The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
tekhne.dev
tekhne.dev
Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs.
Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010[1]. And Technology Connections is only a moderately popular channel. If you look at the bigger channels like Mark Rober it is more like 350x.
What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video.
It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people. Nothing stops people from writing blogs today. They'll probably even get roughly the same (small) number of readers that blogs pulled back in 2010.
[1]: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist...
What I think it comes down to is us, on one level, grasping the benefits of elitist gatekeeping, but, on another level, not wanting to acknowledge that such mechanisms have benefits.
The elitism I speak of isn’t one of wealth, family or schooling. Instead it’s intellectual curiosity. That seems to correlate with the foregoing; hence the discomfort (at least in democratic societies).
Simply: when the internet was peopled by the curious and clever, it was fun. When it had to—or could—cater to a lower common denominator, it did. And that gave us this crap.
That suggests a plan for internet reform. Start with a small group of contributors devoted to a better internet. Let new people in at a slow rate, so they acclimatize to norms of how to behave.
Maybe strict gatekeeping isn't actually necessary, and it's just about (a) starting with something good, and (b) adjusting the rate of newcomers to ensure that they actually acclimatize. If your platform grows 1% monthly, that will produce rapid compounding, yet could still be slow enough for acclimatization.
Sort of the question for our generation. I wish I had an answer.
This is exactly the opposite of my experience.
If we could answer the preceding question, we'd have solved society. People are bastards in real life. People are angels anonymously. (If anything, taking away real identities neuters the internet's celebrity tendency.)
The only gate with a track record is tendency towards exploration. When the internet was a frontier, it selected for curiosity and, if not intelligence, at least daring (for its own sake). When it became accessible, we got influencers.
I think that's primarily because there's no Schelling point for this. There's no single place where everyone who preferred the other form would go to. Perhaps there are webrings out there and stuff like that, but I haven't seen anything.
I've submitted my friends' blogs to the Kagi Small Web (and I'm in there as well) and almost everything there has a human feel to it, but it does not have cluster-navigation.
It seems like what this needs is a search engine that actually surfaces that sort of thing, because that's not a chicken and egg problem. It can open on day one by indexing the existing non-commercial blogs and free-to-read substacks etc., which makes it immediately useful for people who are looking for that.
And then as more people use the search engine, people are more encouraged to create that kind of site because the people looking for it now have a way of actually finding it.
Here's what I did to find out. I first used an RSS aggregate feed that I recall: Planet Debian. I then picked out a ten year old archive of that feed but not on September 11 itself (well because you know). And the data says that blogrolls were always rare! So it's not that.
Blogroll:
https://www.corsac.net/?rub=blog&post=1576
No Blogroll:
https://henrich-on-debian.blogspot.com/
http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_o...
https://weblog.christoph-egger.org/
https://www.preining.info/blog/
https://weblog.christoph-egger.org/Systemd_pitfalls.html
Indeterminate:
https://blog.sesse.net/blog (relaunched now, original excluded, can't be verified)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160227131501/https://enc.com.a... (not really, but he lists all other people he knows with his name, which I thought was cool)
I think you're right about the waves of migration, but I disagree that the product is "better".
What we've really traded are in-person friendships for anonymous online interactions, and that's definitely worse for everyone, in my opinion.
What's distinctive of the old blogging era is that the amount of online content at the time was extremely limited. You couldn't endlessly scroll through blogs. You went online, read some stuff, and then went offline. Now people never go offline. Now the amount of online content is practically unlimited, and not only that, it's the type of content that people typically consume alone. We get sucked into spending so much time alone, our only company being online strangers who we've never met and never will meet. You talk about YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, but that million-to-one ratio of viewer to YouTuber precludes most direct human interaction.
The fact that both we and the masses in general have been sucked into this situation, this depersonalization, separation from in-person interactions, is a great societal harm. And I don't think it's ironic that I'm saying this online to anonymous strangers; I just think it's sad, another symptom of the problem.
