The Algorithmic Diet for Your Mind

I don't get the hating on algorithms.

I remember telling people in 2001 that RSS was going to fail because it didn't have algorithmic feeds. There's nothing cool about having a screen that shows you 50 RSS feeds or having something that replicates all the bad features of email, particularly having to "mark as read" everything that goes by. By 2003 I had contributed to a paper on text classification and knew the technology existed to do better and was frankly flabbergasted that nobody had done it but instead we kept getting failing RSS readers that kept failing with the same failing interfaces that had failed long ago.

It was just this winter that I made an algorithmic feed reader YOShInOn that looks like TikTok for text and I can say with a few thousand articles classified it makes a very nice feed selecting 5% of what it inputs. It is not toxic, not angry, not outrageous, but I am not choosing particularly negative articles.

A lot of people who are angry about algorithmic feeds seem to like chronological feeds with "sharing", "boosting", "retweeting", "quote tweeting" and such and those seem pretty toxic to me since people tend to share angry content.