Well being in times of algorithms
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At least for a great number of people, I believe this to be true. The things that initially made me interrested in the internet, computers and and software are gone from the mainstream. The web has developed in to a perverted Minitel, it's a place I go to order something, if I can't find it in local stored, I read a little news, I look up documentation, and then I check out again. Much the same for TV really, there's no real reason for me to watch the news, movies and shows. The news is poorly covered and just rehashes of the same reporting. Movies and TV shows are commercialized to the point where I'm not even going to try, on the off chance that I hit something good. The stuff I buy is also often highly selective, as the chance of buying juke is at an al time high, better to buy nothing.
I feel like we're close to a major reset, at least for a portion of the population. Many simply can't stand sad state of algorithms, shareholder interests, subscriptions and just pure greed at the expense of everything else. If the reset isn't going to be society wide (which it probably isn't because a large part of the population also seem to not give a shit or they are actively profiting of the current state of affairs), then we're going to see one group quietly distancing themselves from media, technology and modernity. We'll use technology only to the extend where it helps us to our jobs and function in society, taking care to not compromise our humanity, then log right back off.
The original author escapes me, but the quote: "The future has lost it's appeal to me" seem increasingly true with every passing day.
I’ve checked out on pretty much everything except for OSS.
I’m looking for land and an RV to start homesteading because I feel like that’s the only thing that will distract me from doom scrolling news.
One anecdote: An old acquaintance from college did something like this, more or less. Instead of making her more offline, it made her more bored and more removed from in-person social interactions. It only increased desire to scroll online content.
If you really want to be less online, go out into the world with other people and do things. Or even just join an initiative or company where people are working on something together.
Dogs can keep me company. Land can provide me with things to do. A workshop would supplement the rest. I’m not saying I’ll never go online (YouTube is hard to beat for DIY) but I choose not to participate in the digital online society some call a metaverse. If I build relationships with my neighbors, cool. If not, get off my lawn. I have no desire to “find myself” or “be somebody”.
The politicians only talk about regulating content, instead of regulating the algorithm. An error across all dimensions - politically, pragmatically, legally.
I would do these 2 things:
(1) ban all recommendation engines in social media, no boosting by likes, no retweets, no "for you", no "suggested". you get a chronological feed of people you follow, or you search for it directly.
(2) ban all likes/upvotes showing up on public posts, to reduce the incentive for people to engage in combat on politically charged topics
No impact on free speech, everyone still has a voice. No political favoritism. No privacy violations.
I would bet only these tweaks will significantly reduce extremism and unhappiness in society.
You would also be combating against ad and social media companies with extremely deep pockets. You have to keep in mind that algorithmic sorting also would impact search engines like Google and a ton of shopping websites.
I personally think the way this has to be done is something more fundamental and "grassroots-like". Similar to how a significant chunk of the internet are against "AI content" I think that same group of people need to be shown that this algorithmic recommendation brainrot is impacting society considerably.
edit: To take this point further, as an American, I have been wondering why people would disagree on basic principals or what feels like facts. The problem is that their online experience is completely different than mine. No two people share an exact same home page for any service. How are you supposed to get on the same page as someone when they live in a practically different world than you?
Not really. It's a dopamine addiction, like a gambling addict 'preferring' that a casino is nearby. But they know it makes them miserable. That's why people would pay money to quit.
https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/would-you-pay-to-qui...
What other product would people pay to not use? Only products that harm you.
I'm counting on a European country or Australia to try first, where the social media companies don't have much influence.
That's not really what the survey said. In fact, it found that the overwhelming majority of users would pay good money to continue using those platforms.
> The answers suggest users value these platforms a lot, on average by US$59 per month for TikTok and $47 for Instagram. An overwhelming 93 per cent of TikTok users and 86 per cent of Instagram users would be prepared to pay something to stay on them.
$59/month was the average claim for how much they'd pay to stay on TikTok.
They even cite other studies that came up with similar numbers, so it's not a fluke.
The part about paying to be off of them was about a hypothetical scenario where everyone on their campus agreed to some deal where they all stopped using one of the platforms together at the same time.
That's how they arrived at those weird numbers for paying to quit as a group. Like all studies that ask hypothetical questions about how much people would pay for some outcome, the real world value is always less. When you start introducing impossible constraints like "everyone else would quit" it becomes even more disconnected from reality.
