One should never trust a software designed to capture as much of one's attention as possible to play “fair”, that will never happen.
One of the reasons I do not have a functioning Twitter account is that the platform is a highly toxic environment. There's really just a mixture of every thing that's fuckin wrong with this world on Twitter and it's heavily promoted by the platform's algorithm because you know why? Negative things capture longer attention.
I refuse to let it learn what negativity triggers me.
I was reading a report on cointelegraph about an hour ago about a marketplace of algorithms featuring opinions from Jack Dorsey, yeah, that guy trying to build web5.0, lmao.
Moving on, I found a lot of what's being discussed to be interesting, frankly speaking. However, having thought more on the topic, it became clear that none of these things are the solutions we need.
Censorship isn't the answer to fake news and toxicity on social media. We need to give users more choice over the content they are forced to consume.
This is the opening statement from the report and I totally agree. However, the proposed way of offering a “choice” isn't the solution it's made to seem like.
What's funny is that the solution we seek for these problems facing social media already exists, just not bottled up in one app, and we've somehow been engineered into not realizing this.
Dorsey argues that black-box social media algorithms are impacting our agency by twisting our reality and hacking our mind space. He believes the solution is to enable users to choose between different algorithms to have greater control over the sort of content they serve up.
“Give people choice of what algorithm they want to use, from a party that they trust, give people choice to build their own algorithm that they can plug in on top of these networks and see what they want. And they can shift them out as well. And give people choice to have, really, a marketplace.”
This got me thinking about Hive for a minute, being someone that follows just 57 accounts and reads on average 2 contents daily from a regular few - though I rarely interact, I do however, enjoy that bliss of knowing what to expect whenever I get the chance to log in.
Judging by my publishing patterns lately which has been affected by so much, one could easily notice that I go one week in then one week off, sometimes just one post a week but during this period, I'm often reading stories popping through my followings.
I recall a time back when I felt I needed fresh perspective and went on threads to find new people to follow. I followed some but ended up unfollowing after a while.
Why?
Well, their content qualified to be in my feed, but they engaged a lot in reblogging what I wasn't interested in. I hardly visit certain pages across the Hive ecosystem because I am avoiding being greeted by content that would only waste my time or worse, trigger me.
Why am I even bringing this up? Well, if I personally picked out people to follow, but was still met with content I didn't want to see, how much more an autonomous software?
The flaws will always exist, regardless of the long list of algorithms that may exist in this marketplace. The report is a long one and I'd hate to quote everything here, so you can access it on cointelegraph.
Individualized Media As A Solution
At the end of the day, a feed manually curated will always be the best, this is why newsletters are successful, almost forgot that. Recall that in the beginning I said that the solution we seek already exists?
Think about niche websites that we go to occasionally to consume content. Could be fiction, movies, finance or sports. Being in niche spaces drastically reduces one's exposure to things that would bring about a negative reaction.
Personally still yet to forgive Leofinance for jumping ship on being in the finance niche.
Moving one. Individualized media means that people get to subscribe to individual feeds of maybe an organization like a finance blog or an individual publishing content in a specific niche.
Think of it like my following feed, which we all already have, but instead of having all contents from 57 accounts show up in one feed, each account has its own singled out feed to which people will have to manually visit to explore and can easily unsubscribe if the content no longer aligns with what attracted them in the first place.
While we would give anything to have an algorithm that can sort out great content that we'd love, the system will never be that great because its design isn't about balancing our emotions but to capture more of our attention.