That is not true: when the first blog started in 1996 or so, text was being added to the web so fast that nobody could read even 1% of it. (Ditto text on the newsgroups before the rise of the web.)
There was also probably less duplication; these days you can find dozens of Reddit threads relevant to almost any given query, but most of them will have the same kind of comments. With short form video content you’ll often see 3 variations of the same meme within 15 minutes. Back in the early 2000s a lot of queries would only return a couple of relevant results.
It's missing the point to compare two types of people. You need to compare the so-called "normies" before and after. The statistics show that everyone is spending less time in-person socializing and more time online.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., have millions or billions of users, and it's not the blog-loving old-school techies who are spending endless hours on them.
That's what's kind of insane, community forums took maybe 20-30 people to feel "active", but you can't get a big enough slice of attention from that many people to actually use forums, even though the Internet has grown massively. Discovery is really hard: it used to be that community websites were able to claw their way up Page Rank, but these days it's just hard to compete with major websites and SEO slop. Even if you manage to snag a few people, they are very likely to drop off quicker, and the "feel" is a lot different when they're all social-media-brained anyway. The proof is in the pudding: most forums are dead, and forums that are still alive are mostly ancient and very obviously less influential and smaller than they once were. People are too distracted by things that actively claw away attention, and people who are drawn in by social media tend to bring a bad kind of energy to traditional forums anyways.
It is true that you have bigger audiences nowadays with modern social media. Part of that is just the fact that the Internet is bigger (somewhere between 2x to 3x bigger) but another major part of that is the consolidation. Though, it's also worth noting that comparing YouTube subscribers to blog readers may not give the best representation. Entirely different concepts, for entirely different media.
It just feels like there's been a shift away from the super public phpbb forum style, with distinct posts and threads of conversation.
But I'm not sure that's quite the same thing as all the communities going away.
As some examples from my own Discord:
A server for fans of pretty obscure, self published author Victoria Goddard.
A server for fans of Reiner Knizia, the world's most prolific and famous boardgame designer.
A server for fans of the Lancer RPG.
A server for people who play modern (primarily) Japanese card games.
Yeah, but most of the servers are very, very small. They're internet chatrooms. It's more like MSN group chats or IRC channels.
On the other hand, there were probably more small forums than most people realize, due to free forum hosts like Proboards.
Maybe most importantly, having a Discord chat is in no way the same overall effect as having a forum used to be.
Early days had a barrier to entry that made the public who would read and engage much more enjoyable to write for.
The universal internet is not the same thing as the one that naturally filtered it's participants.
I'm a huge fan of the channel, and that video is mostly great and insightful. But his being "puzzled" at the way people use the subscriptions "feed" is kinda surprising. The low percentaged from that feed should lead to asking questions to understand why, instead of assuming people are "doing it wrong". People use subscriptions as a sort of meta bookmarking system. It's also a way of honing their algorithm. People can have a wide variety of interests. Just because someone is subscribed to a channel on anime doesn't mean it's the thing they're looking for at the time they dip into that feed. And some channels just fill the feed up with posts that don't always necessitate the work of pruning it. So, that firehose ends up being a lot of noise. The ideal would be some sort of in-between. Where you can pare down the subscriptions feed based on a current interest. One doesn't need to see the very latest post by a creator of they aren't someone who is chronically online.
I think we will still see the emergence of "human algorithms" that personally curate content for you.
Some of my favourite YouTube channels post very infrequently (one video every few months) whereas others post every single day. The YouTube algorithm seems to know this and pins the low frequency guys’ new videos right to the top when they come out.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be a "discover" type of feed. I'm just saying it shouldn't be the forced default
It's a tricky balance, since I don't necessarily want just a feed of my subscriptions, it really depends on what type of content I want to watch/engage with. There's a ton of time where I just want background noise while I work on something, that's where the previously mentioned video game channel and similar content are what I want. Whereas there's certain content (like hyperspace pirate or applied science) where if they post a video I don't watch until I can actually give it my full attention. I have my complaints with YouTube, but out of the main social media sites it seems to do the best job with being able to present an algorithmic feed that is actually useful. I tried TikTok for a few weeks, and as much as people were talking their algorithm up I just couldn't reliably signal what videos I actually wanted to watch. There's some very good content there, but for me at least I spent more time struggling against the algorithm since it kept trying to show videos I just don't care about.
