Emotional_Series7814

  • 5 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle





  • I contribute a lot here (on different accounts) as an extrovert who just also happens to not care about celebrities. I used to be on Instagram because I care about my friends who use it, but the platform got enshittified enough to drive me off. Yes, maybe I won’t know that you went on vacation so I won’t be able to bring that up as a conversation topic, you’ll have to remember that yourself and bring it up in conversation. But that’s not exactly a great loss and neither is having one fewer person viewing your pictures and tapping “like” on it. A big part of my extroversion is that I like discussing things. Kbin and Lemmy are places to do that.

    I toilet scroll these because it’s something short and engaging I can do instead of just doing nothing while waiting for the human waste disposal process to finish.



  • I don’t consciously make these calculations either, but what you just described sounds exactly like how I choose what to click on. Also came here for suggestions!

    I’ll say that I’ve looked up hobbies I enjoy but don’t think about much so I can boost my engagement on the Fediverse. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but I want to help this place grow, so I’ve let in things that I have a milder interest in as well as my usual interests. This is also how I get variety in the posts I see, as I usually stick to /sub. When I wander out, it’s on purpose and to a specific known community, because /all usually has some depressing political news or ragebait that would get me to outrage-click. I’m here to have a good time, not to doomscroll or get angry. Kbin has no algorithm intended to keep us scrolling on it, but those things do generate the most engagement, so it’s only natural they end up on /all frequently enough (though not as frequently as they’d appear on the popular page on Reddit) that I feel a desire to avoid /all.






  • “We believe that users should have a say in how their attention is directed, and developers should be free to experiment with new ways of presenting information,” Bluesky’s chief executive, Jay Graber, told me in an email message.

    Of course, there are also challenges to algorithmic choice. When the Stanford political science professor Francis Fukuyama led a working group that in 2020 proposed outside entities offer algorithmic choice, critics chimed in with many concerns.

    Robert Faris and Joan Donovan, then of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, wrote that they were worried that Fukuyama’s proposal could let platforms off the hook for their failures to remove harmful content. Nathalie Maréchal, Ramesh Srinivasan and Dipayan Ghosh argued that his approach would do nothing to change the some tech platforms’ underlying business model that incentivizes the creation of toxic and manipulative content.

    Mr. Fukuyama agreed that his solution might not help reduce toxic content and polarization. “I deplore the toxicity of political discourse in the United States and other democracies today, but I am not willing to try solving the problem by discarding the right to free expression,” he wrote in response to the critics.

    When she ran the ethics team at Twitter, Rumman Chowdhury developed prototypes for offering users algorithmic choice. But her research revealed that many users found it difficult to envision having control of their feed. “The paradigm of social media that we have is not one in which people understand having agency,” said Ms. Chowdhury, whose Twitter team was let go when Mr. Musk took over. She went on to found the nonprofit Humane Intelligence.

    But just because people don’t know they want it doesn’t mean that algorithmic choice is not important. I didn’t know I wanted an iPhone until I saw one.

    And with another national election looming and disinformation circulating wildly, I believe that asking people to choose disinformation — rather than to accept it passively — would make a difference. If users had to pick an antivaccine news feed, and to see that there are other feeds to choose from, the existence of that choice would itself be educational.

    Algorithms make our choices invisible. Making those choices visible is an important step in building a healthy information ecosystem.


  • Here’s the text!

    Social media can feel like a giant newsstand, with more choices than any newsstand ever. It contains news not only from journalism outlets, but also from your grandma, your friends, celebrities and people in countries you have never visited. It is a bountiful feast.

    But so often you don’t get to pick from the buffet. On most social media platforms, algorithms use your behavior to narrow in on the posts you are shown. If you send a celebrity’s post to a friend but breeze past your grandma’s, it may display more posts like the celebrity’s in your feed. Even when you choose which accounts to follow, the algorithm still decides which posts to show you and which to bury.

    There are a lot of problems with this model. There is the possibility of being trapped in filter bubbles, where we see only news that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. There are rabbit holes, where algorithms can push people toward more extreme content. And there are engagement-driven algorithms that often reward content that is outrageous or horrifying.

    Yet not one of those problems is as damaging as the problem of who controls the algorithms. Never has the power to control public discourse been so completely in the hands of a few profit-seeking corporations with no requirements to serve the public good.

    Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which he renamed X, has shown what can happen when an individual pushes a political agenda by controlling a social media company.

