Re:Yes, social media is undermining democracy
by arrosenberg on Thursday July 28, 2022 @03:19PM
(#32268972)
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).
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Re:Yes, social media is undermining democracy
by BitwiseFool on Thursday July 28, 2022 @03:31PM
(#32269104)
To be clear I wasn't proposing a ban, but the requirement to provide non algorithmic alternatives for content feeds.
Re:Yes, social media is undermining democracy
by q-big on Thursday July 28, 2022 @03:50PM
(#32269311)
> 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.
Re:Yes, social media is undermining democracy
by dalmo3 on Thursday July 28, 2022 @04:37PM
(#32269813)
I think "sort by recent" or filtering are considered "non-algorithmic" in this space.
Re:Yes, social media is undermining democracy
by arrosenberg on Thursday July 28, 2022 @03:47PM
(#32269272)
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.