Do not confuse the medium with the method. Recommendation systems are the root of what plagues us. Democracy was born because of the social media of its time. Social media good. Current implementations bad.
I miss chronological feeds.
I miss chronological feeds.
But chronological feeds don't solve it (plenty of research on this).
Recommender systems that don't optimize for division are a more meaningful solution, ala https://bridging.systems/ (lots of work by others too).
This, e.g., bridging-based ranking, is same approach that underlies Community Notes.
One of the most harmful effects of the accumulation of capital is the accumulation of political power that accompanies it. We need aggressively limit the power that can be gained that way.
My dad's village in Bangladesh doesn't incentivize either growth or capital accumulation. They also don't have any problem with social media. Do you want to go live there?
Your argument ironically refutes the original point. The bad thing colonization did to Bengal was prevent “pursuit of growth and capital accumulation.” The tariffs and restraints on free trade were the real culprit.[1] The people in Bengal weren’t poorer than they were before colonization. Bengal’s GDP per capita was about the same in 1700 as in 1900. The real problem is that Bengal missed out on all the profits from capitalism that they could have enjoyed had they been allowed to trade freely with other countries. So England went from being twice as rich per capita as Bengal, before colonization, to being more than 10 times as rich at the time of independence.
My dad’s village was a lovely socialist utopia. Rice farming requires a high level of communalism. During religious holidays, the community comes together and pools their resources has feasts for the whole village. Villages like that post videos of it on Youtube, it’s very charming: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rf9x_YZwE5c
[1] Direct revenue extraction was relatively low, and the famines were structural in the region for thousands of years.
Only if assuming that colonialism is distinct from capitalism. And if not, your original comparison is not applicable.
You edited your comment, but totally reversed your argument from citing a poor Bengal village as an example of a society that "doesn't incentivize growth" to an argument that the colonization tragedy was that they prevented growth instead, I presume after you looked into the economic history of the region post-submitting.
> So England went from being twice as rich per capita as Bengal, before colonization, to being more than 10 times as rich at the time of independence.
Are you arguing that the British were successful due to capitalism or colonialism, or are they linked?
> Direct revenue extraction was relatively low
First off, "relatively low" is doing some heavy lifting here. Further, "Direct" ignores the direct extraction from the land taxes being used (indirect) to buy commodities in turn exported to Europe, meaning Bengal paid for the privilege of giving away local resources.
> and the famines were structural in the region for thousands of years.
EIC maintained tax collection and grain hoarding during the 1770 Bengal famine, leading to tax revenues in 1771 that were actually higher than in 1768 despite millions dying.
Most people like the addictive garbage, and they reward the systems that feed it to them. That’s why every surviving platform has gone that way, and why any new attempt to do better always fails.
It’s ugly but it’s true.
like cigarets, they aren't banned outright but they aren't allowed to market to children etc
We can take a field trip back to Fark to observe a forum that has always kept chronological sorting as its defaults. I peer in every now and then, and it doesn't seem like the discussions are any less fraught or the people are happier.
Perhaps there are real problems with algorithmic feeds. But going back to mailing lists is simply impractical and never going to happen.
Never forget, folks: we can all go back to mailman and phpBB, or the modern equivalent, at any point in time. Many of us do! There are still wonderful subject-driven forums out there, not quite inundated by the dreaded "&fbid disease"...
I suppose you could build a scraper to do it but a platform like Facebook take steps to make it difficult. Maybe we're almost at the stage where a personalised AI assistant could parse your feed on the fly and reconstruct it into something user-friendly (a much smarter algorithm to build a dumber one!)
I'd like to have the old social media back, but then again it depends if anyone is still posting content.
The feed is root of the problem.
The feed is an integral part of social media.
We’re allowing them—companies, states, whoever—to feed us individually-targeted generated propaganda.
But humans prefer to spent more time on enraging/outrageous content.
So in a competitive social media environment - the platform with the most engaging content will win.
When TikTok launched short form Video - instagram’s choice was to copy or lose.
it is intentional, or is it engineered?
Is reporting on outrage the same as "taking a heated position"?
Is a media outlet's entire purposely merely to parrot what others have said?
Is reporting actual facts the same as "taking a position"?
"Get rid of algorithmic feeds" strikes me as similarly wishful thinking.