I absolutely cannot stand algorithmic feeds. Unless I can.
Here’s the thing: I left Facebook when I stopped seeing anything my friends posted. At the same time, YouTube wouldn’t be all that useful without suggestions. My subscriptions is my home page, so I’m getting videos in chronological order from users I’ve decided to follow, and then the algorithm occasionally serves up a suggestion that leads to a new subscription.
So just saying “social media must provide an opt-out method” is something of a sledgehammer. Moreover, companies will bury that method behind a bunch of dark patterns so no one ever ever gets to it, even if it technically exists.
Technically sorting your Lemmy feed by Hot or Active is an algorithm.
Why would I do that on a low-volume instance? I still sort by New on Reddit.
Sorting by new? That’s also an algorithm.
So then there’s gonna be an option for a strictly chronological timeline?
No. That’s an algorithm.
So is filtering to only friends and hiding blocked users.
So no algo, no feed at all really.
Why doesn’t Australia just promote Fedi, there are no algorithms to turn off.?
because these politicians know extremely little about the Internet
I started participating in online communities in the 2000s. The “social media” we had back then was web forums, organized by topics and sorted chronologically. I was young enough at the time that it is now permanently stored in my brain that that is the normal way the Internet should be like, and everything popularized since then (recommendation algorithms, the idea that we should follow people instead of topics, even the idea that websites shouldn’t be specific to certain topics) is a deviation from normalcy.
I know, rationally, that those deviations from normalcy are now the new normal (even the fediverse is “only” an attempt to improve further on that, not a move toward the Internet of the 2000s), but there is still a part of my brain that doesn’t accept this.
But I very strongly suspect that those politicians, in Australia and elsewhere, who are now trying to regulate the Internet, never posted anything to a traditional web forum, or edited a wiki, or anything like that. To them, “social media” became a thing (at all!) in around 2008 to 2010 when they created Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to communicate with their voters. (Reality check: social media has been a thing since, at the latest, the 1980s, when Usenet was invented.)
If they don’t know that the Internet is not Facebook, then it’s unsurprising when they regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, so that all that will be left is Facebook. Sad times we are living in.
The thing is, those of us old enough to remember dialup aren’t anyone’s target demographic, and the cohort that is has been conditioned over time to believe that the current situation is the natural order of things. They were raised to consume, not seek.
Sometimes I miss being able to diagnose connection issues by ear.
Bleep boop ding **GRONK GRONK GRONK ** crrrrnchhh
You’ve got mail!
Ok but why can’t you just force social media to make the users opted-out as default & not opt-in ?