And TikTok is leagues better than Instagram or Facebook. There are a few communities that I have to engage with in those sites, since that's just where the people involved are posting. But goddamn are the algorithmic feeds on both just a dumpster fire. The only content I have engaged with on Facebook for 5+ years is RC vehicle related, mainly the local racing club and other groups. And yet my Facebook feed is all political or Ai rage bait, they dint even show posts from my high-school friends. I see it every time I log in, and haven't clicked on any of the suggested posts I years. It's frustrating, since I'm providing them with tons of signal on what content I actually want to see, and that content is on their site. Meta just does such a poor job of allowing you to curate your feed that I gave up on their sites years ago. I wouldn't mind being able to see my old friends posts (although most of them also don't post anymore due to these issues) or at least see content related to my interests. I might spend more time in the site if that were the cadlse, instead I log on for 10 minutes once a week to see when the next race is scheduled.
Launching from the Subscriptions is an intentional act by people who are actively trying to avoid the Recommendation page, or where the Recommendation page failed to surface what they wanted.
I would not be at all surprised if any using of the Subscriptions page triggered YouTube to adjust their algorithm for that user to see more of what they played on the Recommendation page. They probably see the use of the Subscriptions as a failure of the Recommendation engine.
For a short while my YouTube app on my AppleTV was showing Watch Later and Subscriptions when it launched. I loved it. I assume they were just A/B testing, because it stopped doing that after a while.
What works for me is checking if people I respect in a domain also blog or link elsewhere. That is how I found Peter Norvig's blog... or maybe it was on hacker news.
So it already works like this for me.
It almost never suggests random crap. I'd be hard pressed to come up with an example where I was puzzled or infuriated by one of YT's suggestions...
(Facebook and Reddit, on the other hand, are way more random and infuriating).
However, RSS! People have literally emailed me to tell me that they are unsubscribing from my newsletter but "Don't worry, I follow you through RSS." My traffic is larger than ever thanks to RSS. I syndicate the full content, not just a summary, yet people still click and visit my tiny blog.
Google traffic, mainstream social media, all of them don't care about my blog. But from time to time, random people send me an email, and that makes up for it.
Relatively niche but traditional bulletin board forums are good. Recent posts to the top do tend make some threads be attention hogs, but there's a human mod in the loop if the forum is small enough.
I suppose chats (usually Discord) also fall into this as well. A smaller community there can be similar to a smaller community on Mastodon, forums, etc.
Any other thoughts? How do people discover new blogs?
Side note, I think I realized or came to the belief about 10 years ago that large groups of humans suck. Moderation becomes impractical or ineffective; content discovery becomes manipulated like this post is talking about. Similarly, large communities on a monolithic platform have to be monetized -- which results in clickbait of a sorts to maintain engagement.
So whatever they share on there is how I get my social-media awareness. It's basically intentionally a very very narrow filter. It has to be.
Then, subscribe to paid publications, journalism, podcasts, newsletters.
And I feel society could go further in acknowledging the evolution of social networks.
They border on surrogate families, at this point.
Q: So, are there terms for the rules which are implicit or explicit, that apply to joiners of these private chat groups? Pseudo-kids?
And RSS. It never went away. Just use RSS.
But I disagree with your value judgement. Open spaces are great - but men and women who believe in something greater than themselves is what makes the world go round.
Looking at fertility rates between religious and atheists, we'll need these churches and temples in the next generations.
