Comment by perching_aix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perching_aix | Hacker News Reader

I find this to be misguided tech-nostalgia. What you control this way is the way information is brokered to you. It only controls the information reaching you itself to the extent that is reflected in the delivery method.

This is significant if you're a staunch subscriber to the idea that everything, and I really do mean everything, wrong with social and mass media is the "algorithms" (formerly: capitalism, sensationalism, etc.), but I'm not. I find that to be at most half the story.

In the end, you're consuming something someone else produced for you to consume. That's why it's available. So you're relying on that information to be something you don't find inherently objectionable, or at least be filterable in that regard, which is not a given. We consume arbitrary and natural language content. Most you can do is feed it through AI to pre-digest it for you, which can and will fail in numerous ways. And this is to say nothing about content that wasn't produced and/or didn't reach you.

The reason older technologies felt better wasn't necessarily just because of them per se, but also because of their cultural context. These are interwoven of course, but I wouldn't necessarily trust that reverting back to old technology is what's going to steer back this ship to a better course. I'm afraid this is a lot more like undropping a mug than it is like applying negation.

Author here. I do not necessarily think algorithmic feeds are the only thing wrong with social media, but it's certainly one of the major problems. More so if the platforms don't even allow me to revert to chronological feeds, or make it really user unfriendly.

Of course the cultural context has changed, but I think your view is quite cynical. I do believe that AI could, in theory, be a good steward and curator of news feeds (think Google News), but I haven't seen an implementation that would be open and customizable enough. I do not like the idea that someone could be manipulating what I'm being presented, or what reaches me and what doesn't.

Could you elaborate on why you think this is misguided tech-nostalgia? Most of your arguments seem to be true regardless of how you discover content (RSS, social media, link aggregators, ...)

> I do not necessarily think algorithmic feeds are the only thing wrong with social media, but it's certainly one of the major problems.

We're more on the same page than I assumed then just based on the post. I do also think it's a (very) significant issue, and I do think there'd be a lot of merit to gain better control of it. I often apply chronological sorting where possible too, or will at least curate my feed using the available features. I've just also come to think that people are "clearly" a lot less nice than I thought, and that maybe we're getting a bit too interconnected and a bit too well.

> Could you elaborate on why you think this is misguided tech-nostalgia? Most of your arguments seem to be true regardless of how you discover content (RSS, social media, link aggregators, ...)

That's kind of my point. I simply think there's a lot more to why social media posts run afoul so often on the internet (and why mass media posts are so distorted) than just the recommendation algorithms.

I address this under your other reply more, but the "feeds of controlled information" interpretation's goal is something actually desirable to me (and to most everyone, I believe). And for that, this is at most a stepping stone, rather than the solution (if such a thing even exists - who knows, I might be living in a dream world). It is under that interpretation that this post read like "misguided tech-nostalgia".

In case you're asking more literally though, what I meant is that the general vibe I caught from this all is that this old-school-ish thing from when everything was better (a while ago), if you switch to it now, things will be better again. And so due to the everchanging social context, I disagree with that - hence the "undropping a mug" example. That is, even if I consider recommendation algorithms as not only just a significant issue but e.g. where things went wrong outright, removing them alone is imo not going to be enough to undo the damage.

I admit I do have a little bit of old web nostalgia, but I know that we live in a very different world now and web platforms and the types of interactions we have online are much more complex now.

That said, specifically for the type of information you'd typically subscribe to in an RSS reader, I still think the web 1.0 approach has its place. I do believe that if you have something to say, standing up a blog with an RSS feed, writing posts there and then potentially linking on social media is the best way. It's also been trivially easy to set up a blog for years.

Likewise with news - I don't think there's anything better to get them than reading a news site or perhaps subscribing to a video channel. All very RSS-friendly.

I'm mostly interested in longer form content, not shorter or ephemeral types of content. And even there, platforms like Mastodon support RSS feeds natively.

But yeah, as we clarified below, the angle for writing the article was the delivery channel for content and whether it is curated by someone or not. For the quality and provenance of the information, that's still on you and that's a very hard problem with no clear solution - and arguably one that will get better with more AI generated content.

I think you almost have a point in that you seem to be advocating for something along the lines of unbiased input (questioning the presented information because it was constructed for presentation, suggesting that an AI could somehow assist, presumably to help ground your information in a wider context etc)

I think what you may be missing is the role of trust. There is much to say about that, but in this instance, a nice thing about RSS is that I can trust the algorithm it uses to generate my feed. It is very simple, and I, myself choose the sources it draws from. With some other systems, this is not the case.

> I think you almost have a point

Thank you for almost granting me the capability of having a point. That is very nice of you.

I am not missing the role of trust. I have instead simply had that trust betrayed countless of times by now, so I'm seeking a little more. It would be a great first step, but far from the whole journey. And so I'm wary of people mistaking the latter for the former, intentionally or otherwise.

Betrayal of trust is indeed serious, and a hard lesson for many of us. Consider also that progress is made one step at a time, over a long time. While a desire for sudden, wholesale changes is understandable, it may be counterproductive. YMMV

That is not what I'm advocating for, nor are incremental steps something I'm advocating against.

What I'm advocating for is for people to not lose sight of the prize. And what I'm advocating against is misleading claims, which is what I consider the title and the proclaimed motivation of the post to be.

I see now - your issue is with the "controlled feeds of information" part? I am not claiming they are "feeds of controlled information" (which is how you seem to be interpreting it). Of course, all the sources you subscribe to will have their own biases and issues, but you do not lose agency over what you select for consumption. That is the control I am seeking and what I like about RSS.

> I see now - your issue is with the "controlled feeds of information" part? I am not claiming they are "feeds of controlled information" (which is how you seem to be interpreting it).

That's my issue, yes.

Now, I don't want to do the Twitter thing where I present my headcanon interpretation as some sort of deliberate messaging on your part, I 100% expect that this understanding of your words hasn't even crossed your mind, and maybe even reads like a gross twisting of what you intended to convey.

That is indeed how I read it though, even if I then recognized it as ambiguous (between those two). I then also made the guess that if I can take the "feeds of controlled information" interpretation away from this so easily, someone who's also as inattentive as me or perhaps even biased to interpret it that way, this may very well make them get the wrong idea. So I figured I should place it into the perspective this topic usually comes up in (and present it from the angle it usually comes up through).

> Of course, all the sources you subscribe to will have their own biases and issues, but you do not lose agency over what you select for consumption. That is the control I am seeking and what I like about RSS.

Yup, that much is all clear. Nothing to contest on that one. It just also didn't run explicitly contrary to the "feeds of controlled information", because, well, it legitimately just wasn't the perspective you were writing from then. I was coming from an angle where I was feeling the absence of such a clarification.

Understood! I know the onus for how the words are interpreted are primarily on the author, so that's all fair for you to raise and I'm glad for that feedback.

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