TL;DR: Instagram chief argues against a strawman
If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers… Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even more… You miss a lot more content … and you spend a lot less time on the platform…
This is correct. A purely chronological feed will be drowned out by whoever posts the most. Creators publishing mass-produced slop will win.
Except that has nothing to do with the Australian draft legislation (if someone has a link to the draft itself, I can’t find it, but this PR statement still covers my point):
Alternatively, users can opt out of personally recommended content in their default feed and see the friends and creators they choose to follow.
A purely chronological feed consisting purely of friends and creators you choose to follow is not a feed that can be drowned out by mass-produced slop and “content from companies, brands, and publishers” because the user chooses who they follow. If a user doesn’t like the content, they can choose not to follow the person/creator. It’s really not that complicated. Heck, this is how the YouTube subscriptions page works (though I use FreeTube configured in the same manner).
As a secondary point, their statement presents the draft as a false dichotomy. This isn’t an “us vs them” thing. It’s an “us and them” thing. The user chooses what they want. Presenting it as the former serves only to invalidate the group that wants the less personalized feed rather than support them.
Anyway, as a non-Australian who doesn’t use any of these services, this doesn’t have much to do with me. It’s just such an obviously fallacious argument against the legislation that I can only assume the quote was taken out of context or something (though I doubt that’s the case).
Well he does have a point. With a chronological feed, quantity wins. When someone puts out new stuff every hour, it will get seen by many more people compared to someone only putting things out once a week for example.
Thats how I know who not to follow anymore, and it was an effective strategy until their garbage algorithms showed up.
Social media used to be about the social aspect. Now its about content and exposure. Its the whole reason its shit now
In my feed people who post stuff every hour get blocked or unfollowed, unless it’s really good stuff.
When someone puts out new stuff every hour, it will get seen by many more people…
Has any social media tried grouping/folding posts per author and day? If an account write a 12-posts rant or marketing push in a single day, the feed could show the first 1, with a button to “see 11 more posts by Account123” similar to how large threads are folded by default.
I’m avoiding big tech social media and don’t know if any have tried that recently.
Google+
Pornhub does this.
Tumblr doesn’t do it, but in stead incentives spreading with the queue feature. People do it out of etiquette/ to not get unfollowed.
Wouldn’t be an issue to fix that without sacrificing chronology. You can just group posts by a single individual if it would overwhelm the feed
Pornhub does this
Yeah, I agree, chronological feeds are not good. I think the solution is what BSky is doing. Meta can keep their feeds. Or we can create and use our own feeds, or use someone else’s feed.
People who want a chronological feed are stuck in a 2010 mindset.
It worked back then, when the primary use case was just real-life friends and family. It does not scale to a “friends” list of 1000+ accounts, with news, politics, etc.
“Algorithms” are not the bogeyman. The problem is what they do, and the corrupt incentives behind them.
This is in no way an endorsement of the status quo.
The crux of the issue is that what the platforms want to be, and the reason many people want to use them are misaligned.
A chronological feed makes no sense for a content delivery system, where the goal is to maximize the fit of the presented content to the interest of a user from a huge number of content creators. But it makes perfect sense if the goal is for a user to keep appraised of the lives of people they care about and be aware of events and situations with in that limited group. If someone spams or clogs up the feed with nonsense then people can tell them to nock it off, or mute them.
The problem is that every “social network” site inevitably jumps to try and become a “content delivery system” because it promises greater engagement from the existing user base, and thus growth. Users are trapped by inertia and network effects and forced to engage with a content delivery system they didn’t sign up for, assuming they don’t just leave because the utility of the platform as a social network is gone. By forcing companies to offer an option of a chronological feed, it gives them a choice on how they want to use the platform.
I want only a list of real life friends and family.
Why can’t I just have that again?
Because you need to meet the platform’s goals.
On a for-profit one, that’s being somehow profitable to it, whether by paying directly or through ads and content placement. Otherwise, you need a philanthropic platform, where either someone or you indirectly supports it, like a P2P one.
Instagram is of the former kind.
You can on Instagram. Click the big logo on top of the page and click “following”.
It’s the only way I interact with a feed. The default one shows me a bunch of stuff that I’m not following, which still feels foreign to me on any website. Maybe I’m just too old. I only want to keep up with friends / family on social media
because life is now all about the slop.
Okay but it scales for us. I only follow my actual friends and family and I only want to see what they share, chronologically.
That requires enough people I follow to where I need an outside entity to do the filter.
I think a big problem is the use case. Most social media sites are account led, not community led. This naturally makes it harder for users to find accounts outside their social circle.
The algorithm got added to fill the void.
So, how would your ideal social media platform decide what to show to the user in what priority?
I use Mastodon with a chronological feed and it works very well for me. I check it every few hours or even minutes during waking hours (depending on how bored I am) and get a huge share of my news that way. Most of my activity here on Lemmy is posting articles I discover through that exact feed.
But of course, the context here is a certain bill introduced in Australia, to which the correct response would be more similar to this article: https://www.freezenet.ca/what-the-media-didnt-tell-you-about-the-australian-off-switch-bill/
Ideally the ranking algorithm would be transparent (open-source) and customizable. I DO think it should be regulated, but I don’t think mandating chronological sorting is a reasonable solution.
There should also be a way to easily sort things. Bluesky has a custom feed system, and I think Mastodon does too. I’m not a huge user of either so I’m not sure which is better. But ideally I would NOT have a mix of news, politics, art, friends, family, etc. That’s probably why I prefer Lemmy’s community-centered format to most social media’s account-centered format.
Here on Lemmy, I don’t typically use “new”. My subscribed communities are low-traffic enough that I suppose I could without losing my mind, but “hot” or “active” become better as activity increases.
