If it is Top, then that is what people are choosing to upvote. But you don’t have to browse by Top. PieFed even offers keyword filters, plus the ability to unsubscribe from all such communities while also allowing you to see them with just the touch of a button to go to a Topic Feed showing it when you (rarely) actually do want it. You could also replicate this behavior in Lemmy, but it takes having one account per Internet area and that’s a huge pain. Or you could just sort by New. Or block the users submitting such content. The list of configuration options available to you is practically endless, and nowhere explained in the slightest degree that would be helpful:-).
Lemmy’s “Top” is scaled based on what other Lemmy users are doing: upvotes, comments, etc. It’s basically the people who use the site collectively deciding what’s interesting, which is a lot of American politics these days.
Meta, Youtube, Twitter, etc. use what people on the site say as part of the algorithm, but they also examine the content to try to discover if it is something engaging or enraging. They compare it against models of what makes people stay engaged, so if there’s something with millions of comments and lots of “likes” but Meta doesn’t think it’s good content for them to sell ads against, they’ll push it down in the ranking.
Sadly this is not true. We do have a recommendation system, called Top. And it spamms me with enraging american politics when I go to All.
If it is Top, then that is what people are choosing to upvote. But you don’t have to browse by Top. PieFed even offers keyword filters, plus the ability to unsubscribe from all such communities while also allowing you to see them with just the touch of a button to go to a Topic Feed showing it when you (rarely) actually do want it. You could also replicate this behavior in Lemmy, but it takes having one account per Internet area and that’s a huge pain. Or you could just sort by New. Or block the users submitting such content. The list of configuration options available to you is practically endless, and nowhere explained in the slightest degree that would be helpful:-).
!nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social does a pretty good job of keeping that stuff out.
The difference is in who decides what you see.
Lemmy’s “Top” is scaled based on what other Lemmy users are doing: upvotes, comments, etc. It’s basically the people who use the site collectively deciding what’s interesting, which is a lot of American politics these days.
Meta, Youtube, Twitter, etc. use what people on the site say as part of the algorithm, but they also examine the content to try to discover if it is something engaging or enraging. They compare it against models of what makes people stay engaged, so if there’s something with millions of comments and lots of “likes” but Meta doesn’t think it’s good content for them to sell ads against, they’ll push it down in the ranking.
I prefer “scaled”, which is even more like a recommendation system.