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Software Terminology
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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I also hate the way "algorithm" has taken over the public consciousness. You can find people unironically saying "I don't want any algorithm in my social media feed", which is a nonsensical statement.
People are onto something though - there's been a noticeable shift from social media just showing you your feed in a chronological manner to it showing you personally tailored content that shuffles on each refresh and aims to hook you into endless doomscrolling. I understand perfectly well what's an algorithm, but good luck explaining to people that it's not that specific thing.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way. I'm not sure if they are immune to doomscrolling and actually have gotten it to work in a way that serves them and doesn't involve doomscrolling, or if they are doomscrolling and okay with it. But for me, I really wish I could go back to the chronological feed era.
Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.
One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you're doing that, though, you're probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there's been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?
It's a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.
Letting the user decide? If the user decided that they liked fly fishing 8 stars and mother-in-law 0 stars, then the algorithm would show mother-in-law once a week at best and fly fishing 8x out of 10 posts.
If we had one public social media platform that would be the best way. It would force people to filter and learn how to interact with technology. But in our world people are lazy and a platform that picks the best value of X automatically for the most people will win. Even if it's not actually how people want to see things.
Yeah, you're describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user's previous likes. I'm saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.
Other day me and my mom was talking about how TV has all shifted to be nothing but reality TV... and then she said even youtube is becoming the same way... im like uh... thats because thats because you are watching it thus it is giving you more...
I think it's the same concept as when people say that they don't want any chemicals in their food. You know what they mean, but in a technical sense the statement is nonsensical.
Yeah, I don't like that one, either.
If you walk with algorithm, you won't attract the worm.
Holy shit, I just realized that's a dune reference.
I was actually referencing Fatboy Slim referencing Dune.
Yeah, that's what I meant. I've listened to that song countless times, and just now realized it's a dune reference.
I guess Bootsy Collins was wrong ... sometimes you do learn.
So what should we call the thing that we don't want in our social media feeds that controls what we see?
Manipulation
Engagement based personalized recommendations.
Catchy. Can't imagine why "algorithm" caught on instead.
It's because Al Gore invented the internet, so they are known as Al Gore Rhythms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system
Jazz hands.
An algorhythm
Let's not tell them that by definition both a shopping list and a recipe are algorithms.
Isn't a shopping list more like a data structure? A recipe would be an algorithm. I don't know, I could be wrong.
Can you put some milk on the algorithm please?
Depends how broad your definition of algorithm is. Is sort by upvotes an algorithm? I say no but sort by hot is.
So it is possible by this definition to have a feed without any algorithm.
Any sorting at all can only happen through one of the following:
This is (theoretically) a programmer forum. I use the programmer definition. By that definition, not having an algorithm is nonsense.
So garbage in garbage out.