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Comment by 0xEF | Hacker News Reader

Stop trying to make Mastodon be Twitter. If that's what you want, go use Twitter. I don't get this mentality of "I like X, but I don't want to use X, so imma go turn Y into X" some devs seem to have. Chronological ordering is a fair and balanced choice for media presentation. Playing into people's FOMO is what got the Internet into the rat's nest of algorithmically driven problematic feeds in the first place.

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Twitter's algorithm optimizes for advertising. I want my algorithm to optimize for my value.

Use case: I want to log into Mastodon once or twice a week. I want to follow lots of interesting people and topics, but I don't have time to read it all. So, I want to have an algorithm that allows me to see all things from a subset of accounts I consider friends and, after that, see the most shared and starred from the larger group I follow, then the most shared and starred from the topics I follow.

But if I happen to be browsing more frequently, I can see the chronological feed again in that order: close friends, acquaintances, topics. This isn't what Twitter does: their algorithm does not serve me.

Good counter, you and a few others have given me something to consider.

>Stop trying to make Mastodon be Twitter. If that's what you want, go use Twitter.

I don't see how using an optional, open-source, non-chronological feed means that someone should just "go use Twitter". For one, the incentives are completely different between Twitter which generates revenue based on engaging users (and juicing subsequent algorithms), and someone who builds a separate feed interface for Mastodon.

>I don't get this mentality of "I like X, but I don't want to use X, so imma go turn Y into X" some devs seem to have.

Developers like to solve problems and build things. I've re-created other projects and products lots of times. Why is it a problem what someone chooses to do with their own time for their own reasons?

>Playing into people's FOMO is what got the Internet into the rat's nest

Disagree. Incentives tied to advertising-based business models is the root cause here, not FOMO.

Disclaimer: I made my own alternative timeline for Mastodon as well, so I'm pretty biased. :)

Bias aside, you present fair counters to my position. However, I still think the leveraging of FOMO is what drives us in the wrong direction with social media. If the market (us, basically) had the general attitude of "if I miss a post, I miss a post, oh well" the advert-based models wouldn't be as effective as they are, incentive would shrink, and we'd probably have an Internet that was closer to the original intention. That, however, is strong speculation on my part and I am hyper-aware of that, but having watched social media (as an adult) emerge and become what it is today, it's exceedingly difficult for me to unsee that pattern.

We can perhaps agree to disagree on that, but I'm considering your other points.

Just my two cents, but I've always viewed FOMO and the ad-based algorithm as two sides of a feedback loop.

FOMO is the psychological response that the ad-based algorithm is playing off of, neither one is the problem in and of itself.

I think some subset of people do want an algorithmic Twitter-like thing which is not centrally controlled by a crazy person. I know people who prefer Bluesky to Mastodon for precisely that reason (though Bluesky's lack of central control feels very... coming-soon, rather than actually real).

eludes me how people think it's ok to tell other people to stop on topics like this. it's not even about making maston be twitter. it's about experimenting with timeline options that are not chronological and it's all open and an invitation for people to contribute if they are interested. you are not interested? cool, then do whatever. because unlike twitter, you have that option - and that option will not go away.

stop commenting when your comment tells others to stop doing what they like because you don't like it.

Oh, grow up. Dissenting opinions are welcome on line, being probably the most beautiful part of this whole mess we call the Internet. If you don't like my comment, address the content of the comment and explain to me how my warning of the path this treads is unreasonable. Stop virtue signalling and contribute. I'm open to having my mind change and everyone on this site should be as well.

dissenting opinions are not a problem until they start telling people what to do.

i'm not interested in changing your mind.

Interesting. So you wanting me to stop explaining why someone shouldn't be doing something is you not being interested in changing my mind? You live in an interesting world.

What is a dissenting opinion other than an expression of dissatisfaction toward a thing, be that an action of another or not? You say dissent is okay, byt in the same breath say byt only if you do it the way I think it should be done.

