We talk about the Algorithm when we talk about the big social media players - what is their algorithm? It’s a mystery, and it’s certainly set up to make you see what they want you to see.
What if Lemmy users had their own algorithms? Well, we already have a few - sort by Hot, Active, New, etc. Blocking users, communities, threads, keywords - that’s another algorithm - remove content that’s likely to be obnoxious. But we can do more than that when the algorithm’s working for us instead of a big company…
Could Lemmy have an AI algorithm that over time is trained to find stuff you like? Or trained to automatically catch and flag Nazi content or illegal content - would save the mods some work. Or trained to send you content you find lame when you’ve been doomscrolling too long.
Or for a simpler algorithm, give the users one of Tik Tok’s cheats - behind the scenes, Tik Tok staff would “heat” certain vids from certain creators, or with certain keywords, or that promote certain agendas… Like recording industry payola. What if you had the ability to sort by Hot, but with user-specified heat (or user-specified chill) - you like these posts, so dial up their karma, but you hate those posts, so dial posts with that keyword down, so they get pushed down in your feed.
Better than Meta algorithm Kremlinology, would you say? The one thing I want, though is open algorithms. We should know how they work, and what kinds of content they promote or block. Give the users the keys!
The best response to “the algorithm” is no algorithm. Sort by easily sortable metadata.
Sorting by date, or by karma formula (aka Hot) are algorithms. The key is that you chose those algorithms and know how they work.
This is the reddit “ackshually” game. Yes, any piece of code that accepts input and produces output could qualify as an “algorithm”, but no one, when talking about social media sorting algorithms means “sorted by date”. Let’s leave that shit on Reddit. I don’t want to play that.
I don’t know how Hot sorts. But if it’s more than just sorting by highest to lowest karma for posts, then I’d argue we should also do away with it.
We should rely solely on simple, transparent ordering
Agree with the first point, disagree with the second. Afaik hot is some mixture of total upvotes, upvote ratio and upvotes recently (trending). And to be honest, I like that. I want to see some very new posts, so new stuff can get upvoted without people having to sort by new. I also want to see stuff many people already upvoted, since it’s probably interesting/funny/whatever. I don’t want to get rid of all those algorithms, I just want them to be transparent.
My apologies, I phrased that in a shitty way.
No worries. I read my response later and realized I sounded harsher than I meant to, so sorry for that.
All good!
Anyways, I don’t want to sound condescending, but thought you might be curious - seeing that Lemmy is open source, I found Lemmy’s Hot algorithm in the documentation. A bit more complicated than I thought it was, but the math’s pretty straightforward.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
Sure, as long as you can turn it off
Oh yeah, that should be a given.
Y’know … kinda modularizing your own algorithm and then simply providing it to the users with a shiny UI full of settings should theoretically be doable.
That would simply be another front page sort option. Hey I’m all for that. Right now we have a healthy list, but I’d welcome “custom” or “smart” as well.
Smart sort could be fun to implement. One could set up Bayesian filtering, or Markov chains, similar to spam filtering, set to promote posts that are similar to posts you’ve upvoted.
Or one could train a neural network (though that may require too much computing power).
The issue with sorting by stuff it thinks you like is problematic, I think. You’ll eventually end up in a bubble where the things you see will be reinforced more over time.
If this is at an instance level… Fine? As long as it’s visible.
I’d worry you’re promoting some amount of information siloing if the current general purpose instance structure doesn’t hold though.
I agree, visibility is key. No mystery algorithms!
That and I worry about algorithms that are engagement-based - we don’t want feeds that devolve into rage-porn and constant pie-fights. You’re right, some of these algorithms have side-effects…
I think some of that devolution going to be inevitable or you’re going to face charges of censorship from some corners, which is just it’s own cycle of rage. The network gets bigger, people click what they click and the aggregate of what our animal brains react to has a lot to be angry about.
What I worry most about is the acceleration of that cycle because we gradually gravitate towards instances with our preferred moderation or slant, which I can already see happening anyway.
I guess, at best, that It might be a cure with some side effects because it’s necessarily going to play with in/out crowd dynamics.
