Mastodawn

scottmoore Jul 29, 2023

If we pretend that the only options are:

1) Chronological feed
2) Algorithmic feed where a company chooses the algorithm and objective function

And we pretend that "Share of time is a perfect metric for happiness," then this might make sense.

But... time spent isn't a perfect metric for happiness, and there is another option: 3) Algorithmic feed where the user has more control of the algorithm and objective function.

Eg, chronological *is* an algorithmic feed!🙂🙃

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds/

Meta Just Proved People Hate Chronological Feeds

Some social media users and lawmakers say chronological feeds are healthier. A new study found that Facebook and Instagram users who were forced to see time-ranked posts turned to TikTok instead.

WIRED

Chronological is an algorithmic feed where the "timestamp" feature is maximally weighted, and the user can't change that.

If I own a lunch buffet, I can define an objective function that I optimize for when setting my menu and buffet rules. I can trade-off between:

*number of customers
*customer spend
*profits
*customer enjoyment
*nutrition

Or I could choose:

*Make customers spend so much time here that other restaurants go out of business. I don't care if customers' bellies burst! Only me!🤡

Sean Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke How do you suggest measuring those alternative metrics? It’s certainly an interesting concept for FOSS, but these recommendation models improve with the number of data points.

some kind of orange shape Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke I'd kind of like a variant of lists where I can mix a few together and say like, "show me MOSTLY game stuff with OCCASIONAL music posts"

Chris Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke would a distinction between a “generic” and “personal” algorithm have any utility here? Maybe that just confuses the fact that it’s a Cartesian plot/spectrum, not a Boolean.

Yes. Personal algorithms are hard to implement *well*, but there is a huge distinction between them and centrally defined algorithms.

And bonus: users become *deeply* invested in the creation and crafting of their personal algorithm ♥️. It's like carefully pruning a garden. This dude is less likely to sell this house *because* he's put years into getting his garden just how he likes it.

https://youtube.com/shorts/Aa2NtG0O-lA

Imagine if he could magically take his garden with him! 👍🏿

How to trim boxwood shrubs #shorts

YouTube

Chris Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke that resonates. For me, prime example is music. Despite all the money poured into discovery algorithms, almost all my favorite new music discoveries are via other means.

Katie F Jul 28, 2023

@anexanhume @mekkaokereke Instead of music for me it is phone notifications. I want notifications with sound during work hours from my work calendar but not all the time (And why do "all day events have to alarm at midnight?).

Normally I mute my phone and put it face down. But I'm on-call every 6 weeks and I need sound on for just phone calls on those nights.

Katie F Jul 28, 2023

@anexanhume @mekkaokereke

Instead of being able to individually set notification settings by time AND app I'm forced into broadbrush distinctions like turning off all sound/notifications or turning on them all.
Turning off all email notifications or all on.

And since I get just as many calls from coworkers personal phones as office phones when I'm on-call I can't even whitelist all of the possibly relevant phone numbers.

Akshay | అక్షయ్Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke The dislike for algorithmic feeds is a good example (for me) why predictive models must be explainable, perhaps through a model card.

Randy Tayler Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke The most upsetting part of the discussion is how Meta and co. are laser focused on keeping people hooked. Social Networks as a Drug.

Craig Hepworth Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke Agreed. I would like to have a simple, user-controlled algorithm in Mastodon, where I can rank some of the people I follow to always show up at to always show up at the top of my feed, so I never miss their posts. And ranking posts higher than reposts in my feed.

serklarvel Jul 28, 2023

@floridafruitgeek @mekkaokereke it would be great to have this option

Brandon Webster Jul 28, 2023

@floridafruitgeek @mekkaokereke It's not quite what you are asking for (it's a different feed) but you can do this with lists on Mastodon. I've actually done exactly that, because there were certain accounts I followed that I wanted to make sure I didn't miss

Doctor Memory Jul 28, 2023

@floridafruitgeek @mekkaokereke one of the reasons I’m continuing to find bluesky interesting despite its obvious problems is that they did something that in retrospect seems obvious: build a plug in API for sorting algorithms. Don’t like any of the default ones? Write (and publish!) your own.

Woozle Hypertwin Jul 28, 2023

@memory @floridafruitgeek @mekkaokereke

If they support any kind of plugins, that's already a step up from Masto. I was told that Eugen has declined to take interest in making Masto extendable.

@woozle @memory @floridafruitgeek

Maybe in the past, but depending on the specific proposal, he's more open to it today, as is the core team. ♥️👍🏿

Woozle Hypertwin Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke @memory @floridafruitgeek

That's really good to hear! I hope something comes from it. Lack of extendability was always one of Masto's big limitations.