Hypocrisy is a helluva drug, I guess.

Anyway, have a great day. Didn't mean to piss in anyone's cereal quite this early.

everyone can dissent as much as he likes and make it public too. personally i'd have preferred if it wasn't that imperative. it's not what, but how one says things. but anyway, maybe that other commenter is right that it shouldn't be seen that emotional.

Using the imperative form in writing is more commonly used as rethorical device than as a literal order. You interpreting it as the latter suggests to me that maybe you should work on your emotional regulation when it comes to other people's writing.

Dissenting opinions are welcome with me, I appreciate them. What I don't appreciate is casual downvoting. I suspect I must have some of the highest downvote stats on this site. And I would love to be able to search HN users using that sort of metric!

Anyway, I have unpopular, but sincerely held opinions - anyone is free to disagree, of course. The point I'm trying to get to is that while I hardly ever downvote, if I did, I would hope that I would also comment on what the issue was.

As a courtesy, it should be downvote + comment, if poss.

I don't really know how you migrated to the subject of downvoting, but I do not disagree. Never found the idea of "karma" on a forum to be useful for anything other that brigading and collective censorship. I use Harmonic to view HN, which has options yo hide scores and all that, do I don't even see the downvotes, tbh. Safe to assume they are there though, especially when you say things that do not jive with the popular narrative.

have an upvote!

> I don't get this mentality of "I like X, but I don't want to use X, so imma go turn Y into X"

You really don't understand why someone would prefer Mastodon because of its decentralized and open source nature, but would like to take some of the things they like about Twitter and include it in their Mastodon experience?

> Playing into people's FOMO

This implies that the only form of "algorithmic feed" is one where clickbait and inflammatory content is maximized.

An algorithmic feed can also mean something like a "for you" feed that tries to find you posts you'd find interesting based solely on your current follows, but from other accounts you're not following.

It can also mean a "what you missed" feed like the one Twitter used to have, that shows you the top posts from your follows since the last time you logged in. If someone doesn't open mastodon for a week because they were on vacation, it's not feasible for them to scroll through an entire weeks worth of posts to "catch up".

Understand that people have a wide variety of experiences they'd like to get out of social media, and that this whole mentality of "my idea of a social network is the most enlightened and correct one, and everyone else is stupid" just feeds into the stereotype of the socially inept engineer.

Totally get what you're saying and agree to an extent, but can you supply examples where algo-driven feeds did not eventually devolve into clickbait/inflammatory/etc recommendations?

I am not saying algos are bad, so I should clarify that. What I should have directed my ire at is the people that implement them since, historically speaking, they can not be trusted to do so without bias or other motives. Chronological feeds cannot be abused in this way, to my knowledge, and represent a state of purity in my mind.

Appreciate you taking the time to make salient points, though.

The alignment problem is an extremely difficult one, and one that we've basically punted on for all AI research. Making an algorithm is easy, scoring content by external factors like engagement or time on screen are also easy. Designing a scoring algorithm that is aligned to a person's preferences, desires, opinions, etc are extremely hard. At best we attempt to find proxies and correlations, the algorithm tracks engagement and we assume that means they want to see more similar content.

IMO this is the fundamental reason for chronological feeds. Aligning the algorithm is an unsolved problem, I'd rather just not use it at all.

For a moment there I thought you were the first person to actually follow the new branding guide for the platform formerly known as Twitter. Of course, I should've known better.

Nothing about this mimics Twitter. What the heck do you care what somebody does with open source software in a part of a federated ecosystem that you don't have to use? The whole point of software is to serve people's needs; don't tell people what their needs should be. If some person wants to have a non-chronological timeline, and others want to use that same software, that's their prerogative. If that makes you mad, there are plenty of trivial ways to wall yourself off from all of this.

Perhaps you should have walled yourself off from my comment, but you still chose to get upset and reply. Weird how that works.

I'll you the same thing I told the other responder; Hypocrisy's a helluva drug, eh?

Anyway, moving on.

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