I'm not into demographics planning. But I do have two kids, girls. I certainly want them to have as much autonomy as they could have. A religious argument regarding "fertility rates" that need to be increased is not aligned with that.
I love green spaces. So I simply want to see churches gone, because they compete for the same (very limited) resource. Using the privilege of being grandfathered in.
If they'll move their activity online, it'll not be the case. So I'm happy to see this happening.
So for example - even back when I was an atheist (I was born in the USSR) - I had a feeling that life had a purpose, there was a potential to live up to, there was meaning and reason beyond just me. In a way that's a religiously originated belief that happened to "survive" for a while unrooted from religion, but clearly originated from it.
Now that I've come back to religion, one lens on it is that it's simply the necessary context in which meaning and purpose can exist. For example, if as an atheist I encounter another atheist who is a nihilist or hedonist (as proxy for not having anything greater than themselves) I have no logical foundation from which to say there's more to life than that. But as a religious person talking to another religious person, establishing that baseline is trivial - that's not where the effort goes.
For a belief to be "outdated" requires something updated that works better. One obviously true attribute of atheism is that it doesn't enable its adherents to have enough kids - so from a purely Darwinian metric it obviously doesn't work. It's a hard sell to say "here's a better belief, sure it'll drive you into an evolutionary dead end but... uhh yeah it's better"
Congrats on your two girls and while I also want my kids (2 boys and 1 girl) to have maximal autonomy, I have a great role to play in shaping their thinking and values. For example - whether I live in a neighborhood with a lot of families of in a city filled primarily with spinsters, whether I convey my own values around children or not, whether I encourage a social group that is positive about parenthood vs one that sees kids as undesired burdens, these are all things within my control. And my personal belief is that my kids will be happiest and have the greatest meaning in life if they - like me and my wife - love life, and want to pass it on, and to use our children as a way to contribute positively to the future. So yes I want to pass on these values, yes religion helps that, and also - if we don't do that - the future will simply be inherited by the kids of parents who do. It's not about sustaining fertility rate in some mechanistic sense, it's about a dropping rate being a numeric symptom of a problem I don't want my kids to suffer from if I can help it.
I agree with the desire to not move your kids "online" but I don't think green spaces are gonna do that for you, as plenty of kids live near the park but never look up from their phone. I recently realized that a religious lifestyle "forces" more in person interaction, as I alluded to in my original comment here. For example, it's my religious friends that attend services together - physically, that go to each others houses for lifecycle events, that study as a community.
Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. That changes the dynamic IMHO. People post to seek answers to their questions, or to share their knowledge and answer other people's questions. This is the way.
I'd include HN in this group of ye olde internet forums. It does have a mechanism to vote, but it's different and the expectation of the readers are brutal to frivolous posts (of which I have made only couple and paid for dearly).
Those types of forums are great, but just as a counterpoint, I get a lot of that type of value from Facebook Groups as well. There are niche specialty interest groups with people of different skill depths conversing on probably just about anything.
It's mixed in with the rest of your Facebook feed most of the time so it is a categorically different experience/"community" than an independent forum but I don't think the "like" mechanics materially affect the discussion in those places.
I’m not convinced. 4chan doesn’t have any of these mechanisms, so the proxy just becomes the number of replies you receive. The chief benefit of forums is that they are smaller. This is good if the original base of users is good, and untenable if they are bad—and they usually are bad. I always hated forums when I was younger and was glad when Reddit killed them. Of course, Reddit brought its own problems, but even in the state it is in today I find it infinitely preferable to forums.
But yes, I agree pretty much with the whole article.
However... for me, the communities come first. I mean I do have a goal in my internet usage, and this goal comes before any principled stands (mostly; there are exceptions). So if, for example, the hobby communities around games and crafts I enjoy form in Facebook, what can I do? Facebook sucks as a platform, but I want to be in those communities because I enjoy being part of them. It's a trap, but one where there's no easy way out.