John Wilson Jul 29, 2023

@floridafruitgeek @mekkaokereke my algorithm would be:

Always chronological
All posts
When things get hairy, dump the prolific posters (I identify these) and only show must-follows
A second chance feed with all posts that have been dumped. So I come back from a weekend camping trip and instead of 700 posts I have maybe 200 must follows. Then if I’m caught up and bored, I can go back and see what I missed.

Matt Sicker Jul 29, 2023

@floridafruitgeek @mekkaokereke ooh I like this idea. I need a bunch of algorithmic knobs to tune! Especially whenever quote boosts are officially supported. Filters are nice, but we need scorers and other rules to set.

Tim Richards Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke I like chronological feeds for another reason: fairness. Everyone's posts have an equal chance of being seen.

Maybe?

But for example, I am an *extremely* high volume poster. And I post threads, and quote my old threads.

A pure chronological feed shows a lot of me, and not enough of a low volume poster.🫤

I post so much in part because my posts are mostly about debunk racist memes, and one of the purposes of racism is to make Black people repeat themselves. Sisyphusian!

Every time I answer a question about racism, it's new and enlightening for some, but repetition for others.

That situation is not ideal for me, or for low volume posters, or for people who have followed me for a while.

If I post a thread about car break-ins in SF and you like/boost every single post, and then a few months later someone asks a question about SF crime, and I link to that same thread... maybe you might *manually* mute that new convo. It's not that you hate it! It's just... not new for you!👍🏿

Or I might post about sports. Maybe not your jam. Again, manual temporary muting.

Tim Richards Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke That doesn't bother me really, it's easy to scroll past the talkative folk if needed.

jmelesky Jul 28, 2023

@timrichards @mekkaokereke I follow a bunch of people outside of my time zone, and enough people that scrolling through all of my history is generally untenable. For my feed, chronological means a bunch of people basically have no chance of being seen, not an equal chance.

Tim Richards Jul 29, 2023

@jmelesky @mekkaokereke C'mon, you only follow 132, that's not hard to scroll through. :) I follow nearly a thousand and I'd still prefer the chronological approach. Also non-chronological ruins live commentary on events.

Julian Fietkau Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke A perspective that's often missing from feed algo discourse is the creator side. I've heard artists say that they enjoy how their posts get seen by some people on here even if they don't go viral, whereas on more algo-driven platforms you could have 100k "followers" with 99% never getting a chance to see your post. Ad-impressions-driven algos tend to push what's already popular, leading to a "the rich get richer" attention economy.

I think I might expand this into a blog post. 🤔

Julian Fietkau Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke Meanwhile in case you haven't seen it, here's an excellent blog post by @maya on the same topic from last November that I've been thinking about ever since: https://maya.land/responses/2022/11/28/we-live-in-a-society.html

In fact, if I do write a non-micro post on the topic I'll have to check whether I can add enough ground that she hasn't already covered.

choosing algorithms: we live in a society

And we can’t settings-toggle our way out

maya.land

Swift (will be at EMF)Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke I was at an excellent conference talk a few years back from an engineer with a background in recommendation algorithms, who was basically arguing that it's both ineffective and amoral to not let people make their own algorithms for it. Doesn't need to be editing code, but users need to be able to communicate what they want to see (with more nuance than just liking and disliking individual elements).

The Animal and the Machine Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke
Agreed, the premise is cooked to be about what Twitter thinks people want from this. Not me.

“The response was clear: Users served chronological feeds got bored quicker and were much more likely to decamp to rivals such as YouTube and TikTok.”

If I get bored, I’m following the wrong people. I will only ever accept chronological as that is how you speak and I want to hear what you have to say, how you say it.

If you are high volume I might unfollow you simply because I don’t want the load, it is not a reflection on your quality but my resource limitation. I manage myself and if you must say it for comparison, ‘I am the algorithm’.

SlightlyCyberpunk Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke Wait, you're telliing me the company that routinely experiments on human subjects without their knowledge or consent did a study that "proves" they're better than everyone else? Shocking!

One thing I know very well from back when I used to be on Facebook is that people get pissed off any time they make any change. So maybe they only proved people don't like change. Or look at the numbers involved -- maybe people just don't like being singled out and given a different experience than the rest of their community. There's also the issue that chronological feeds require a different kind of interaction which likely leaves them ineffective if only a few users are using it that way. For example, it's quite common here on Mastodon for people to boost their own toots so their followers don't miss the important ones. People are also more likely to boost in general knowing that a favorite won't put that post in peoples' feeds. If only a small number of users are forced to go chronological in an algorithmic community, they're gonna have a bad time...

