Look it’s not that I think recommendation systems are evil. Recommendation systems are an attempt to sort through the immense flood of Content™ that is the modern internet. I like the option to, when I don’t know what I want, to just let The Computer figure that out for me; it’s not that great at it, and it’s got its own goals to further that aren’t quite aligned with mine, but it’s better than random draws from the set of everything that exists on the platform.
But “option” is a very important word in that sentence; it’s one tool among many. It’s a thing to resort to when other things fail, like say “things tagged by a human being as relating to a specific subject” and “the things my friends are saying” and “keyword search”. Various tools need to coexist, and I want some of those tools to be more transparent to me than “idk the algorithm decided you’re into this now for its own reasons”.
A chronological feed that contains all of and only those posts that were made by a specific set of blogs is very transparent; I can tell exactly why a certain post ended up in front of me, which gives me control to adjust my feed to include stuff i want to see and exclude stuff I don’t. It’s coarse-grained control, of course, which is why I think it’s important to combine it with other tools like keyword filtering and tag-following and so on, but it very clearly exposes cause and effect.
Recommendation systems are opaque; I cannot tell why a post was recommended to me. If I’m lucky it’s at least responsive to “no this sucks stop recommending it to me”, but honestly I have not found that to be a very good tool to stop getting shit I don’t want shoved in front of me.
Onboarding new users presents a problem when they don’t know who to follow yet, sure. It makes sense to foreground other tools when introducing people to your website. Just don’t take away the other tools. Let people transition from “new user who has no idea how anything works” to “experienced user who can use the tools at their disposal to choose the content they see”
And the other thing is:
I want to be on platforms where the content restrictions are minimal. I don’t trust them to not exclude me and I don’t trust them to enforce them fairly (because moderation at scale is unsolved problem).
I don’t care if this means nazis and terfs exist on the same platform as me, as long as I have a robust set of tools that means I can curate a small bubble within that platform. There’s a lot of shit on tumblr, very rarely does any of it make it to the stream that is my feed, because I can trust the people who make that stream not to put it there.
(do you ever see some tangential discussion of the latest horrible callout post or nonsensical discourse and thank your bubble for never actually showing you the terrible thing in the first place, only third-hand discussion of it? I do. all the time)
but minimal content restrictions are unworkable when anything on the platform is fair game to put on your dash. Recommendation systems as the only option mean that suddenly it’s entirely my business how much shit is being dumped into the massive ocean of Content, because I no longer have my carefully filtered little stream. I have a carelessly slapped together spoonful of whatever’s out there, selected by whatever criteria the recommendation system has (hey, did you know this post is getting a lot of Engagement? that’s good, right? when lots of people are yelling back and forth about a topic that means we should show to more people who’ll went to yell at one side or the other)
we get people angry about staff not pressing the “remove all nazis” button they probably for sure have now, imagine what it’d be like if you can’t even unfollow the person who put nazi shit on your dash.
“sanitising the platform of anything potentially offensive” is a much higher priority when people can’t be trusted to be adults who choose what they see, and as the potentially offensive content this is not great for me.
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #disappointed permanent resident of The Future #discourse cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 