As for YouTube: my search history and the algorithm are my main use of YT; I wouldn't dream of turning them off. Because I basically use it for two things, my hobby things (subscribed to several channels I like) and watching cartoon clips with my daughter, all the algorithm ever recommends me is exactly those two things: cartoon clips and things related to my hobbies. Never rage bait, never random nonsense. When I click accidentally on rage bait inducing stuff, I remove it from my watch history; I know this isn't perfect but it works in the sense I don't get recommended that crap.
Also, YouTube Premium because I can't stand ads. Yes, I'm aware I'm paying the mafia thugs to leave me alone. It sucks.
This is no defense of YouTube, I know it can turn to shit any minute, but at least for me the algorithm works.
The one thing that is absolutely driving me nuts is the AI-driven en-slopification of the internet. I wish AI got magically banned from most venues. I want to interact with humans and human-created stuff, not AI spam. I think this is a battle that cannot be won, to my eternal sadness.
Again I must repeat I do agree with the sentiment of the blog post, and I wish the internet got de-enshitified again. I'm not sure it's that easy though.
uBlock Origin has been able to block 100% of Youtube ads in my experience so far; granted I don't visit Youtube all the time. I also use yt-dlp to download videos so that I can timeshift them and watch them later when I'm not connected to WiFi and yet not burn through my phone data. This also happens to exclude ads, though that's not my primary purpose in using it.
Also, while Youtube claims that adblockers are also against their Terms of Service, if you actually go read https://www.youtube.com/t/terms you'll see that their claim is not supported by the actual language of their ToS. They forbid you to "access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content" without their express permission. But adblocking is not altering the Content of the service, it's blocking certain videos while letting other videos through. If there was a service that detected "here's a word from our sponsors" parts of the video and removed them, that would be altering Content. But the ads are not part of any given video, rather they're external videos inserted at certain points into the video you're watching. Selectively blocking video A while watching video B is not forbidden by any part of Youtube's Terms of Service.
So go ahead and use uBlock Origin with a clear conscience, unless you can find the part of their Terms of Service that actually forbids blocking certain videos while letting others through.
This exists and it's called SponsorBlock. It automatically skips past sponsored segments. Debatable if that is altering content though
What about mobile and the YouTube app?
And there is also https://revanced.app/
Though I personally just pay the premium sub, as I use it to play music on most days.
Unfortunately yt-dlp is a no-go for me, I don't plan so far ahead and I mostly watch YouTube from my phone, usually when cooking dinner, doing the dishes, etc. That's why simply paying for YouTube Premium is (for me, and for now) the path of least friction. Paying off the thugs so they leave me alone :(
Reminds me of the last line of R.E.M.’s ‘Radio Song’ (1991)… “Now our children grow up prisoners All their life, radio listeners” < https://open.spotify.com/track/5UBeN0XvvIvnEjyp6uThr4?si=V_Q...>
I've been thinking about this for a while. How could we both choose our feed sources and tailor our own algorithm? I'm tinkering with this idea at https://www.thecrux.is/
We are surrounded by examples of sometimes mainstream products and services that reflect the way people are shifting their thinking and swinging the pendulum.
This survey isn't 100% the same exact topic, but I think that it's an illustration of my point that well over half of Americans say that social media has a negative impact. [1]
People know the present state is bad and I think they are starting to take their dollars and eyeballs elsewhere. It's just anecdotal, but the amount of people I know who fully pulled the plug on deleting social media accounts would have seemed incomprehensible 10 years ago.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/15/64-of-ame...
Technology-adept people will always have ways to avoid the prevailing swamp of dark patterns, but that's not corporate America's target anyway -- that target is people who constantly react to things, who don't exercise agency, who don't possess any measurable degree of autonomy.
That fact results from our broken educational system. In school, people are trained to surrender their autonomy early on. People aren't being taught how to think, they're being told what to think. And if we don't fix that problem, no later interventions have any hope of succeeding.
Few things have simple causes, but this is an exception. Most people are brainless consumers because that's public education's goal. It's not an unintended side effect.