    Since Mr. Musk bought the platform, he has repeatedly declared that he wants to defeat the “woke mind virus” — which he has struggled to define, but that largely seems to mean Democratic and progressive policies. He has reinstated accounts that were banned because of the white supremacist and antisemitic views they espoused. He has banned journalists and activists. He has promoted far-right figures such as Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate, who were kicked off other platforms. He has changed the rules so that users can pay to have some posts boosted by the algorithm, and has purportedly changed the algorithm to boost his own posts. The result, as Charlie Warzel said in The Atlantic, is that the platform is now a “far-right social network” that “advances the interests, prejudices and conspiracy theories of the right wing of American politics.”

    The Twitter takeover has been a public reckoning with algorithmic control, but any tech company could do something similar. To prevent those who would hijack algorithms for power, we need a pro-choice movement for algorithms. We, the users, should be able to decide what we read at the newsstand.

    In my ideal world, I would like to be able to choose my feed from a list of providers. I would love to have a feed put together by librarians, who are already expert at curating information, or from my favorite news outlet. And I’d like to be able to compare what a feed curated by the American Civil Liberties Union looks like compared with one curated by the Heritage Foundation. Or maybe I just want to use my friend Susie’s curation, because she has great taste.

    There is a growing worldwide movement to provide us with some algorithmic choice — from a Belgrade group demanding that recommender algorithms should be a “public good” to European regulators who are demanding that platforms give users at least one algorithm option that is not based on tracking user behavior.

    One of the first places to start making this vision a reality is a social network called Bluesky, which recently opened up its data to allow developers to build custom algorithms. The company, which is financially supported by the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, said that 20 percent of its 265,000 users are using custom feeds.

    On my Bluesky feed, I often toggle between feeds called Tech News, Cute Animal Pics, PositiviFeed and my favorite, Home+, which includes “interesting content from your extended social circles.” Some of them were built by Bluesky developers, and others were created by outside developers. All I have to do is go to My Feeds and select a feed from a wide menu of choices including from MLB+, a feed about baseball, to #Disability, one that picks up keywords related to disability or UA fundraising, a feed of Ukrainian fund-raising posts.

    Choosing from this wide selection of feeds frees me from having to decide whom to follow. Switching social networks is less exhausting — I don’t have to rebuild my Twitter network. Instead, I can just dip my toes into already curated feeds that introduce me to new people and topics.




  • I’m fine with being active in the place, doing lots of advertising, doing my best to get the place off the ground, writing up rules, etc.

    I’m not fine with being the first line of defense against some troll posting gore. I also know that I tend to be pretty oversensitive and might use moderator powers to remove replies that really should have stayed up. Hence “I do not have the… thick skin needed to be a moderator”.

    So yeah, this is totally self-serving. Don’t feel like putting myself through the gore or putting myself through the “oh my god fucking powertripping mod” criticism (whether warranted or unwarranted), better stay out of that position of power in the first place.



  • A Reddit replacement, except without doomscrolling. On Reddit I would follow communities for hobbies and have discussions about the hobby, and I’d like to do the same here. I would also doomscroll news and all the outraged comments on the news, and I would very much not like to do the same thing here.

    On Kbin, there isn’t an easily-accessible Discovery feed, which is where I would click and fall into the doomscrolling and people yelling at the news. Once it gets implemented for those who want it, I dearly hope we can hide it. Out of sight, out of mind. Yes, I know it’s my own fault for clicking the Discovery button in the first place. I’ll stick to the magazines I /sub to, thank you very much. I can find new interests perfectly well through real-life friends, and learn about the news from actual news articles.





  • I’m really sorry but I feel like you’re answering a question I don’t have, and explaining things I already know.

    When I made this post, I already understood that

    1. people on kbin.cafe need to subscribe to a magazine on kbin.social to make any posts from it show up on kbin.cafe. The only posts that will show are ones made after a kbin.cafe user subscribed there.
    2. these posts have the potential to show up on general/all, and when I search for them.
    3. I can interact with these posts on my kbin.cafe account.

    What I am asking is how I can access a specific kbin.social post that I first find on the kbin.social site, through kbin.cafe in such a way that I am able to interact with it. I am already aware of these methods:

    1. have a kbin.social account. Follow it with your kbin.cafe account. Use the kbin.social account to boost the post. It will show up for all your followers—which means you on your kbin.cafe account. Now you can interact. I am looking for a method other than this, because it feels dirty and why bother with this boosting process if I can already interact with my existing kbin.social account? If the point is just to use an alternate account to obfuscate my identity, I can do the same thing using an alternate account on kbin.social instead of kbin.cafe.
    2. use the search on kbin.cafe to look for the post. I am looking for a method other than this because if the post did not federate over, this fails—but I won’t know if I failed to find the post because I searched the wrong terms and just need to keep trying, or if I failed and should give up because the post failed to federate over. Also, if many posts match the keywords, it becomes tedious to search through all the results.

    I want to know if there is any faster way to do this, or if I’m stuck with these hacky-feeling workarounds.