TL;DR: Instagram chief argues against a strawman
If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers… Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even more… You miss a lot more content … and you spend a lot less time on the platform…
This is correct. A purely chronological feed will be drowned out by whoever posts the most. Creators publishing mass-produced slop will win.
Except that has nothing to do with the Australian draft legislation (if someone has a link to the draft itself, I can’t find it, but this PR statement still covers my point):
Alternatively, users can opt out of personally recommended content in their default feed and see the friends and creators they choose to follow.
A purely chronological feed consisting purely of friends and creators you choose to follow is not a feed that can be drowned out by mass-produced slop and “content from companies, brands, and publishers” because the user chooses who they follow. If a user doesn’t like the content, they can choose not to follow the person/creator. It’s really not that complicated. Heck, this is how the YouTube subscriptions page works (though I use FreeTube configured in the same manner).
As a secondary point, their statement presents the draft as a false dichotomy. This isn’t an “us vs them” thing. It’s an “us and them” thing. The user chooses what they want. Presenting it as the former serves only to invalidate the group that wants the less personalized feed rather than support them.
Anyway, as a non-Australian who doesn’t use any of these services, this doesn’t have much to do with me. It’s just such an obviously fallacious argument against the legislation that I can only assume the quote was taken out of context or something (though I doubt that’s the case).
People who want a chronological feed are stuck in a 2010 mindset.
It worked back then, when the primary use case was just real-life friends and family. It does not scale to a “friends” list of 1000+ accounts, with news, politics, etc.
“Algorithms” are not the bogeyman. The problem is what they do, and the corrupt incentives behind them.
This is in no way an endorsement of the status quo.
I want only a list of real life friends and family.
Why can’t I just have that again?
You can on Instagram. Click the big logo on top of the page and click “following”.
It’s the only way I interact with a feed. The default one shows me a bunch of stuff that I’m not following, which still feels foreign to me on any website. Maybe I’m just too old. I only want to keep up with friends / family on social media
because life is now all about the slop.
Okay but it scales for us. I only follow my actual friends and family and I only want to see what they share, chronologically.
So, how would your ideal social media platform decide what to show to the user in what priority?
I use Mastodon with a chronological feed and it works very well for me. I check it every few hours or even minutes during waking hours (depending on how bored I am) and get a huge share of my news that way. Most of my activity here on Lemmy is posting articles I discover through that exact feed.
But of course, the context here is a certain bill introduced in Australia, to which the correct response would be more similar to this article: https://www.freezenet.ca/what-the-media-didnt-tell-you-about-the-australian-off-switch-bill/
That requires enough people I follow to where I need an outside entity to do the filter.
I think a big problem is the use case. Most social media sites are account led, not community led. This naturally makes it harder for users to find accounts outside their social circle.
The algorithm got added to fill the void.
Well he does have a point. With a chronological feed, quantity wins. When someone puts out new stuff every hour, it will get seen by many more people compared to someone only putting things out once a week for example.
Yeah, I agree, chronological feeds are not good. I think the solution is what BSky is doing. Meta can keep their feeds. Or we can create and use our own feeds, or use someone else’s feed.
In my feed people who post stuff every hour get blocked or unfollowed, unless it’s really good stuff.
Thats how I know who not to follow anymore, and it was an effective strategy until their garbage algorithms showed up.
Social media used to be about the social aspect. Now its about content and exposure. Its the whole reason its shit now
When someone puts out new stuff every hour, it will get seen by many more people…
Has any social media tried grouping/folding posts per author and day? If an account write a 12-posts rant or marketing push in a single day, the feed could show the first 1, with a button to “see 11 more posts by Account123” similar to how large threads are folded by default.
I’m avoiding big tech social media and don’t know if any have tried that recently.
Pornhub does this.
Tumblr doesn’t do it, but in stead incentives spreading with the queue feature. People do it out of etiquette/ to not get unfollowed.
Wouldn’t be an issue to fix that without sacrificing chronology. You can just group posts by a single individual if it would overwhelm the feed
Pornhub does this
