Comment on Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

• meldrik@lemmy.wtf ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Those are very basic algorithms and they are public. You can see exactly how they work.

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• Glitchvid@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO.
  Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.

  As for community of communities, that’s how the Fediverse works — you have a home instance which communicates with other instances. An instance has (nominally) rules, and expected conduct, and is often centered around a particular interest (game dev, programming, cities or countries, etc) then these communities interact with each other.

  Having home instances with shared values and a subset of the entire userbase allows for recognizing and connecting with other “local” users. The same way people would trust their immediate neighbors more than random people from the city over. It helps form webs of trust, and establish natural networks.
  This is how human society has functioned up until very recently — it’s what the brain evolved to do.

  We can see the consequence of systems that don’t respect that fact, sites that try catering to everyone and put us in the same tent, it destroys social regulation, you cannot possibly hope to explain yourself to tens of thousands of angry people on the Internet, nor should people be exposed to such vitriol.

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  • solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO. Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.

    I would say scrutability in itself doesn’t automatically make an algorithm good. “Demote everything that doesn’t support Trump” is perfectly scrutable but leads to a skewed discussion.

    In fact I would say any content boosting algorithm at all leads to skew and what you call sycophancy. That includes upvotes/downvotes that affect what posts users see first. So I would get rid of all that stuff and just show purely chronologically.

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    • Glitchvid@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I would say scrutability in itself doesn’t automatically make an algorithm good. “Demote everything that doesn’t support Trump” is perfectly scrutable but leads to a skewed discussion.

      This is mostly getting into normative vs descriptive philosophy. If it’s scrutable that a site/instance is demoting everything non-aligned with a worldview; then on the Fediverse it’s users’ choice to leave (and part of ‘community values’).

      In fact I would say any content boosting algorithm at all leads to skew and what you call sycophancy. That includes upvotes/downvotes that affect what posts users see first. So I would get rid of all that stuff and just show purely chronologically.

      To some degree, yes. New Reddit is particularly bad about this, it actively buries unpopular replies (but it goes further, and doesn’t just use upvotes) — Software like Lemmy is better, you can easily set Sort by New or sort by Top as the default. There’s also no ‘Karma’ system that propagates across the site.

      Sycophancy is a human trait, so it’ll always emerge in social systems; but normatively, our systems should not cater to these negative traits (e.g. Twitter).

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      • solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        There are some Lemmy instances without downvoting, but none without upvoting. That affects what gets posted.

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