How would you determine what can fit on your mobile screen? What sorting algorithm would you choose?
If you sort based off of what the most recent submissions, you might not ever see things that interest you and you might leave the platform.
If you sort based off of most recent or the most comments, then the most controversial posts would be amplified above more moderate and well thought out posts.
You can think of any type of sorting algorithm you want, you can even provide options/combinations. However it is impossible to give all content the same access to free amplification.
Yes we can. You could make a transparent algorithm in which eg. 15 out of 15 posts in my FB feed are from my friends in chronological order, at most two per friend. Likes etc. are just graphics and a reply from a friend bumps the post.
And something similar for Twitter.
It is not rocked science if you don't want to make the site so bad you possibly can to make visitors stay longer and see more ads when they wade through the irrelevant crap to see the post they want to see.
Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)? Sure this might not be much of a problem on a site where you only are following a small number of people, but I find it hard to imagine it could translate to a larger site that inherently isn't just you following a few friends (i.e. Reddit).
Ye well one friend could spam alot and almost always show up in his two slots in the feed. But aslong as you have a finit number of annoying friends you could deal with that by maybe muting them from the feed or just live with it. It might be a problem since many Facebook users have 100s of "friends", but I see that as an user error. You could have a "favorite" bar with friends you easily could click on and see what they have posted. Ie. actively looking instead of a feed if the feed gets too spammy by 100s of friends.
Having absolutely equal and fair exposure would need some kind of normalized random selection of posts since last login but that would probably just get messy and confusing.
"Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)?"
Ye but atleast its deterministic, your friends find it interesting enough to talk about and the conversation can continue till it is done instead of disapearing in the feed. There could be a big cross to click to mute it.
I have no hope of having an algorithm decide what I want to see. That is my main point.
A lot of people I know use twitter DMs as a primary communication method for people in their own families, even inside the same household. Twitter filtering communication between family members in your home is ... well ... a perfect excuse for me to strongly encourage them to stop using twitter.
Not only do the social networks allow you to amplify your opinion, they also nudge users further and further into bubbles where voices amplify even more.
Before social networks, if you got a pro-environment newspaper, the bias of that paper still had a bound on it. But imagine if the paper was constantly changing based on what you read. Were you interested in the article yesterday? Here is an even more biased article. Read it again? Try this article even more biased. Soon, the original paper would be so moderate that it would almost appear anti-environment.
The number of conspiracy theories floating around right now is alarming. And I blame a lot of it on the algorithms that these social networks are using to promote content people seem interested in. You get into rabbit holes and eventually land up reading extremist/fringe theories.
The infinite scrolling, sound-biteized, dopamine hit farming, engagement (and outrage) maximized social media is more like this: https://www3.pictures.zimbio.com/mp/7aRQwqq77srl.jpg
Key to this is that the objective isn't interest, it's "engagement", addictive behaviour and advertising consumption. It may be content that you hate, or-- better-- content that depresses you: Sapped of initiative you just keep scrolling and clicking, and some studies have show that depressed people are easier to influence and more vulnerable to advertising.
It is a completely unavoidable artifact of our attention span and mortality, with no possible workaround. Hence why curation and bias becomes the value propositions.
I think people should be the judge for who they trust and/or want to listen to.
I don’t see the “but now we can’t control what they see” objection kindly.