Feeds Considered Harmful

Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by dvt on Friday February 12, 2021 @06:18PM (#26119725)

> You may be asking: don’t feeds broaden our exposure to new ideas? Yes, they do.

I disagree with this. Feeds are carefully crafted to create feedback loops. Did you click X? You're going to see more X on your feed; showing not-X would make no sense from an engagement perspective. They are echo-chambers by design.

The feed is harmful, but so is sugar. And just like it's saccharine cousin, I don't see it going away any time soon.

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Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by Sevii on Friday February 12, 2021 @07:34PM (#26120335)

Feeds could be crafted to expose us to new ideas and to find the content we are interested in. But instead they are optimized to create an addictive experience and generate revenue.

Twitter removing the linear feed reduced the value of the website for me because I couldn't see all the tweets of the people I follow anymore. I don't want to have to go to each persons twitter page just to see if there are updates.

I think it comes down to the 'free' advertising based model of these companies. As long as any paid advertising is allowed online we can't really trust feeds controlled by other people.

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Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by wsinks on Friday February 12, 2021 @08:28PM (#26120619)

I'm with you! So since it's on us to measure our own sugar intake, we should use a similar process for feeds, right?

Do you have tips on if / how you manage feeds, if you do?

I'm trying to figure out a twice a year sort of audit to do for myself. I haven't figured it out yet.

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Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by suketk on Sunday February 14, 2021 @04:05PM (#26136262)

Yes and no. There's no doubt they often act like echo-chambers. However, there are also innocent examples of them enabling discovery, e.g being recommended a knife skills video after watching many cooking videos - it's in the general domain you're interested in, but was probably something you hadn't considered before.

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Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by rektide on Friday February 12, 2021 @09:41PM (#26120925)

warning: anecdotal. back when i wasn't banned on twitter, it was doing a good job surfacing outside, surprising content, seemingly without repetitous design. i got interesting tech tidbits from surprising places, regularly.

sugar is just one substance. i'm on mastodon & chilling elsewhere. these days there's a little less animosity & hostility in the algorithm vs timeline view, but for a while popular outrage against the algorithm was high. and i didn't buy in. i saw the algorithm as giving me good content, outside content, different things i wouldn't have seen.

i think there are dangerous avenues too. i'd like to know more about how many other people got recommended the "niche" "interesting" content i saw, get some idea how broadscale versus personal it was. but it was working for me. it wasn't an echo chamber. it was surfacing interesting tech topics.

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