> In other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic.
I think OPs point is valid if the algorithm is really just giving humans more of what they want. In other words, if the engagement metric really is responding to how humans prefer to spend their time, this really is a view into what a more technically democratic society looks like.
Personally, I don't like the idea of that and would prefer the thought that these algorithms really are measuring the wrong thing!
To highlight the point I'm making, assuming the above is true, your stance could be summed up as: "yes, humans prefer this content, but we know better and will make the right decision on their behalf"
To re-enforce a sibling comment, being able to choose your own algorithm is exactly how you tease apart these two takes. Twitter supports this (chronological vs. engagement) - I personally opt for chronological. I'd be interested to see the stats on usage of that!
What makes people engaged and what people want are not the same thing by definition. If you want to state they are, you should say why you think it.
I agree that it's not, but long-term desires are not all that people have.
> many would argue
Maybe, maybe not, but I would disagree.
> that they're not freely choosing to succumb to addiction either.
"freely" is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. And a discussion about that is philosophical. They're as free to make that decision as they are to make any other.
Personally I try to go out of my way to purchase books directly from the author, publisher, a book store with a local presence, and online retailers in that order.
I’ve mostly cut Barnes and Nobel out of my vendor list for this exact reason, their book shelves are full of products I have no interest in - walking into their store has such a high noise to signal ratio that, unless I place my order in advance for a specific product, I don’t bother walking in anymore. The books of value are buried on shelves drown out by heavily marketed pop culture noise; and that’s if I’m lucky, often I have to have it ordered and shipped to store to pick it up locally. They don’t meet my needs for content discovery so I don’t do business with them very often.
Those things are literally the result of human and automated research on how to make people read/share content. I wonder what is your definition of "forced".
They aren't forcing you to keep your eyes open and see the content on their sites
Your computer can open another web page. You can get off the seat.
Tired of seeing garbage clickbait articles? Block the sites which post that stuff.
Tired of conspiracy theories and gossipy articles? Block the sites and mute/unfollow those people.
Tired of experiencing the world in 140 character chunks? Get off Twitter.
Just because they haven't succeeded does not mean they haven't tried.
If this is your stance: what algorithm do you propose to separate content that is "toxic" from content that is "non-toxic"?
I know the actual text of the bill would require a lot of finagling and legalese, but that's the concept of what I want.
if u want an example: tiktok has the for you page (algo discovery) and the following page (just ppl u follow). its the fyp where ppl spend time.
There used to be a news app called Pulse that LinkedIn bought and killed. To me, that was the best possible execution of the feed concept. It was essentially RSS with a scrollable feed component. You could browse feeds by category, but it wasn't recommending things based on current interests. If you wanted to go down a right/left wing newshole it was possible, but you had to consciously seek it out and go down it. The app wasn't breadcrumbing you.
"Non algorithmic" means "some human creates the content feed by hand". This is also not free of lots of biases and what news portals in the web did in the past.
Say you hit a button, and each time you hit it you gain a million dollars. After you hit that button once or twice, you discover that it also causes great harm to other people. If you continue to hit the button, your original intent (when you didn't know it's effects) is no longer relevant to whether or not it you should continue hitting the button, since you would now knowingly be harming people for your own profit. The side-effect is no longer a side-effect. It's just an effect.
To answer your question anyway, perhaps we should consider the well-being of a user and bake that into our algorithms. It might not be as profitable, but there's a reason we regulate companies- having some restrictions on profitability can often be a net benefit to society.
The problem rather is: how are we supposed to algorithmically measure the well-being of a user?