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 !
Then use chronological ordering if you want random new things.
In fact, if what you really want is “stuff not like I’ve seen before” then dislike what you’ve seen and that will train the algorithm to show you things not you’ve seen.
One way or the other, there will be an algorithm that sorts the content your seeing because your can’t read millions of posts and comments per second, your device has to decide what to show.
You choices are, you control the algorithm in your computer or someone else controls the algorithm while you use someone else’s computer (that’s the cloud).