How do the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram affect what you see in your news feed? To find out, Guardian Australia unleashed them on a completely blank smartphone linked to a new, unused email address.
Three months later, without any input, they were riddled with sexist and misogynistic content.
Initially Facebook served up jokes from The Office and other sitcom-related memes alongside posts from 7 News, Daily Mail and Ladbible. A day later it began showing Star Wars memes and gym or “dudebro”-style content.
By day three, “trad Catholic”-type memes began appearing and the feed veered into more sexist content.
Three months later, The Office, Star Wars, and now The Boys memes continue to punctuate the feed, now interspersed with highly sexist and misogynistic images that have have appeared in the feed without any input from the user.
When I first joined Internet communities as a preteen, I just followed forums that interested me and got exposed to whatever people happened to be talking about on those forums.
Why, oh why, has the world decided that we need recommendation algorithms at all?
The algorithms aren’t there to improve the user experience they’re there to increase user engagement. People engage with things positively and they engage with things negatively. The algorithm doesn’t care.
Why is every third Reddit post someone “accidentally misspelling” or otherwise humorously butchering a post title? Because people comment on it.
and it’s not like it was difficult to find said communities back in the day. I first got online in like '96 and '97 and I was able to randomly find communities of people with similar interests. I was a 14 year old kid, I liked star wars. I found a huge star wars forum and then a more niche one, and then one about star wars video games, and then that lead to a huge x-wing vs tie fighter clan which lead to me downloading and learnnig how to use mIRC which then opened up to more communities of different games I enjoyed.
I made friends that I have to this day via finding these forums and IRC rooms.
I don’t know why today people need recommendation algorithms other than for said companies to make money off of it.
Yes, so much this! I always believed that in the mobile internet era it would still be like this except we would be able to access it everywhere. Instead all we have is “platforms”. 🙁😡
it was better, it was “more personal” in a way while still being anonymous. which is the opposite of today. Today you’re not anonymous and it’s no longer in a personal/intimate atomsphere
Back in the day you could get active on a message board or an IRC room and it was personal. Generally it was the same people participating everyday and you knew each other but you were still fairly anonymous. I didn’t know any of their real names or their history or anything like that but I knew them as friends. This grew to using ICQ and/or AIM and it was even more personal why still being fairly anonymous. Granted if you were chatting with people on ICQ or AIM it was safe to assume they were close friends regardless of being online only at that point. It was rare you’d get into debates or arguments on forums or irc because in general you all got along and if there was an argument or debate it never got hostile or anything. you didn’t insult each other with the intent to hurt them.
Now it’s just talking to random people online that you’re unlikely to have any similar interest with. or if you do talk to people within groups of similar interests it’s never going to go beyond talking about that interest/agenda/narrative/whatever so then it just becomes an echo chamber. It makes everything more hostile. This is why people always seem to say it feels like there’s more idiots online then there used to be. That’s because we used to be in close knit communities online, we used to be friends with each other. Now we’re all out in the open and it’s not that great out here.
whats weird to me is that the kids today seem to require an ‘app’ per website . this requirement of their own choosing seems to lock them into whatever platform
as an old person familiar with browsers since lynx, its baffling
Apps aren’t even that bad an idea, by themselves. Transmitting only the actual information and not the entire UI every time is a good idea, even more so if the apps are FOSS and the services have open APIs (which admittedly is the exception).
I grew up with IRC and of course everyone seriously using it used a standalone IRC client, not a browser chat interface.
but the difference is between using an irc client to connect to any irc server and using ICQ to connect only to that one service.
we purposefully updated browsers to enable dynamic content for exactly the reason you propose…efficiency. i cant count how many sites converted to ajaxy-goodness so we dont have to redraw the whole ui. we spent 20 years building ‘mobile-aware’ websites so devices with different screens could handle the same site without problem.
i still get from the children, ‘is there an app for your site?’ yep; firefox.
to make money
And many people are refusing to leave Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. due to those very same algorithms are not being present on Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.
Corporations realized infinite growth is unnatural and had to engineer a way to keep themselves marketable for rabid investors. Lo, and behold.