> The app uses algorithmic predictions, which Kevin Systrom sees as ‘the future of social.’
I see this as the anti-future. All I want from social (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) is a chronologically ordered list of things I chose to follow. That's it.
I see this as the anti-future. All I want from social (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) is a chronologically ordered list of things I chose to follow. That's it.
The vast majority of people get their news from some kind of feed. Be it Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, whatever. Scrolling a feed is what gets news to most people. I can see the purpose of making an app that does just that, instead of having to also live with 3000 social features i don't care about (and all the noise and pointless posts they bring to the feed).
I also don't agree on the chronologically ordered list of things i choose to follow. I tried to do that and as soon as you put any kind of news outlet it's going to flood your feed of things you don't care about. I want to follow TechCrunch, Ars Technica or The Verge, but you can be sure that I don't want to see every article they post. I just want to have them on my radar for that more noteworthy stories. And I also want to discover new things, trending articles or topic that might have nothing to do with what i specifically follow.
That's why i also go on HN or reddit for news, because there's some kind of user curation where only the interesting articles ends up on my feed. I get to disover things that i don't already know and follow, plus i get curated news selection that should filter the noise while letting me know what's the hot topic of the week. But if the articles are selected by upvotes, then we have echo-chambers and both this site, reddit or any other social media are prime examples of this. You really get only a narrow and often biased slice. An app whose sole purpose is to give you news and articles you find interesting might have an incentive to do so without trapping you in a filter bubble. Or maybe not, only time will tell.
You don't get a big pile of all of your subscriptions in a list, like a twitter feed. You get a list of all of your subscriptions, like a list of IM chats. Selecting one of them gives you a chronological list of posts from that channel.
I think the downside is there seems to be a limit to the number of chats a human can keep track of. Algo feeds let you subscribe to thousands of things without thinking about it too much, that would get overwhelming with how Telegram does things.
I have a collection of bookmarked news sites that I check regularly, which show their articles without any personalized algorithmic reshuffling or hiding. Knowing that I see the same content as other visitors do is a plus for me. I don't need to worry about missing stories I care about because some AI decided the opposite, and I feel like it helps me avoid filter bubbles and clickbait.
This isn't to say that one approach is right or wrong, just that this is what works for me and some other folks.
Democratic design instead of authoritarian design is the future of social media to me. I am long on Reddit because it allows you to subscribe to specific subreddits. I am long on RSS - which has seen a resurgence - because of the control it gives you over what you see.
If only there was a "reddit for video" where I could see categorized videos instead of the garbage the YouTube algorithm gives me - of which I have almost no control over.
There is far, far too much information out there, and the things outputted from the things you follow is a 'decent start' but it's not what you want.
Systrom is exactly right and better algs is what we need.
TikTok is a great social medial platform, it's fun, irreverent, and the alg allows you to find niches in content that would not exist otherwise. I've found this guy who does videos on his sheep herding dogs, it's so fun to watch.
Applying a great filter to all of my youtube/news feeds is one of the most meaningful ways to improve my content feed.
Yes - we want to make sure people have the option to follow exactly what they want and hopefully to adjust the feed parameters ... but I would love to get rid of the fuzz in my feed.
This is decent innovation and it could affect a lot of people, it's fine to be a bit sus but I don't think we should be cynical.
You don't have to use it.
They also additionally introduced chronologically sorted “following” and “favorites” feeds. I haven’t had a Facebook in a decade, but after hardly using IG for years, I’ve started using it again. These features have honestly improved my opinion of Meta significantly, you can at least utilize it as a tool now.
I'm going to guess that it's possible, if not likely, for me to have higher engagement with an alg while being less happy. A simple way to find out is choice. I like that Twitter has both modes.
Both apps are quite mainstream & huge DAU versus their English counterparts. The delta ingredient is likely alg.
(That it only offers a chronological feed is the main thing I don't like about it, to the point that I wrote my own client to implement rudimentary prioritization)
If they tune for quality, have a scroll that bottoms out when the next article no longer meets some high bar, and gives the user some control over the sources and presentation, then it could be decent.
I don't care about discovery unless it happens naturally, eg I go looking for something or a friend recommends it. Same with the HN feed, I basically consider most of your friends so it works really well. An AI that has a purpose of just making sure I stick around in the site as much as possible? No.
I've gone and found news sites that were the exact same: chronological content in text format. Hacker news is like a role model for websites for me.
(Personally, and maybe this isn't great, but I use through social media when I'm bored and want to see something semi-interesting. Ordering by an estimate of interestingness seems like a no-brainer in this scenario.)
Then you would like Mastodon/ActivityPub.
My understanding is that the Mastodon devs are trying to separate "increase the distribution of a post" from "give positive feedback to the post author".
I do like that there's no reply component to boosts though. You boost it up or not. No sniping.
If I want my followers to see something, I have to consciously make a post that says "hey check out this thing". It's great! I open Mastodon, look at what the people I'm following are saying or pointing at, and then I close it and get on with doing something else instead of spending half an hour being distracted by Shit Twitter Thinks I Might Like.
Also, since 4.0 you can follow hashtags. Currently a restriction on this is that you only see posts that made it to your instance because someone else on your instance is following the author. So it works better if you are on an instance with many users or users with similar interests to yours. It works very well for my use cases, most of the content I see is through hashtag follows.