’m not even advocating algorithm-by-choice. Even instance-specific algorithms would already work and would make the whole experience much more enjoyable and less boring. And if an instance’s algorithm(s) is too aggressive, it gets defederated. That would result in a much more exciting experience imo. And by the way: what’s the problem with getting old posts back in the timeline if it makes the overall conversation more interesting?
No. Just no. I like being in control of my timeline. I don’t need a computer to decide what I’ll find interesting.
Exactly why I stopped using Facebook because it was damned near impossible to have a chronological timeline on the app.
In my case the algorithm bored the heck out of me. I stopped using Facebook since 2015. Even the youtube algorithm has started boring me now and I am happy with newpipe.
It wasn’t the only reason I left FB, but it was on the list.
I think I was trying to find out about a news event that had recently happened in our community (the community groups in Facebook are still a decent resource for local news) and getting the stupid app to show me a chronological timeline of the group was damned near impossible. I mean, I know it’s possible to do it, but it frustrated me to no end that it was turned into a more difficult process than it needed to be.
After that, I said ‘screw this place’. I know that we are all the product on Facebook, but I didn’t mind surrendering to ads and all that stuff until it became a product that stopped being useful to me.
I just started using Mastodon. It’s been around 10 days or so. I am already having a lot of good engagement there. I guess “no algorithm” works best for me. I used to get bored of scrolling twitter or even reddit within 15 minutes or so. On Mastodon on certain days I can easily spend 45 minutes or more.
My experience on Mastodon was never really satisfying. Most of what I see are post with one or mostly zero engagements from other peopel and that’s just boring.
No idea why you’re getting downvoted when lemmy uses an algorithm by default.
Technically sort by top and some by new are algorithms. But that’s not what people talk about when they say algorithm with regards to social media it’s secret sauce engagement based algorithms used to show content.
The active and rising sort options are fairly simple and open source so we know exactly how it works
Okay, so people would then be fine if we add better trending / popular / related-to-your-interests feed to Mastodon? Because based on comments here they exclusively want the chronological feed, regardless of what your definition of algorithm is.
lemmy uses
Does it?
Probably because there exists a bit of a rift in the technical term ‘algorithm’ and how it’s commonly used in discourse. Technically it describes both:
- An open-source algorithm that assigns a simple score based on votes, score and age, where two users subscribing to the same communities will always have the same result.
- A hidden algorithm that’s based on an unknown amount of invisible variables, many of which are based on user-tracking, and tries to maximize time-spent at all costs.
While OP (hopefully) intended the former, which I wouldn’t disagree with would be nice to have as an option, most people immediately think of the latter when term is used.
But actually, they’re bad for both reasons.
I guess one issue about engineering a well performing algorithm is that ot only works if you collect a real high amount of personal data and label it with stereotype based labels. And then you have to do the same with every content shared on the platform.
If you do this publicly, people will have problems with the labels of their posts.Your awesome idea gets labeled as left wing utopic dream? Your rant about that new movement is conservative and populistic?
Might be true, but will offend people.Are they labeled this way in other social media networks?
