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.
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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”. 🙁😡
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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.