Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

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> But here's the thing ... people CHOOSE to engage

Kinda, but they also don't really realise that they have much more control over the feed than they expect (in certain areas)

For the reel/tiktok/foryou-instagram feeds, it shows you subjects that you engage with. It will a/b other subjects that similar people engage with. Thats all its doing. continual a/b to see if you like what ever flavour of bullshit is popular.

Most people don't realise that you can banish posts from your feeds by doing a long press "I don't like this" equivalent. It takes a few times for the machine to work out if its an account, groups of accounts of theme that you don't like, and it'll stop showing it to you. (threads for example took a very long time to stop showing me fucking sports.)

Why don't more people know this? because it hurts short term metrics for what ever bollocks the devs are working on. so its not that well advertised. just think how unsuccessful the experiments in the facebook app would have been if you were able to block the "other posts we think you might like" experiments. How sad Zuckerberg would be that his assertion was actually bollocks?

There's definitely a mass of people who can't/won't/don't get past passive/least-effort relationships with things on screens. These would be the type that in the TV days would simply leave the TV on a specific channel all day and just watch whatever was on, and probably haven't changed their car radio dial from the station they set it to when they bought the car. In modern times they probably have their cable TV they still pay for on a 24 hour news channel and simply have that going all day.

To be fair, in times far past, you really didn't have much choice in TV or radio channels, and I suspect it's this demographic that tend to just scroll down Facebook and take what it gives without much thought other than pressing Like on stuff.

Yup. Knowing the exact percentage of those people would be hurtful to my soul I think, but I suspect they drive a meaningful percentage of business. Like that time when Netflix displayed shows on, because some people couldn't be bothered to actually choose something to watch ?

Transparency would prove or disprove this. Release the algorithm and let us decide for ourselves. In my experience, Instagram made an algorithm change 3-4 years ago. It used to be that my feed was exactly my interests. Then overnight my feed changed. It became a mix of 1. interracial relationship success stories 2. scantily clad women clickbait, 3. east asian "craft project" clickbait, and just general clickbait. It felt as if "here's what other people like you are clicking on" became part of the algorithm.

Maybe the TikTok algorithm is better, but the "I don't like this" action on Meta properties just blatantly does not work. I still get the same type of clickbait content no matter how many times I try to get rid of it. Maybe watching other types of Reels would do it, but no thanks.

on facebook, yes, for many stupid reasons. It doesn't have a "I don't like this" function on most stuff. and there are no controls for stopping "non friend" content injection in the feed.

In instagram, its very different.

First there is "snooze suggested content" which gives you a pure follow feed.

However once you reach the end of that and go into the "for you" feed, which has one "personality". Then there is the explore page, which has another "personality"

The new reels carousel stuff I think is possibly another personality.

So there are now three places where you need to yeet stuff you don't like.

I noticed that when the reels carousel was introduced they went heavy into thirst traps.

But again, this is a regulation issue. If this was the 1980s, there would be a moral panic causing something like the v-chip to stop "the youth" getting access to soft porn (not that it worked that well) Now it'll be a executive fatwa, which'll be reversed when he gets distracted by something else.

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