I always find these comments interesting on Hacker News. The Hacker News front page is a socially sourced recommendation engine which presents stories in an algorithmic feed, as boosted by likes (upvotes) from other users. The comment section where we're talking is also social at it's core, with comments boosted or driven down by upvotes and downvotes.
In your proposed regulation, are you really expecting that the Hacker News front page would go away, replaced only by the "new" feed? Or that we'd have to manually sign up to follow different posters?
If we have to sign up to follow specific posters, how do you propose we discover them to begin with?
Usually when I ask these questions the follow ups involve some definition of social media that excludes Hacker News and other forums that people enjoy.
Yes, it's an algorithmic feed that treats all active users as your friends. Stories are still boosted by votes, sorted algorithmically, and ordered by an opaque algorithm. It would fall under the ban described above.
> on ig, im happy to see my friends' posts, but
Yes, but how would that work on HN? You see no stories until you start friending people? How would you discover people if recommendation engines weren't allowed?
for what it's worth, discord doesn't really have a user algorithm to get people into certain servers, and yet people are readily radicalized on discord (especially to the far-right, in my experience), but obviously the way people interact on discord is different to social media.
Abstaining is really the only thing that's been working for me, and all I'm going to try to do is abstain more. It's clear that my old refuge has been destroyed by greed and misanthropy, and the only path for me is to abandon the refuge as much as possible.
culture is stuck in endless remakes of optimistic 70s futurism
it's an important point: we don't have a future, a telos, that doesn't fill us with foreboding
Minitel sounds interesting though:
> Minitel was thus hardly the rigid, static system imagined by many Internet advocates of the 1990s. The hybrid architecture—bridging public and private, open and closed—provided a rich platform for innovation and entrepreneurship at a time when online services elsewhere in the world were floundering.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/minitel-the-online-world-france-bu...
Nah. We need move back to the real world being the destination instead of the screen. If the technology is not augmenting your life in meatspace, it's slowly robbing you of your somatic experience and turning you into something more machine-like. Doesn't matter whether the technology is open web or proprietary, the effect is the same.
Technology is augmenting real world experiences all the time, and not always in positive ways.
Whenever anyone does anything with the real world as the destination, the phone comes too, and all that comes with the phone intersects with whatever it is you're doing. Again not always in positive ways.
I completely agree that the nature of the technology / platform doesn't matter or affect this.
Poster above is making a claim about what brings us into our body-experiences, or what takes us out. Technically mostly noting that technology takes us out of the somatic experience.
Accessibility? Meditation apps? There are things with technology that allow us to be more connected with each other and ourselves in some ways. But not really to the somatic experience of their body, the world around them.
Generally if I understand OP correctly, I strongly agree. As a techie it took me a long time to understand the somatic experience as the missing part to my world view and thinking.
As the sibling comment says, I never made a claim that technology writ large wasn't augmenting real world experiences. I did make reference to 'the technology', which if it helps to clarify could be read as 'a specific X technology'. A technology could be as broad as 'software', but it could mean a software innovation like 'infinite scroll with status updates'. How a technology is used can also factor in. iNaturalist, MeetUp, and hospitality club style websites are all social networks that encourage people to go out into the world and experience things. Even Facebook groups and marketplace can facilitate this to some degree, though real-world human connection is counter to its revenue strategy.
> and not always in positive ways.
Augmenting means to add to something, not take away. The word for that is detract.
Interesting point on the word augment. I'd always took it to mean something more like a value-neutral addition, to which one is free to apply their own value judgements, which could be positive or negative and in any case aren't objective.
To take an example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of: you're out on a peaceful countryside walk yet are able to receive emails. The experience is augmented by this-- in my interpretation meaning you have something literally added to it. But the effect of this can be both positive or negative, to any degree, depending on the email itself and any number of other factors.
Anyway I think we're mostly just getting into semantics and I probably agree actually with your original point :-)
Eh. Sure, lets start at Netflix as a the edge of streaming wars for a quick example:
https://nscreenmedia.com/netflix-ad-values-5-dollar-increase... https://nypost.com/2025/12/12/entertainment/streamers-are-ri... https://deadline.com/2024/10/netflix-price-hikes-executives-...
I would like then point to exec statement in last one:
“Our approach to pricing has been remarkably consistent over many, many years,” Co-CEO Greg Peters said. “Our core theory is, we’ve got to work really, really hard to make sure we are delivering more value to members every quarter. Then, we assess based on how that’s going, through metrics like engagement, acquisition and retention, did we do a good job there? How we actually deliver that promise of more value. If we do, then we occasionally ask members to pay a bit more, so we can invest that forward and keep that whole process going.”
