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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13107 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Turns out more than one side has the "7 zillion witches" problem.

In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.

Back when SocMeds were only taking off, and some blue-tribers of the FOSS variety were getting creeped out by the potential power megacorps could wield with control of recommendation algorithms, someone came up with the idea of letting each user customize their algorithm on each platform. Technically speaking it wouldn't be that much of a problem to implement it, but the SocMeds have no incentive to do so, so it would require government regulation. Sadly it turned out that stopping Trump / the anti-woke backlash became a higher priority than controlling corporate power. Such a shame. The "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" crowd can now enjoy the world they created.

The "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" crowd can now enjoy the world they created.

This is me, unironically. And yes I am enjoying the world. Though I don't take credit for creating it.

The secrets to enjoyment:

  1. Longer time horizons. The transitions of various social media companies has often sucked, or been annoying. But I do find myself happy now almost a decade or more after some of those slow transitions began.
  2. Social media is a fundamentally toxic relationship. You give them your blood sweat and tears poured endlessly into content. They give you eyeballs and people to see it. These things are not equivalent, and their main lever for getting people to make more content for them, is just to feed them more attention. I've found that in my personal life toxic and unbalanced relationships can be fun and exciting for a little bit, but they all crash and burn.
  3. The only product you are owed is the one you pay for. I don't trust free products.
  4. Social media is a cheap and second rate alternative to real life connections. We've now all had a chance to run the experiment ourselves during Covid.

Everyone went on a weird social media bender for a few years, but I think a lot of people are waking up from the haze. The companies got to do what they wanted with their product, and they gave us the drugs so good and hard that now a bunch of us get sick at just seeing the drugs again. This is personally how I prefer to deal with additctions. I like to burn them out of my system hard and fast.

To be honest I think it’s the way most social media is set up. Unless you set up pretty hard limits on minimal content quality, you’ll quickly find that everyone is going pretty low hanging fruit of one liners and hard core factionalism. Nuance just doesn’t work in an environment where the currency is engagements. Long from content is not viral in the same way that a one line dig at outside enemies can be. Memes, gross images, crass wording, and anger are the things that nature has somehow engineered our brains to notice and spread. A long form nuanced article that steel mans the other side and treats the issue fairly is only plausible in environments where such content is a minimal expectation.

I do go on Twitter for the lols, but not much else. It’s kinda funny to snark and mock the pious Palestine-free stuff simply because I find it naive and uncritical of its own side. People who under other circumstances would oppose rape, murder, and terrorism are taking the side of people who do exactly that and celebrate it happening. The Israelis, particularly the settlers, are not completely innocent here, but after months of hearing about how this is one sided and anyone who isn’t actively opposed is evil, some part of my brain gets excited about posting a guy eating a hamburger under a tweet about McDonald’s supporting Israel. Downside being that Twitter thinks I’m Jewish or something.

...Bluesky has exactly that: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

Sweet! Shame they ban / remove content they don't like. It's even harder to justify all the censorship if you can make your own feed algorithm.

When was this, specifically? Do you have any links or something to evidence this?

The idea for letting individual users customize their algorithms? It was ages ago. Early 2010's, or even late aughties. I read it on some blog. I can try to look for traces of it, but the blog might be long gone, and search engines have gotten terrible so I hope you understand this is a tall order.

On the flip side, are you actually saying this is something strange for blue-tribers of that era to recommend? What are you basing your opinion on? This was standard politics of the Stallman-Torvalds techie faction.

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