this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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I thought this video was going to be "old man yells at cloud", but it made me think about some posts I've seen on Lemmy. You know the ones I mean, people who are new and asking about how to tailor the experience to their own tastes, usually political tastes.
I always thought it was silly to expect the internet to put bespoke content in front of you with minimal effort. But maybe I'm just behind the times. Why wouldn't you expect the platform to track your behavior and promote what it recons will keep you scrolling? That's what's normal I guess.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Way back, I found it hard to discover new people to follow on Mastodon, and I found myself wishing for a little bit of algorithmic feed, as a treat. I found it a shame that people were increasingly becoming anti-algorithm, full stop, because I think that algorithmic recommendation engines could be so powerful if they were leveraged for good (which, for many people, isn't the endless scrolling or maximal engagement that the current system optimises for).
I need to get round to setting up an RSS reader. I've heard that a few of those have an option to give some level of algorithmic recommendations, whilst still prioritising the stuff you've already opted into seeing.
I think this is where the nuance is and where the things can go off the rails. Your example is that you want to more easily be connected with people that you enjoy engaging with but find it hard to find - which you did attempt to find a work around for, which I do commend.
I think because of the volume of scale of the internet it has been fine-tuned and engineered towards benefiting the major players more as they have taken convenience features and frankenstein'd it into a tool of "increased engagement".
It is like a market square and everyone is shouting out their wares at the same time and the major players (and others) have done their research on how to be the "loudest and most attention-grabbing hawker at the square"
Here the algorithm approach is useful to help "silence the sea of voices" and find "hawkers" that sell "products" that are of interest to you. It does require some discipline on the users part to curate their "hawkers", but overall the experience is improved as one deals with "products" that is aligned with one's interests.
I feel, in general, however that the intent has been twisted into something that has become a slippery slope that slides down towards "how can I get eyes on my thing and keep people coming back" for as long as possible. One's attention gets bombarded with as many ideas as possible and, from this, one's scope starts to bloat and becomes muddy as one processes too many different ideas and viewpoints in a short time frame and as a result one spends less time forming a individual opinion. I believe this does contribute to shorter attention spans as we attempt to "offload" our thinking onto something else as we try to make sense of all the information we take in.
The easiest thing I can think of is TikTok and how quickly the short video format was incorporated into the big platforms.
It is a human shortcoming I feel that gets taken advantage of (and I feel like it is being cultivated) and as humans we do have a side to us that tries to optimise the shit out of a things - often to our detriment.