I am willing to hear differing opinions on this.

I sometimes see people on Fediverse speak as if there is something inherently wrong about the idea of content sorting and filtering algorithms.

There is a massive amount of content today and limited time. Content algorithms could provide the benefit of helping us sort content based on what we want. The most he urgent news, the most informative articles, the closest friends, etc. This might have some similarities with how Facebook and others do it, but it is not the same. Big social media algorithms have one goal: maximizing their profit. One metric for that is maximizing screen on-time and scrolling.

Personally, I’ve been developing an algorithm to help me sift through the content I get on my RSS reader, as there’s a lot of content I’m uninterested in. This algorithm would save me time, whereas those of Twitter and Facebook maximize my wasted time.

In my opinion, algorithms should be:

  • opt-in: off my default, and the user is given a clear choice to change it
  • transparent: the algorithm should be transparent about its goals and inner workings

Only with this, can algorithms be good.

What are your thoughts?

  • testingthis
    3·
    3 years ago

    I feel like most of those examples tend towards inherently immoral and wrong…

    E.g., no news is actually urgent, and algorithmic friend sorting is wrong – serendipity is correct

    Regarding informative articles, in that context there are keywords for searching

    I think the only way that we’ll start getting remotely close to something moral is with fine-grained controls that will let us know exactly why an algorithm chooses what it does