Re:Algorithms are changing what we read online
by Nasrudith on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @01:13PM
(#24483748)
I wonder what would it even take for the first "what will let you grow best as an individual human being" algorithmically even possible to judge? The spurious correlations alone from bad attempts to quantify it would be amusing.
Re:Algorithms are changing what we read online
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @01:55PM
(#24484359)
For starters, I'd give people a honest and functioning search and filtering interface. Like: "Give me videos on topic X, order by date, then viewcount, filter out the blacklist". Let people save such queries for quick access in the UI.
Give the ability to provide negative feedback. One-click "blacklist this video/channel". One-click "don't show me things like this". One-click "show me less of these". In a way that actually works.
Allow to explicitly tune the recommendation algorithm. Like, modify the list of categories that get prioritized, and even their relative priority.
All that boils down to: give people autonomy to curate their own experience to match their own goals, instead of letting an algorithm do it in the background to optimize for company's goals.
As for "the spurious correlations from bad attempts to quantify it", yeah, I'd love to read about them too. But perhaps not on the front page of the news, in context of how it hurts people.
That is what you get, and I thought in 2020, this would be an accepted wisdom: if you optimize for what gets the most engagement from people, you end up with things that cater to our most primal urges. It's a statistical phenomenon; you're more likely to ignore a nugget of deep knowledge than a headline which makes your eyes red before you even finish reading it.
SSC had a good essay on it back in the day: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage....