I'm not sure it is needlessly pedantic.

> In other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic.

I think OPs point is valid if the algorithm is really just giving humans more of what they want. In other words, if the engagement metric really is responding to how humans prefer to spend their time, this really is a view into what a more technically democratic society looks like.

Personally, I don't like the idea of that and would prefer the thought that these algorithms really are measuring the wrong thing!

To highlight the point I'm making, assuming the above is true, your stance could be summed up as: "yes, humans prefer this content, but we know better and will make the right decision on their behalf"

To re-enforce a sibling comment, being able to choose your own algorithm is exactly how you tease apart these two takes. Twitter supports this (chronological vs. engagement) - I personally opt for chronological. I'd be interested to see the stats on usage of that!

> I think OPs point is valid if the algorithm is really just giving humans more of what they want.

What makes people engaged and what people want are not the same thing by definition. If you want to state they are, you should say why you think it.

I think the burden is on you to explain why it's not the case. Nobody is being forced to read/share that content. People are choosing to do so.

You'd be venturing into the realm of psychology for that, but I would argue that short-term engagement != long-term desire. Think of gambling or gaming addictions- nobody's "forcing" those people to engage in behavior against their best interest, but many would argue that they're not freely choosing to succumb to addiction either.

> short-term engagement != long-term desire

I agree that it's not, but long-term desires are not all that people have.

> many would argue

Maybe, maybe not, but I would disagree.

> that they're not freely choosing to succumb to addiction either.

"freely" is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. And a discussion about that is philosophical. They're as free to make that decision as they are to make any other.

> Nobody is being forced to read/share that content.

Those things are literally the result of human and automated research on how to make people read/share content. I wonder what is your definition of "forced".

Social media companies are not beaming information into your brain.

They aren't forcing you to keep your eyes open and see the content on their sites

Your computer can open another web page. You can get off the seat.

Tired of seeing garbage clickbait articles? Block the sites which post that stuff.

Tired of conspiracy theories and gossipy articles? Block the sites and mute/unfollow those people.

Tired of experiencing the world in 140 character chunks? Get off Twitter.

If you go to the bookstore and there are two shelves, one of Danielle Steel novels and another of Dan Brown, are you making a free choice to read trashy pulp fiction?

The point of a functioning market is that humans choose who they do business with. Both sides of the transaction are responsible for this - if you fill your shelves with trashy pulp fiction and there isn’t a market for that people stop going to your store.

Personally I try to go out of my way to purchase books directly from the author, publisher, a book store with a local presence, and online retailers in that order.

I’ve mostly cut Barnes and Nobel out of my vendor list for this exact reason, their book shelves are full of products I have no interest in - walking into their store has such a high noise to signal ratio that, unless I place my order in advance for a specific product, I don’t bother walking in anymore. The books of value are buried on shelves drown out by heavily marketed pop culture noise; and that’s if I’m lucky, often I have to have it ordered and shipped to store to pick it up locally. They don’t meet my needs for content discovery so I don’t do business with them very often.

Yes you are, you always have the option to read neither.

> they have long since known they are effectively doing so and have done very little to stop it

Just because they haven't succeeded does not mean they haven't tried.

What metric do you then propose to optimize for to stop promoting "toxic" content?

Don’t optimize, don’t recommend. Chronological timeline of only things you directly subscribed to. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, you should have to find it on your own.

My inner Libertarian is screaming, but I would support a "choose your algorithm" law. Wherein social media platforms would be required to allow the user a clear choice to opt-out of algorithmic recommendations. Perhaps even requiring a basic chronological feed.

I know the actual text of the bill would require a lot of finagling and legalese, but that's the concept of what I want.

You inner Libertarian has the same problem as every other person with that ideology - you are vastly overestimating the knowledge and capabilities of the average user, and the ideas that result will fail in practice. Algorithmic content is a market failure being subsidized by the fact that it helps sell ads. The capitalist greedy function means they're going to keep pushing algo content, because it's the money making engine. If you ban the combination of algorithmic content and targeted advertising, the damage would be vastly reduced (also Meta would implode, because their business is a market failure that only exists because regulators are not enforcing competition laws that prevent the use of free services subsided by ads and other antitrust laws).

To be clear I wasn't proposing a ban, but the requirement to provide non algorithmic alternatives for content feeds.

> but the requirement to provide non algorithmic alternatives for content feeds.

"Non algorithmic" means "some human creates the content feed by hand". This is also not free of lots of biases and what news portals in the web did in the past.

I think "sort by recent" or filtering are considered "non-algorithmic" in this space.

Yeah, I understood what you said, I just would be against it in general unless advertising is strictly decoupled from it. Even then, I'm not sure there is a huge benefit to it.

There used to be a news app called Pulse that LinkedIn bought and killed. To me, that was the best possible execution of the feed concept. It was essentially RSS with a scrollable feed component. You could browse feeds by category, but it wasn't recommending things based on current interests. If you wanted to go down a right/left wing newshole it was possible, but you had to consciously seek it out and go down it. The app wasn't breadcrumbing you.

except recommendation platforms are more popular all the time. ppl will choose the algo feed bc they like it more. idk why but everybody is taking america off the hook for wanting toxic shit and gravitating to it. its at least half a demand side problem.

if u want an example: tiktok has the for you page (algo discovery) and the following page (just ppl u follow). its the fyp where ppl spend time.

I can't respond to the child comment, so I'll reply here. The "type everything out" must be a generational/cultural thing. Because when I read your comment I literally did not realize you used words like "ppl". I automatically expanded it to people when reading it

If that's true, why is twitter making it so difficult (and more difficult over time) to see only content you follow, and Facebook making it impossible?

Please type out your words in full, using so much texting shorthand significantly detracts from what you are trying to say.

The answer to that question has nothing to do with my objection. I was simply pointing out the irrelevance of the "original intent" of these algorithms, given that we now know, and have known what they do. Focusing on that downplays their effects, which can indeed be considered their intent nowadays since we have known the effects for a while.

Say you hit a button, and each time you hit it you gain a million dollars. After you hit that button once or twice, you discover that it also causes great harm to other people. If you continue to hit the button, your original intent (when you didn't know it's effects) is no longer relevant to whether or not it you should continue hitting the button, since you would now knowingly be harming people for your own profit. The side-effect is no longer a side-effect. It's just an effect.

To answer your question anyway, perhaps we should consider the well-being of a user and bake that into our algorithms. It might not be as profitable, but there's a reason we regulate companies- having some restrictions on profitability can often be a net benefit to society.

> perhaps we should consider the well-being of a user and bake that into our algorithms. It might not be as profitable

The problem rather is: how are we supposed to algorithmically measure the well-being of a user?

You do not necessarily need a separate metric, you can filter out toxic content from other engaging content.

> you can filter out toxic content from other engaging content.

If this is your stance: what algorithm do you propose to separate content that is "toxic" from content that is "non-toxic"?

I'm not taking a stance, just pointing out that there does not need to be any single metric you need to optimise for.

Who gets to define what “toxic content” is? Is the Great Barrington Declaration toxic? How about studies that show masks might not work? How about public sourced data showing the IFR of Covid was nowhere near what “the experts” modeled early on?

The owners of the space can make those decisions, and the users can provide feedback, just like it happens now. There's no static status quo where everybody's happy, just like there's no static society.