I didn’t see from the article if they have a definition of “the algorithm” that means anything?
Like, I know this is preaching to the choir here of all places, but you literally can’t have a social media without “an algorithm”, but I think we all know that’s not what they mean. But what actually do they mean? Do they mean “showing things from people you haven’t followed or subscribed to”, do they mean “showing posts or videos with stats that make them think you’ll like it”? Do they mean any selection algorithm that’s personalized to your account rather than site wide? So you could still have “top of the last 12 hours”, but everyone would have the same top?
Because every platform has more content on it per day than any human could consume that day. Something somewhere must choose what to show you and what order it’s in, because it can’t show everything. So I’m curious how they’ll define what “the algorithm” is…
You uh, didn’t use metacrawler, Altavista, ask Jeeves, yahoo, or Google(back in the day) much did you?
The internet has been more content than a human can experience in a lifetime since it was brought to the masses, and probably even before the pentium was created and a oc3 line was the dream of every computer nerd and geek
Chosen as in “subscriptions” / “followed” / “friends”?
So if it picks from among accounts you’ve opted-in to then it’s not the bad algorithm? That’s not meant as a gotcha, it’s a choice one could make to draw the line, but I don’t know if it’s the one they had in mind. There’s still room there to pick which order it shows your selected things in, but maybe that still mitigates the harm.
Does TikTok have the concept of following or subscribing? I don’t even know…
Things like Lemmy are a little trickier because our model is different. I can subscribe to a community, but then the content in that community is posted by strangers, and then those posts have comments by strangers, all of which require some kind of algorithm to curate. So in this definition showing me strangers shitposts is “no algorithm” if I’m subscribed to the shitpost community, but it isn’t allowed to suggest a shitpost if I’m not in that community?
It’s a line that could be drawn, but it remains to be seen if that’s the line they have in their minds.
Lemmy sorts by new, top and comment count, all of which are easily checkable, and I imagine hot and active are too. These aren’t algorithms because their methods aren’t hidden.
Thank you for sving me the trouble of typing basically that. heh.
It’s like when they talk about how to define porn and the best definition is basically “you know it when you see it”. But you can’t write law like that (except they can and do and it causes problems).
I didn’t see from the article if they have a definition of “the algorithm” that means anything?
Like, I know this is preaching to the choir here of all places, but you literally can’t have a social media without “an algorithm”, but I think we all know that’s not what they mean. But what actually do they mean? Do they mean “showing things from people you haven’t followed or subscribed to”, do they mean “showing posts or videos with stats that make them think you’ll like it”? Do they mean any selection algorithm that’s personalized to your account rather than site wide? So you could still have “top of the last 12 hours”, but everyone would have the same top?
Because every platform has more content on it per day than any human could consume that day. Something somewhere must choose what to show you and what order it’s in, because it can’t show everything. So I’m curious how they’ll define what “the algorithm” is…
You uh, didn’t use metacrawler, Altavista, ask Jeeves, yahoo, or Google(back in the day) much did you?
The internet has been more content than a human can experience in a lifetime since it was brought to the masses, and probably even before the pentium was created and a oc3 line was the dream of every computer nerd and geek
The algorithm here means showing content to one that wasn’t directly chosen, e.g. SEO on Google.
Sense 4 (Wiktionary)
Chosen as in “subscriptions” / “followed” / “friends”?
So if it picks from among accounts you’ve opted-in to then it’s not the bad algorithm? That’s not meant as a gotcha, it’s a choice one could make to draw the line, but I don’t know if it’s the one they had in mind. There’s still room there to pick which order it shows your selected things in, but maybe that still mitigates the harm.
Does TikTok have the concept of following or subscribing? I don’t even know…
Things like Lemmy are a little trickier because our model is different. I can subscribe to a community, but then the content in that community is posted by strangers, and then those posts have comments by strangers, all of which require some kind of algorithm to curate. So in this definition showing me strangers shitposts is “no algorithm” if I’m subscribed to the shitpost community, but it isn’t allowed to suggest a shitpost if I’m not in that community?
It’s a line that could be drawn, but it remains to be seen if that’s the line they have in their minds.
Lemmy sorts by new, top and comment count, all of which are easily checkable, and I imagine hot and active are too. These aren’t algorithms because their methods aren’t hidden.
Thank you for sving me the trouble of typing basically that. heh.
It’s like when they talk about how to define porn and the best definition is basically “you know it when you see it”. But you can’t write law like that (except they can and do and it causes problems).