Maybe the algorithmic curation that's talked about here is enough on its own to prime the average user to behave a certain way. Or maybe humans are just like that and prefer it that way, and we're returning to the mean now that the internet is owned by average people. Either way, this seems to have a lot more complexity and I'm not sure if it can ever be solved at this point.
But, AI search is here. When you write for hours will it be just to have AI quote or amalgamate it, so you can have a link sit by it that few will click on? Or will you submit it to some old Yahoo-like index, HN, or peer-messaging app that reaches maybe typically 10 people typically or 100,000 once for your 15 minutes of fame?
When you write something fairly long, don’t do it for the clicks, unless you need the money. If you have something to say that’s that you think is important, sure, write it, but don’t bet on anything but making a few people mad. Do it because it’s what you want to do. AI can’t take that away from you, yet.
I’m sure I’ve recently read something great that was written by AI, though. It’s not all slop. It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon.
We'd call that simple plagiarism or copyright violation in any other context.
> unless you need the money
Who doesn't need money? Also shouldn't the people spending the money decide who gets it?
> AI can’t take that away from you, yet.
AI isn't taking anything. Google is. Consciously.
> It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon.
Who told you that? Google? You see the flaw in that strategy?
In this day and age, a blog is like music; if I can’t engage with it for free, I’m probably not going to engage with it at all.
The “small web” is (citation needed) bigger and healthier than ever. Yep, big algorithm feed apps are huge. That doesn’t stop the small stuff from being more huge than it was way back, decades ago, when it was the big game in town.
It’s nice to take off the rose colored glasses and look at the present sometimes. The web is awesome - no hacks needed to make your site look amazing; awesome animations or frosted glass effects in one line of CSS; static site generators desperate for you to use their code to write what you care about; blogs with RSS feeds even though RSS is dead.
If you believe these awesome things don’t exist you’ll live in that world - but it does actually exist, so you’ll be very much missing out.
I must also say I dislike the obnoxious "Look at how quirky I am!" 90s web badges on an HTML5 page.
Today's kids will still do that, in their own way. I'm not convinced there's anything here other than old man and cloud. We did it our way, in our time. I don't think this generation is actually for-reals-this-time the one where technology finally neutered human curiosity and wrecked it all.
In the days you speak of the internet was the frontier for the curious and early adopters. The rest of the world caught up and now it's a fully commodified and industrialized space. Nostalgically trying to recreate the early internet isn't the way forward. I don't know what is but I know the kids will find it.
The younger people I see on social media are mostly all on the plantation but at least some of them have found creative ways to use it for their own purposes (e.g. evading word filters or building their own communities on direct platforms like Discord or WhatsApp). I see this a lot on Reddit, too (although I’m not sure if the crowd there is young anymore).
I think the key issue is that a lot of kids see the internet primarily as something they can make money off of, so they go to the platforms that promise a ready-made audience. When I was younger having anything I put on the internet get even a few hundred views would have had me elated, whereas for an aspiring professional content creator, getting a few hundred views just means that you failed.
For those who don’t have these kinds of aspirations, the new meta is group chats; Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter. The advantage here is that the messaging space is highly competitive and users are not going to tolerate receiving their messages in non-chronological order the way they do with their feed; this makes private messaging somewhat future-proof against the worse excesses of social media while still being more accessible than something like IRC.
But human nature does not move that fast. It's arguable that we are largely the same as pre-tech humans. I guarantee that the biological property of human curiosity did not materially shift between our generation and the next. Every generation expresses the sentiment that some form of technology has ruined today's kids because we had it so much harder, we had to do X, whatever. Our parents were saying the same about us. And every time the kids find a way to innovate. I am so so weary of any claim that somehow this time the cycle has been broken.
Occam's razor says no, that's just how you feel when you get older. We already know this. To me it's the height of hubris and folly to actually believe "well they really broke the mold with us and now we're doomed."