Over reliance on algorithms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement. Just like a toddler, algorithms don’t discriminate between good and bad attention, so everything that gets clicks is thrust forward. Now, you could hope to train the algorithm to show you only postive things, but engagement is engagement and the algorithm curators often engage in rage farming, where your feed is injected with things that are likely to enrage you.
You can avoid this by installing an RSS reader, going to your favorite sites, and manually adding a RSS feed. Now, your reader has things that you manually selected, with the added bonus of having a content pipe free of malicious interference. You can also divide topics in a way that you can avoid certain themes and news until you decide to engage them.
The majority of my information comes from RSS feeds. However, I depend on Lemmy (formerly I depended on Reddit) for the things that pop up in an area of interest that I might other wise have missed.
Anyone got a good recommendation for Firefox?
Been a Feedly user for years and I love it. I browse it throughout the day.
RSS is the best – I’ve been self hosting a personal tt-rss server since the time google reader went down and never looked back when it comes to “a place to scroll and get all kinds of great info/news/entertainment/etc” and for the most part even a lot of the “big places” still support it, or you an use services like https://morss.it/ to generate them.
Over reliance on algorhythms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement
People on Reddit, a vote based platform, used to say this all the time and the front page was filled with ragebait.
Even here, sort by hot or top and most of it is anti-reddit/meta/twitter/capitalism memes or infuriating news articles.
Go back further, what hits the front page of large newspapers? Not puppies, that’s for sure.
At some point we have to stop blaming “the algorithm” and recognize that it’s human behaviour to seek out ragebait that trains the algorithms. Only way to remove ragebait from algorithmic or voter based platforms is to retrain the way we seek content really.
This is what I pretty much said - algorithms are amplifying already existing negative trends, and those who control them design the user experience for maximum engagement at the cost of the user’s mental wellbeing. We can shrug our shoulders and say “that’s just human nature” which does nothing to improve the situation, or we can create our own experience and “retrain the way we seek content” as you put it.
Right, but what I mean is it’s not just “algorithms” though, and tailoring your feed to be the top of reddit or lemmy (or other voter based platform) isn’t necessarily going to fix the ragebait issue. My comment wasn’t meant to disagree with your post, more of an addition.