I don't have use my corporate to human translator machine..
the difference is the incentive (what the algorithm is optimized for). in most of these feeds it’s for ad revenue, hence the results
The stories shown are determined by user input (upvotes and flags). Moderators tend to rescue stories that are excessively flagged and there's also the second-chance queue, but I don't believe they're actively picking winners and losers on the front page.
Also, the HN global feed is heavily gamed. It's very common practice for startups to organize voting rings to front-page their latest blog post or new product announcement. The simple attempts are caught, but it's common information in the startup world about how to organize group voting efforts to tip a story on to the front page without triggering the voting ring detector too much.
Maybe the Bluesky and Mastadon algorithms are or are not as addiction producing as Twitter or Facebook. I don’t know. But the harms are still there.
One person I followed described Bluesky as the place to go if you want to be viciously attacked and torn apart by people who 98% agree with what you're saying.
Bluesky is a left-leaning political mess - I strictly follow tech-only accounts yet get posts on the timeline about what this week's monstrous White House act was. This is not a judgement against the left, but rather against Bluesky.
As another example - the Bitcoin/cypherpunk community went to Nostr. Nostr today is the same slop as Bitcoin Twitter was before. It has a tiny bit more of an organic feel to it - but it basically spiralled to the same cookie-cutter attention-grabbing content. Things like mindless cat videos.
X as we know is already problematic.
Basically the current state is that all platforms suck
Algorithms tend to optimize us toward well-being as “well-done”: predictable, consistent, uniformly cooked. Safe, measurable, repeatable.
But human experience is closer to “rare”: uneven, risky, asymmetric, and still alive. The parts that matter most are often the ones that don’t fit cleanly into metrics.
If everything becomes optimized, nothing remains interesting. And more importantly, we risk replacing well-being with the monitoring of well-being.
When a life is constantly optimized, scored, nudged, and corrected, it gradually stops being a life that is actually experienced.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/freedom/these-are-barbarous...
It made me wonder where a future goes when it keeps trying to define both barbarism and normalcy.
As a small tribute in return, three films came to mind:
Bicentennial Man,
Gattaca,
Fight Club.
I’ve always preferred Ivan the Fool — choosing to live, rather than living inside a definition.
i might be wrong, it might just be a huge grift, but i dont know how to come to that conclusion
This is a nice thought but I think it's wrong. If TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts have proven anything, it's that people don't want to decide they want to consume. It's cynical but it's what the data has shown time and again works for these platforms. Passive consumption is easier for the user and companies know it keeps us online longer.
When you ask people, they will say they want to see who they follow but their behaviour, incentivised by companies, says otherwise.
I want the algorithm to analyze spammers' behavior and filter them out for everyone. Not analyzing my behaviors to filter content for me.
It just turned into something out of control with unintended side effects and immoral goals.
Note that there is also "censorship" (!) - `gag_factor` - even in this free thought paradise. The lesson is that no matter your scale, suppressing certain content is necessary to prevent low quality posts and spam from turning your site into a swamp.
Correct, it is not personalized. So we need a different word than 'algorithmic'. People keep saying that word when they want to "ban" a certain kind of math. But they should at least be particular about what they don't like (sort your friends' posts chronologically is also a personalized algorithm, after all..)
But is it cynical if it is accurate.
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
Book by Brian Christian, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Tom GriffithsUse social networks in a healthy way: avoid scrolling on the home/main page. Search for the information you want yourself and don't rely on what's handed to you. This works in general, TV, papers, ...
"Algorithm" is a beautiful and very old word. Long before recommender systems and engagement metrics, it meant precise problem-solving methods. Quicksort is an algorithm. Binary search is an algorithm. GCD is an algorithm. Most of modern technology exists because of algorithms in this broader, richer sense. It is one of the foundations of CS.
Yes, machine-learning systems are also algorithms. But collapsing the term to mean only opaque, attention-maximizing mechanisms strips it of its meaning and history. It taints a neutral technical concept as something manipulative by default.
It's more so disappointing when this comes from people in tech. We should be more careful with our vocabulary. Maybe we should call these systems what they are. Maybe "engagement engines", "recommender systems", or "attention-suckers" instead of letting one narrow and disturbing use redefine the word altogether.