I miss chronological feeds.
But chronological feeds don't solve it (plenty of research on this).
Recommender systems that don't optimize for division are a more meaningful solution, ala https://bridging.systems/ (lots of work by others too).
This, e.g., bridging-based ranking, is same approach that underlies Community Notes.
The feed is root of the problem.
The feed is an integral part of social media.
We’re allowing them—companies, states, whoever—to feed us individually-targeted generated propaganda.
I suppose you could build a scraper to do it but a platform like Facebook take steps to make it difficult. Maybe we're almost at the stage where a personalised AI assistant could parse your feed on the fly and reconstruct it into something user-friendly (a much smarter algorithm to build a dumber one!)
I'd like to have the old social media back, but then again it depends if anyone is still posting content.
But humans prefer to spent more time on enraging/outrageous content.
So in a competitive social media environment - the platform with the most engaging content will win.
When TikTok launched short form Video - instagram’s choice was to copy or lose.
it is intentional, or is it engineered?
"Get rid of algorithmic feeds" strikes me as similarly wishful thinking.
It was very telling when X started showing people’s locations and a lot of the political accounts targeting the US were based in other countries.
It was nice when the only people that could publish to an audience larger than a room were "trusted sources" with some measure of respectability. Or maybe it wasn't, because I'm not sure these people were all that trustworthy to begin with. So now we have a lot of voices with megaphones and a lot of them don't think like you or I do.
I guess I prefer this world to the world where Truth is handed down by Dan Rather.
I think a lot of the issue is that in local communities a lot of what would have been direct local discussion has moved on-line, and is manipulated for "engagement".
No, not really. I grew up in the TV era. Whatever algorithmic tricks FB is playing, they're nothing compared to broadcast news.
I also don't think the algorithmic tricks are particularly insidious. Mostly they give people more of what they ask for. Yeah, this allows QAnoners to build themselves a little echo chamber. But this is nothing new; walk into your local Kingdom Hall and see if they want to be friends with an infidel.
If you want to fix this, stop unfriending people who don't think like you. Challenge the echo chambers.
Social media gave a voice to people.
Sure, not everyone has a point worth paying attention to, nor are most participants on social media real - most likely bots.
But do we want only points of views from Billionaire network and media owners who have their own agenda ?
People should pay more attention to what affects their daily lives and not what hatred is shown to them to rile them up.
If the individuals in the society are discerning and capable then no media traditional or social can have power to manipulate us against each other.
Just an example, but in my city there have been some local cost overruns on projects, which of course is a problem. But the amount is not huge, ~ 3 million which has accumulated over like 5 years. The money was clearly spent on projects as they have been completed, but there are people making videos doxxing every contractor that did anything with the city, calling for FBI investigations and posting the personal information and videos contractors,city employees, elected officials families and coming up with wildly numbers 30 million+ etc to say they have been stealing the funds. It's impactful to the point that some of the contractors have decline further municipal wok which literally is going to add millions of costs as the local companies were considerably cheaper, plus it will delay projects.
Plus the fun thing is many of the people making videos etc don't even live here and half of the commenters threatening violence etc are from other places in the country and don't even realize the discussion isn't about their town.
The history of media have always had an disruption and people taking advantage of it: printing machine was a disruption that caused people like Martin Luther to be able to reach to prominence (printing press was initially printing more short news/tabloid letter, wayy more than books or proper news. And it was majority fake news). Another disruption was the radio. Made people with good, passionate voice being able to take advantage of it (Hitler, that US crazy pastor I can't remember the name of). It's up to your own moral compass if those disruption was good or bad, but they all followed by regulators realizing the potential danger of it, and putting guardrails.
But that's not the point. The point is scale. You have finite bandwidth to process information and unlike some queue system on a computer that will just lag or overflow, as a human you'll start to behave differently and it affects your information processing capacity. Doubly so if that queue is artificially filled (biased) with certain information (attention grabbing, outrage seeking algorithms)
People saying "fake news always existed" is saying "quantity doesn't matter". They're essentially saying: "school math test have always had 10+ multiplication table memorization questions. Why are people whining that they have to do 1e6 questions on one sitting??" which is ironic because techies are the first to say SCALE SCALE SCALE SCALE as an crucial strength and differentiator of software.