Carl Muckenhoupt Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke Seems like there's also a pretty strong sample bias here. They haven't shown anything about the preferences of "people" as a group, they've at best shown what Facebook and Instagram users prefer. And their conclusion from studying Facebook and Instagram users is that they like what Facebook and Instagram do?

This is like concluding "Actually people like the smell of limburger" from a poll included in packages of limburger

@CarlMuckenhoupt @mekkaokereke "Crack addicts like crack."

Jason Galla Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke Premium false-dilemma. When I was on the other social sites, I wanted a feed that was chronological AND filtered to MY preferences, not advertisers. Oh, and in the case of Facebook, UI and privacy features that aren't a dumpster fire. I'm now convinced that those are all features that benefit advertisers.

Ben Curthoys Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke Quoting myself from another thread on this article:

"I bet people given nicotine chewing gum spend more time chewing than people given normal gum, doesn't mean they "enjoy" being addicted to nicotine"

James V Taylor Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke Tell me more,please.

Shepherdess Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke that’s an interesting assumption to make about why folks left. You didn’t make me scroll for a million years to find what I was looking for, so clearly I was bored. Oof.

william.maggos Jul 28, 2023

"Our lives are controlled by an algorithm, man. It's just chronological."

I'm not opposed to an algo we control, but we have to decide what we're using these systems for. If it's personal entertainment, use whatever you want. Who cares. If there's a social importance to what humans are collectively thinking about, if we think about the big picture, I am not a fan of any person or corporation having too much influence over that.

https://liberal.city/@wjmaggos/110072888719825265

william.maggos (@[email protected])

Marketing sucks, but I think we're failing to push the "unique selling proposition" (ugh) of the #fediverse. So many kinds of social media exist, but this place is about "attention democracy". We are "decentralized boosts with dialogue". That the best art, info and ideas go viral, as decided by everyone collectively. No gatekeepers or advantages for advertisers. It embraces journalism's ideals. It's why it matters at a cultural level. It should be the focus of future development and our message.

Liberal City

readbeanicecream Jul 28, 2023

I prefer all my feeds chronological. I also think all internet articles should have time date stamps.

maegul Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke

Lemmy / kbin have "algorithms" ... simple, understandable, transparent sorting options that you get to pick from (and set as the default). From what I've gathered, many have (slightly) different preferences for their use cases, and typically use more than one in various patterns of exploration.

Some might enjoy seeing, eg, kbin.social's microblog global timeline: https://kbin.social/microblog

And lemmy.world's local feed: https://lemmy.world/

Both have typical (reddit like) options: hot, active, new, old, top etc.

Lemmy also has the useful "top within time X" options for 1hr, 6hrs, 12hrs, ... etc.

And both have the same options for the comments on a post ... which is rather useful for getting a grip on where the conversation is up to when you jumping in to a large one.

Microblog - kbin.social

Explore the Fediverse

Hughster Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke I don't know. For power users, yes, it could help to have customisability (much as with Twitter we have advanced search operators, until recently third-party clients, etc.). But I suspect the vast majority of users would still stick to defaults, so there'll still have to be that default company-defined algorithm.

Yup.

This is why I say user defined algorithms are hard to do *well*.

It's really hard to come up with a good UI and set of features that are lightweight enough for users to understand what's going on, and tweak it to their liking.

But it's really easy for those users to tell you in plain language what they want to see more of / less of, and what they want their experience to be optimized for.

Their whole areas of UX Research between those two things.

I don't believe in dogmas Jul 28, 2023

@hughster @mekkaokereke Chronological feeds do not require data harvesting. A Chronological feed only needs to know what you want and when it was made, it does not need to know anything else about you, and it's fully opt-in. Algorithms will need some sort of data input from you, which is what makes the m attractive to ad sellers and merchants. They are also designed to be more addictive (engagement) which again is good for revenues.

Hughster Jul 28, 2023

@Fourth_Dogma Did you read the linked article?

I don't believe in dogmas Jul 28, 2023

@hughster Yes, that was in direct response to the article linked. The article was stating facts and I was commenting upon those facts. Empirically algorithms make for a more addictive, engaging, viral product. I was stating my personal opinion about the costs associated with that (your privacy, control, and attention). Maybe there is a way to have a user create an algorithm that is fully private and solely in their control, but it seems like a technological feat.

