Any time it happens, things get twisted, or shut down. Reddit used to be good. Twitter used to be good. But the money people come in, the bots, the astroturfers, the guerrilla marketers, the spammers... If they stay alive regardless, in come the billionaires to offer ridiculous sums.
People complained that TikTok's algorithm was too good at finding niche and interesting content. The marketing was somewhat balanced, and tailored to people's actual tastes. That was before lobbyists and politicians discovered that it was severely interfering with their propaganda. Now I hear you can't so much as post 'Free Palestine', and kids are supposed to be grateful that we're allowed to have it on our phones at all.
All that said, for people with the right skills there is no shortage of entertaining content to discover; far more than could ever be consumed in a lifetime. It's really the most important news and views that gets suppressed the most.
It is simple, money peoppe use money to destroy spaces that don't have their preferred bias.
(Though, to be honest, it wasn't a bias in the service itself, IMHO. Twitter was nothing but a resonance chamber. The bias was in what the outside world reacted to, and how.)
What Musk did to Twitter is unusual. The typical way "money people use money to destroy spaces" is through sterilization of the place to placate advertisers, and then through ongoing enshittification to extract as much as possible from what little users there are left. Other common ways are: buying up and merging with a shittier platform in the same or adjacent space, and a weird-ass pivot that makes business sense to everyone except the actual user base.
> What Musk did to Twitter is unusual.
Yes, it is unusual to destroy financial value of a company that fast. I assume he will do the same to the country economics too. And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.
He personally will maybe come off more rich this time, because you can steal from the government but he could really not from twitter. Corruption works for him.
Was that why a chunk of left-leaning users famously left to form Bag, a "safe space" alternative to Twitter? Oh wait it was right wing and it was called Gab.
Doesn't really matter anyway. Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire, but it would've been half-dead by now anyway like all social media sites, thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.
> And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.
You confuse me with someone else. I'm from the other side of the world, and my only interest in US economy is that the rest of the world kind of depends on the US keeping its shit together.
If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire.
(And yes, we have the same thing over here, too.)
> Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire [...] thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.
He was not bored, he had political project. The enshittificationwas entrirely on Musk personal decisions, not on some impersonal rules.
> If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire
I will blame people currently in power and those who voted for them. And nice to complain about polarization while talking about Gab as if it was not the group of people responsible for it.
this is absurd
Certainly sometimes making bad stuff does make it so people don't want to buy it, and those who do buy it will only buy it for a low price, but surprisingly that's the case less often than you'd expect. (Blame the field of psychological manipulation that is advertising?)
And so on top of that, the algorithms that recommend things are eventually going to be subverted by the people who want to sell you things, so you end up with stuff pushed at you that "sells well" even if much of it doesn't actually match what you want.
One thing that might work is to decouple the recommendation algorithm from the entity trying to sell you stuff. I'd want an independent third party to give me recommendations on what to buy on Amazon, for example, rather than Amazon themselves recommending products to me. But you have to also somehow ensure that this third party isn't motivated by profit in a way that's related to what products you eventually buy.
On top of that, the problem with every good service is that once it gets to a certain size, it attracts the sort of people who will make it a bad service, because bad services can make them more money.
Yup, thats clear for everyone.
Whats not clear to me is how you got what parent was writing into saying that people shouldnt get paid for their work?
It is obviously true that the problem of massive amounts of shitty media being sold to consumers is capitalism.
And when you try to, it’s always “um where did they say that?”
If you're going to bring up capitalism in your crusade against... recommendation systems... I think it's fair to ask you to workshop your genius idea a little more past the shower thought stage.
You can critizise something without having to provide alternatives. I dont know why people like you or gp feel the need to become so defensive about it.
Capitalism is the status quo. Like any other system ruling us it should be discussed in order to keep an intellectually honest discourse [1].
I'm unconvinced by the profit motive argument: there's plenty of money to be made in the "long tail" of selling weird things (or experiences) to weird people!
It feels like that didn't happen, and we're still stuck with the same issue of promotions and gatekeepers and tastemakers, because those who control the algorithms (centralized, proprietary, remotely hosted) find it more profitable that way.