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Comment by Slackwise | Hacker News Reader

> Why does Google always think they know what is best for me?

This is the entire ethos of the "AI Revolution" in tech. The algorithm "knows what is best for you". This will only get worse with more "AI" being applied to more tech.

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This is my gripe with Facebook and why I stopped using it. Biaaaaootch, I added people to my friends list because I want to see their posts. Ditch the dang algorithm and literally just show me everyone’s posts, in chronological order. That’s all you literally have to do. Don’t worry about me getting annoyed by spam, idiots who abuse their status updates will be blocked or defriended by me and everyone else who isnt having it. It’s self-policing. My discretion and the discretion of people on the platform is better than your dumb algorithm. But now I don’t use your app at all, because you thought you knew what’s best for me, and I kept missing out on people’s posts that I did in fact want to see, and that pissed me off more than whatever you’re trying to keep off of my newsfeed.

Your value proposition is having my entire social network on one feed. You’ve done that. That’s all you have to do. Ditch the algorithm.

Yeah, the biggest problem with these types of algorithms is that they show that the application developers don't trust the user to know what they want and trust the user to fix their own problems.

It's one thing for an application to provide sensible defaults. It's another thing entirely if it just second guesses the user.

The sad thing is the algorithm fixed zero problems for me. And it introduced the problem of hiding things that I did in fact want to see.. for no good reason other than apparently for their engineers to feel like they did something. Because how can they justify their paychecks when the newsfeed sorting order hasn’t changed since its prime of ~2009?

I often see a great deal of contempt for users here on HN, why should Facebook etc. be any different?

You can view "most recent" posts and that will do exactly what you're saying you want.

You must not use that feature very often or else you would know that Facebook does not respect that setting. When you set it, come back in a day or two and they’ve switched it back. Because once again, they know what’s best for you. You don’t know what you want, even if it’s not default and you go through the trouble of turning it on.

Tried it and got tired of randomly noticing that it’s not showing me “most recent” any more, and not knowing at what point in time they had switched it back on me, and what I might have missed that I would have wanted to see during that time. You have to religiously go through the process of seeing if it’s set to “most recent” every time you visit. FOH.

Actually I didn't even know it's supposed to stay in the most recent settings. I just go and click on it every time I open FB.

you make it sound so easy. It’s a hassle. It’s not like it’s always switched off when you come back. Sometimes it is sometimes it isn’t. So you have to navigate to a switch even if you’re not going to toggle it just to be sure that you’re getting the experience that you had explicitly expressed you want by switching away from the default to begin with. Why does it even switch back? They don’t think you’re capable of making your own decisions?

I just go there every time and make sure it is switched the way I like. I never said it is easy nor that I agree with their way of doing things, but the fact that sometimes it is set up like I want it to be does not make it a bigger hassle, it's exactly the same.

Except for the fact that Facebook keeps changing that back

Not just the AI revolution. For over a decade, I've grown increasingly frustrated with software suffering from overly-clever syndrome.

I'd rather use software that is predictable than predictive.

Too bad those algorithms don't know when I'm yelling at my computer because it's fucking up

If only folks on HN wouldn’t be so paranoid about microphones...

The problem with AI is that we are building it, with all our biases.

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