Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
But correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not a programmer), lemmy’s algorithm is basically just sorting; it doesn’t choose over two pieces of media to show me but rather how it orders them. Facebook et al will simply not show content that I will not engage with or that will make me spend less time on the platform.
I agree that they are useful but at a certain point we as a society sometimes need to weight the usefulness of certain technologies against the potential for harm. If the potential for harm is greater than the benefit, then maybe we should somewhat curb the potential for that harm or remove it altogether.
So maybe we could refine the argument to be we need to limit what signals algorithms can use to push content? Or maybe that all social media users should have access to an algorithm free feed and that the algorithm driven feed be hidden by default and can be customizable by users?
Algorithm is just a fancy word for rules to sort by. "New" is an algorithm that says "sort by the timestamp of the submissions". That one is pretty innocuous, I think. Likewise "Active" which just says "sort by the last time someone commented" (or whatever). "Hot" and "Scaled", though, involve business logic -- rules that don't have one technically correct solution, but involve decisions and preferences made by people to accomplish a certain aim. Again in Lemmy's case I don't think either the "Hot" or "Scaled" algorithms should be too controversial -- and if they are, you can review the source code, make comments or a PR for changes, or stand up your own Lemmy instance that does it the way you want to. For walled-garden SM sites like TikTok, Facebook and Twitter/X, though, we don't know what the logic behind the algorithm says. We can speculate that it's optimized to keep people using the service for longer, or encouraging them to come back more frequently, but for all intents and purposes those algorithms are black boxes and we have to assume that they're working only for the benefits of the companies, and not the users.
Every algorithm is just sorting. Facebook sorts which posts should be shown on top and which should be pushed down. Posts that have a bad rank aren't shown to many people - and eventually - none at all.
Sorting by new?