A slightly unusual video from the fantastic Technology Connections channel. It articulates a lot of my own thoughts on social media, “algorithms” and AI.
What surprised me the most was the statistic that only 3% of author’s views come from the subscriptions feed. This is wild to me because subscriptions are pretty much the only way I have ever used YouTube.
I mean, algorithms are not bad at all if they are transparent. The “scaled” sorting in Lemmy is an algorithm and it does work great. You can take a look at the source code and see how it works. The problem here is not “algorithms” and we really shouldn’t call it “algorithms” - it’s tech companies force feeding you content they want you to see and preventing you from seeing the sites/posts/users you are actively following from reaching your feed. What Musk is doing on X is propaganda and we should call it that
Yeah, I’m here for a reason. It takes a lot of blocking/filtering too. But the reason I am here is my desire for “algorithmic complacency”. I like to spend some time mentally wandering.