#TheAlgorithm
I understand the people who say that #Mastodon still isn’t and can’t be what #Twitter was to them.
I get it when people—organizers, journalists, indie podcasters, whatever—say that they can’t yet afford to give up Twitter.
I 100% believe people who talk about real problems here (bigotry, failures of moderation, tone policing, etc.).
But.
Mastodon is better, for me, in almost every way. You people are great. And it’s clear now that #TheAlgorithm was only ever a chain, at least for me.
The main reason I'm drifting back to using #Twitter over #Mastodon isn't due to a lack of interesting people to follow here, or falling short of some critical mass, it's #TheAlgorithm. It is better.
I don't want to see the same person who just posted 4 different things all at the top of my feed, followed by someone who boosted a bunch of stuff in a row. I don't want to miss things just because I'm not online at the time they were posted.
The very real difference, for me, between #Mastodon and #Twitter:
I found this joke in my Twitter archive. I posted it in 2020, and as I recall it got a couple retweets and a couple likes. No big deal.
I reposted it last night here, and it already has 147 boosts and 230 likes, plus tons of comments.
#TheAlgorithm did me no favors.
#Twitter invisibilise les tweets s'ils contiennent des liens, des fautes d'orthographe ou des mots inventés alors qu'ici peu importe ce que tu fais tous tes toots sont invisibilisés. :welp:
@thingsiplay idk, the whole repo maybe an #AprilFoolsDay joke.
People are definitely having fun.
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/commit/ec83d01dcaebf369444d75ed04b3625a0a645eb9#r107039893 😂
The issue is -- that issues are being deleted!!
@danluu And folks, this is why we SHOULD be working on making the algorithm and the code and these things happening behind the scenes open for the public. Only by seeing this with our own eyes we can realize how this can pose a risk to, let me say it please, our understanding of how the world, the economy and 21st Century's democracies work. This repo is a #MustSee.
On dirait un feuilleton #TheAlgorithm :twitter: 🍿
So apparently Twitter is indeed open-sourcing their Algorithm. Good for them.
The links to the code and accompanying blog post are here https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm and here https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023/twitter-recommendation-algorithm, respectively, and I'm not really going to go through all this, I don't care, but the thing that got me was their prompt at the end of the blog post to apply for a job there.
Ah, after all they've done to their (former) employees.
That is very relatable. Here #TheAlgorithm is us. Get # and boosting and being nice to people! :)
@juergen_hubert might be able to hook you up with folklore types or @crypticinquiry :)
Srsly. I follow TWO users (ironically - so I can shake my fist at them then get on with my day) on #twitter. I refresh my #ForYou view and *its entirely different. *Its not like those two have posted in the last 20 seconds, the algorithm is just randomly picking garbage from the past week to throw up there. What horseshit.
*** HEY*** HEY! know what I like about #mastodon of late (at least of #elk, the native web interface anyway)? Its the fact that I can bing-bong around a comment thread, click through to a user's profile, click through a few posts of theirs, bing-bong around *those* threads, then mash the back button to get back to where I left *and posts are in the SAME ORDER they were when I left.*
Media companies who posted excerpts to FB, along with links to their sites on the real internet were rewarded with *floods* of traffic, as their posts were jammed into the eyeballs of millions of users who never asked to see them. Media companies and advertisers went all-in, integrating FB surveillance beacons in their presence on the real internet, hiring social media specialists who'd do #PlatformKremlinology in order to advise them on the best way to please #TheAlgorithm.
6/
Putting this together with the another leaked #Elon edict about open sourcing "the algorithm" makes me think he's hoping he can just fire the programmers and get the work done for free.
Maybe the Internet Research Agency will contribute some free code for #theAlgorithm?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613288/twitter-slack-jira-outages-performance-degradation
Ich hab via #Bandcamp mal in #MasterBootRecord reingehört und die bewegen sich so zwischen #MachinaeSupremacy (vor allem #JetsNGuns Ära) und #TheAlgorithm. Ab und zu mal ganz gut, muss aber nicht dauernd.
It felt like my two choices were to pick one or a few platforms and devote my efforts to #PlatformKremlinology, trying to figure out what words, subjects or formats would cause #TheAlgorithm to block the people who'd subscribed to my feed from seeing it; or to start a standalone website, which no one would ever see, but which I would control.
5/
Twitter’s Remaining Engineers Appear To Solve Elon Musk’s Complaint That His Tweets Aren’t Getting Enough Views By… Making The Algorithm Forcefeed All Of Elon’s Tweets To Everyone
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/14/twitters-remaining-engineers-appear-to-solve-elon-musks-complaint-that-his-tweets-arent-getting-enough-views-by-making-the-algorithm-forcefeed-all-of-elons-tweets-to-everyone/
#thealgorithm #engagement #elonmusk #twitter #foryou
Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning #TheAlgorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to "boost" their articles to the readers who had *explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.*
Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs.