Hughster Jul 28, 2023

@Fourth_Dogma I honestly don't think most users care that much about "data harvesting" or other supposed moral ills. I don't either. I think there's an inevitable trade-off between total user privacy/control and convenient ease of use, and I'm happy to sacrifice certain degrees of the former for the latter, despite the dogma popular on here that corporations are always bad or whatever.

serklarvel Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke that's right, I wish there was a algorithm I could control myself with my parameters

bentosmile🍱Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke in my experience, the only reason I spend more time on a non-chronological feed is because I have to sift through tons of trash suggested posts and other garbage in order to make sure I've seen the posts from people I care about. Which is why I've gotten sick of instagram, because I can't trust it as a platform for keeping up with my friends. >_< if that's supposed to be a desirable user experience from their pov then no. They are measuring the wrong metric.

jmelesky Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke Even collapsing identical repeats/boosts into a single post would help clean up my timeline!

One approach that might work well (in the sense that “work well” means “looks to people like options, not algorithms”) is offer different “sort by”:

pure chronological
chronological plus boost collapse
sort by most boosted in the past (24/48/whatnot) hours
same sort, but only for posts originating in people I follow
sort by most liked/favorited in the past (24/48….)….
…

Those are all algorithms, but they’re both simple enough and with enough precedent in other scenarios that most users will know exactly what they should be doing. Which means they won’t be thought of as magic.

Ron Gilbert (GrumpyGamer)Jul 28, 2023

@jmelesky @mekkaokereke Mastodon has been so anti-algorithm that it's thrown the baby out with the bath water.

birdpoof Jul 28, 2023

@jmelesky @mekkaokereke

Collapsing boosts together would be great.

What I really want is the ability to collapse threads into the original post, as an option. Some threads are very informative, but take up my entire timeline with over 20 posts and I may not want to get into reading it just yet. (Hooray for bookmarks)

unlofl [Promoted Toot]Jul 28, 2023

@jmelesky @mekkaokereke this would be good, but one more I've always wanted: sort whoever posted the least in the past X time to the top.

I think the main drawback of pure chronological feeds is that less frequent posters get buried. I don't really want any algorithm deciding what posts are good or bad for me, but if I bother following someone, and they only tooted once this week, I want to see it.

@unlofl @jmelesky

🤯 This is brilliant.

Dinah 🕊🇺🇦Jul 28, 2023

@jmelesky @mekkaokereke In all this, don't forget the big asset Mastodon already has in the ' Advanced Interface' with its multiple columns and their individual controls.

There is already a lot of capability to create fine-tuned feeds of Fediverse posts that we can build on.

jmelesky Jul 28, 2023

@metagrrrl @mekkaokereke I’m an Akkoma user, and if I had the spare brainspace, a UI that offers stuff like that is definitely on my project list. Until that brainspace appears, though, I’m just gonna keep sharing ideas 😁

DasTausW Jul 29, 2023

@jmelesky @mekkaokereke @MonaApp hides repeated boosts by default. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Ed Sanders Jul 29, 2023

@jmelesky I use icecubes, mostly on an iPad,the four top icons in the navigation bar are
timeline
Trending
Federated
Local

Timeline has a drop-down of my lists. I’ve been here for 8 months & I’m still curating a fair amount .

I’d love a “last post” feature which just shows the last post from everyone I follow. Extremely heavy posters, even when they are great, can gum up a timeline.

Also, thanks @LisaMelton for being the discovery mechanism.

David Scott Moyer Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke Livejournal did this ages ago without an algorithm. You had a chronological feed, but you could break up the people you followed into overlapping groups depending on what you wanted to see at any given time. I don't see the benefit of an algorithm except maybe with something like a music service where you want to find similar work. LJ also allowed you to search users by interest. That was good enough for me.

Some of the [people] you follow might post on [topics] that you're less interested in. Your personal algorithm might rank posts from people on your list lower if they're talking about a topic that doesn't interest you.

David Scott Moyer Jul 28, 2023

@mekkaokereke So long as no external formula ever decides what I see, I'm down. I want full control.

MouseAT Jul 30, 2023

@farbel @mekkaokereke I’d benefit from better, per-user filtering on Mastodon. The ability to choose which users a specific filter applies to would help eliminate some timeline noise, without being overly broad.

The ability to see who made a collapsed, filtered post before expanding it (rather than just which filter applied) would also help.

Where I’d maybe benefit from a selectable algorithm is with hashtags. See everything from some, a selection from busy ones.