See title, but for some added detail: I’ve been thinking lately about how one of the stumbling blocks for folks to federated social spaces is the absence of, for lack of a better word, engagement algorithms.
What I mean by engagement algorithms are the different systems corporate social media employs to drive your continued use of their apps/platforms. Choose a few interests/people/communities, see some suggested topics/people/groups to follow. You follow Mad Max, maybe you’d like to follow Furiosa!
Furiosa liked/shared your photo! You viewed this video, here’s another you might like, and another, and another!
These systems tend to do a few things at once, keep your attention, minimize friction to find more to interact with/view, and in turn discourage actively looking beyond them. Depending on how you use them, or in some cases just how they work, you’re almost discouraged from socializing and instead encouraged to doomscroll/perpetually consume as they tend to work more as broadcasting/advertising platforms at a certain point than social platforms.
Remove most of the engagement algorithms and instead have folks socializing as the “engagement algorithm” and some folks tend to seem a little disoriented or lost (which is sometimes the absence of familiar faces tbh, but not always!). Moreover, some just…Never really wanted to socialize much to begin with, so this may not really translate for them to begin with.
What do you think?
I think the algorithm is vastly overrated. People talk about it like it’s some kind of a god, both sarcastically and genuinely.
It’s just another buzzword for the CEOs and shareholders.
In reality people just like to procrastinate.
Algo can do a little to show you the stuff you’re more likely to stay for, but the real culprit is simply having everything in one place, so it’s hard to pull away.
I switched over to freetube for my YouTube consumption, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it was so different, that’s when I realized that it only fed me my subscriptions, where my daily YouTube habits up to that point was constantly A B testing myself on youtube’s homepage and letting the algorithm curate content for me.
It was pretty crazy to see
I think a better question is why do people think that platforms like Lemmy don’t have algorithms to keep you engaged? Specifically, people will naturally tend toward the things that keep them interested. This means they’ll use the apps that are easiest and the ones with the most engaging feeds. I think a better distinction is that platforms like Lemmy are open so you know exactly what’s happening. It’s more consentual in that sense
I think when people say ”Algorithms", they mean the massive time-sucking behemoths that power the infinite scrolling of Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, etc.
Platforms like Lemmy have comparatively simple algorithms that can visually amount to "show the highest upvoted posts from the past x time, deduct rank by y time, improve rank by z if …”, but these are still algorithms.
Yeah, this is why I tried to identify them as engagement algorithms specifically. Lemmy & the like do have algorithms, of course, but they’re both open and not as laser-focused on maximizing user retention/engagement as corporate platforms.
In the case of Mastodon, for instance, there’s not even any additional sorting algorithms like here, it’s a pretty basic chronological feed from those you follow (home), posts of those on your instance (local), and posts from other instances (federated/all).
So I totally get the difference here and I’m not trying to come off as obtuse. But I think what I’m getting at is that these “hyper addictive” style algorithms may arise regardless of what type of platform they are on. This imo will be a result of people naturally migrating towards things they find more interesting and more engaging. For instance imagine how painful it would be to find good content on a YT competitor that has no way to present new content other than chronologically. Like imagine trying to find something cool from all 10 billion videos. It would suck. The average person simply wont put up with that kind of thing. So I think one of the reasons people like these open platforms actually has more to do with their consent. As a user on an open source system you get to chose which implementation. You get to chose which set of algorithms you surround yourself with from across the entire spectrum of “hyper addictive” to “super simple and chronological.” A choice which simply isnt present when their is only one platform for the thing you want (reddit, youtube, facebook, etc)
Lemmy doesn’t have any algo, it just shows all the content chronologically, or am I wrong?
Well that’s technically an algorithm yes, but not the kind we’re talking about.
I can say since I started using the internet in the 90s that I’ve never paid attention to whatever a website wanted to show me. I’m there for a reason and that’s not it. This is probably why I never got into social media.
No algo on reddit or here though? Human brains are shit, that’s the problem.
There is, though. See how you can sort posts and comments by Hot/Top/Active? That’s an algorithm sorting things based on engagement over time. It’s just not tailored to your personal history of engagement.