Hi,
If you’re like me, your probably seeing a lot of stuff you’ve already seen in jerboa
On Reddit this didn’t happen because the site takes into account how many times a post was printed and the more you’ve seen it, the quicker it would disappear from your version of the front page.
Now of course jerboa could and should do this, But I think there’s two opportunities to make this better than Reddit. On one part, putting the squarely in control of the content discovery algorithm, next, solicit user input and ask him to lend a hand in the social sorting algorithm that is voting.
So, a user voting sounds be a way to tell jerboa that “I’ve seen this” and it shouldn’t show it anymore on my feed. To prevent bias, the neutral vote should be added.
Next is giving the user more explicit control of the algorithm. When you vote up or down, you’re sorting for the community but also for yourself. Jerboa should take into account user’s voting pattern and recommend current based on what the user likes.
These voting patterns should be publicly exchanged in “out of band” communication. Jerboa could then use these voting patterns to further help with content discovery in the following way.
“My user likes X,Y,Z, after consulting public voting patterns, we can see that most users who like X,Y,Z often also like A,B,C and dislike I,J,K”
This is how Netflix, YouTube and other algorithms find stuff you like.
The difference is now, this runs on your computer. You can see your algorithm weights and edit them. Place extra filters on them and most important, swap , export, import algorithm sorting weights and exchange them with others users, craft them for specific usage and etc.
Plus of course, basic function like chronological view that doesn’t cheat or insert ads.
Algorithmic content discovery under user control is going to be the biggest user benefit of switching to Lemmy versus a private commercial centralized platform. Our data will finally serve us !
I don’t know what do say, I’ve had great experience with content discovery algorithm. But they need a lot of work in your part to be good. Your line and dislike action tune the algorithm.
If you don’t like/dislike things, it will but learn and you will get the common denominator mush content.
Going by plain numeric user activity is not going to yield good results. It is a positive feedback loop. This is how you get “popular stuff that is popular because it is popular”. It is the recipe to create Kim Kardashian !
The more content there is, the more sophisticated the content algorithm have to be. Or else you won’t find the stuff you like.
What we need is all the data, searchable in every way possible.