Appeal to history is the favorite Fallacy of techies (at least on HN) fueled by some American libertarian delusion of thinking social dynamics can be ignored.
It's pretty clear to me that those kind of techies clearly can't even conceive the problem, so don't be surprised that people are shifting to regulators to tackle this
the concept of a democracy, and the root of power being the will of the people is far more sound than a dictatorship.
What youre seeing today is the result of a 70 year long campaign that started when nixon resigned and roger ailes said nixon was actually innocent and founded fox news on the principle that the media was the real reason he was impeached.
and then suddenly we're surprised to see right wing authoritarian technocrats buying up every piece of media they can, as fast as they can, after they systematically destroyed every regulation put in place to prevent that.
No. Our democracy was not lost. It was conquered by right wing authoritarians who seek to purge any and all political opposition.
50 years ago, the President was supporting numerous brutal authoritarian third-world regimes that routinely used torture and murder. That still happens, but it happened more during the Cold War.
US foreign policy is actually a lot more moral now than it was during the Cold War. I think this probably has more to do with how much harder it is to hide things from the masses than it does with a change of heart, but the fact remains.
lol
The truth is that people like outrage and outrageous content.
Boring, even handed content does not get engagement.
We have to call out human nature to be able to reckon with it.
This is what I meant. Is that what you are saying removes agency from the individual?
If anything social media is a benefit to democracy vs. legacy media because it dilutes the power of any one voice, it's very hard to control all social media whereas a couple conglomerates now own nearly all of legacy media.
Looked at another way, if democracy cannot withstand social media and made up stories then it's not a stable system of government. Stories of the end of history are greatly exaggerated, historically democracy is far less successful than autocracy, perhaps due to this issue.
i find it hard to accept that the solution to your problem here is that democracy must fall because of propaganda, when the very same propaganda is what leads to dictatorship.
Without a way to create objective dialogue, what is any system of government other than the picture it paints. Facts, and nothing else, is the only way to maintain a democracy.
Once you permit subjectivity, conjecture, and propaganda, like, say... when right wing billionaires buy create fox news, buy cnn, john oliver, colbert, every local news network (sinclar), washington post, tik tok, twitter, etc etc etc etc etc........ democracy is no longer possible.
The current situation is the result of free speech and consumers being able to choose the kind of content that they enjoy.
It is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that your argument in effect logically implies that free speech should be further curtailed and that elites (but the Right Elites) should be in control of the sources of content.
Which is a defensible position to take, actually. But people generally don't take it because reduction in free speech and consumer choice is anti-democratic. So the essence of this position is actually that we have too much democracy, not too little.
Once the ministry of truth gains power, democracy is finished.
The extremely unpopular citizen's united supreme court case was in many ways a last ditch attempt to prevent the creation of the ministry of truth. It likely won't last.
The foundation of liberal democracy is the idea that people are capable of thinking for themselves, making choices, and don't need to rely on kings, popes, presidents, or CEOs to tell them what to do. It's fine to doubt this. Skepticism of democracy starts with the Greeks (who invented it), and runs through Hobbes, Nietzsche, Mencken, Schumpeter, and Thiel. But it's self-refuting to see people arguing, basically, "we have to restrict people's ability to communicate to save democracy". Maybe you can square that circle, but it's hard to see how it can be done without undermining the original argument for liberal democracy.
My view is that, while the internet, social media, etc have raised real challenges, it's simple cowardice to back away from liberal principles because of people lying on the internet about this and that. The liberal experiment has worked well and we should keep running it.
It is completely wrong to say or imply that quantity of it hasn't changed with social media. All of the Satanic panic church leaflets you speak of -- in aggregate -- had infinitesimally small reach compared to a single Facebook post.
As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".
That said, social media is not free communication.
That is begging the question. What we have is not "people freely communicating on the Internet." We have bots, state actors spewing propaganda, paid shills, etc. Actual humans with actual opinions are the small minority, and unfortunately they are largely being informed by the bad actors so even then what we have is mostly crap.
I have seen no evidence that "actual humans are the small minority".
And if this isn't US-centric enough for you, the previous US administration created a "Disinformation Governance Board" specifically to address the threats that they felt free communication among the people was posing to democracy, taking action to pressure corporate actors to censor disfavored popular speech in attempt to circumvent first amendment protections. At least the current administration isn't really pretending that attacking free speech is protecting democracy somehow.