15/
Some say the War Against the Machines began when Mastodon rejected algorithmic timelines.
#JohnMastodon #Terminator #AI #TheAlgorithm
Ryan Broderick has the best explainer about current Musk Twitter I've read recently. I highly recommend it. Also his newsletter Garbage Day is spectacularly good & worth subscribing to 👌
Link: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-doomscrolling-is-the-point
Outlets that *don't* participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring #SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please #TheAlgorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.
18/
@human_dude I don’t like it either, though the consent issue hadn’t occurred to me
I dislike the addition of trending posts for the simpler reason that it seems to be trying to emulate Twitter’s amplification of popularity rankings
Why try to reintroduce ‘the algorithm’ by the back door like this? 🤷🏻♀️
We can do without the potential unpredictability and ensuing toxicity
I'm sure that Meta's automated content scanning will be every bit as successful as their Galactica "AI". Or, come to that, as the tone-deaf and clueless automata they use to detect violations of "Community Standards" on Facebook. How nice that they've chosen to share their tools with everyone else.
https://www.engadget.com/meta-open-source-tool-scan-terrorist-content-130952284.html
Fantastic (and simple) explainer of the "black box" of algorithms that affect our lives. Perfect for sharing with less technical friends and family.
#BlackBox #algorithms #TheAlgorithm
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-12/robodebt-algorithms-black-box-explainer/101215902
I low-key miss #TheAlgorithm
I wrote a small "what you may have missed" bot that (privately) reboosts popular¹ posts from my timeline four times a day. And yes, it takes into account everybody's favourites. I feel slightly bad. #theAlgorithm
¹ relative, weighted by follower count
@dcm I feel like this lovely hashtag will be the downfall of my ability to be a fan of the purely chronological timeline.
I mean, I love me some moss, and I can handle maybe 10, even 20% of my feed being Just Moss, probably. But at some point, when it hits 50-60%? I may start begging to follow a #BestOfMosstodon that's somehow curated or something?
If we aren't to ever have #TheAlgorithm
I keep seeing reminders that "likes don't boost #visibility here"—and getting more and more horrified at how many people on #Twitter apparently kept their display set to Home view and were permanently at the mercy of #TheAlgorithm.
I found Home view unusable and always switched back to chronological the moment it reappeared. It was obvious that Twitter's idea of what I'd want to see was entirely different from mine, and I didn't see why I should let them force it on me!
More thoughts on #MastodonCulture.
On twitter, we lived in fear of #TheAlgorithm. How many followers do I have, should I aim to have more followers than follows, what will my "Like" do to the other's standing?
Here there is no algorithm.
You see what your follows publish, in chronological order. Nothing gets suppressed. You follow someone because you want to read them, you boost a comment because others will like it.
It's liberating.
My youtube today after looking up something about assembling my new couch #thealgorithm https://youtu.be/d8fJPvXyfc0
@niram o tmb es que son comunidades con distintos valores, sabemos que acá si no ponemos voluntad en interactuar, el feed no se mueve solo, no existe #TheAlgorithm
Remember, unlike the #birdsite, your #actions directly #influence the #toots we all see on #Mastodon.
You and your #hashtags are #TheAlgorithm!
If you enjoy a toot, clicking #favourite lets the author know. But the #BOOST button is the way to allow your #followers, and those on your local #instance, to have the chance of enjoying it too.
And if you want others to discover your toots in their #searches, make sure #KeyWords in your toots are #hashtagged.
I've been on Mastodon for just a while and I am already quite annoyed by the bird site. I didn't use it much even before but what the hell is that timeline doing?
I know that "the algorithm" is trying to feed me posts it thinks I could be interested in but it makes no sense. It's an absolute chaos. 😅
I would choose a deterministic chronological timeline over whatever is on the bird site every time.
#mastodon #timeline #annoyed #birdsite #chaos #thealgorithm
Wenn mich bei der Cyberarbeit meine Cyberkräfte verlassen, baller ich ein bisschen The Algorithm rein und dann wird geil weitergecybert! Funktioniert seit meiner Cyberausbildung konsistent. Sehr zu empfehlen!
(Zählt das noch zum #MetalMittwoch oder ist es schon #TechnoTonnerstag? Ein bisschen von beidem wohl…) #TheAlgorithm
Importantly, you don't need to explicitly answer the above here.
If you feel the best way forward is to not inform #theAlgorithm your intentions, then that is a fine choice, too.
Alle paar Monate höre ich für ein zwei Tage #TheAlgorithm
Watch "The Algorithm - pointers (Official Music Video)" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/YjjmM3w2t_g