It’s probably not true anymore, but at the time this guy was being radicalized, you’re right, it wasn’t algorithmically catered to them. At least not in the sense that it was exposing them to a specific type of content.
I suppose you can think of the way reddit works (or used to work) as being content agnostic. The algorithm is not aware of the sorts of things it’s suggesting to you, it’s just showing you things based on subreddit popularity and user voting, regardless of what it is.
In the case of YouTube and Facebook, their algorithms are taking into account the actual content and funneling you towards similar content algorithmically, in a way that is unique to you
cophater69@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Mate, I never got the same homepage twice on my old reddit account. I dunno how you can claim that two people with identical subs would see the same page. That’s just patently not true and hasn’t been for years.
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 6 months ago
Quite simple. The feeds were ordered by hot, new, or top.
New was ORDER BY date DESC. Top was ORDER BY upvotes DESC. And hot was a slightly more complicated order that used a mixture of upvotes and time.
You can easily verify this by opening 2 different browsers in incognito mode and go to the old reddit frontpage - I get the same results in either. Again - I can’t account for the new reddit site because I never used it for more than a few minutes, but that’s definitely how they old one worked and still seems to.