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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

My inner Libertarian is screaming, but I would support a "choose your algorithm" law. Wherein social media platforms would be required to allow the user a clear choice to opt-out of algorithmic recommendations. Perhaps even requiring a basic chronological feed.

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.

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You inner Libertarian has the same problem as every other person with that ideology - you are vastly overestimating the knowledge and capabilities of the average user, and the ideas that result will fail in practice. Algorithmic content is a market failure being subsidized by the fact that it helps sell ads. The capitalist greedy function means they're going to keep pushing algo content, because it's the money making engine. If you ban the combination of algorithmic content and targeted advertising, the damage would be vastly reduced (also Meta would implode, because their business is a market failure that only exists because regulators are not enforcing competition laws that prevent the use of free services subsided by ads and other antitrust laws).

To be clear I wasn't proposing a ban, but the requirement to provide non algorithmic alternatives for content feeds.

Yeah, I understood what you said, I just would be against it in general unless advertising is strictly decoupled from it. Even then, I'm not sure there is a huge benefit to it.

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.

> but the requirement to provide non algorithmic alternatives for content feeds.

"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.

I think "sort by recent" or filtering are considered "non-algorithmic" in this space.

except recommendation platforms are more popular all the time. ppl will choose the algo feed bc they like it more. idk why but everybody is taking america off the hook for wanting toxic shit and gravitating to it. its at least half a demand side problem.

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.

Please type out your words in full, using so much texting shorthand significantly detracts from what you are trying to say.

I can't respond to the child comment, so I'll reply here. The "type everything out" must be a generational/cultural thing. Because when I read your comment I literally did not realize you used words like "ppl". I automatically expanded it to people when reading it

If that's true, why is twitter making it so difficult (and more difficult over time) to see only content you follow, and Facebook making it impossible?

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