GlyphThere's been a lot of fretting recently—some of it from me—about there being Too Much Politics On Here, encouraging people to (A) stop posting so much about it and (B) post about other things. This is a valid concern but I want to take a moment to put a structural lens on this problem.
We don't have an (sigh) "algorithm" here, so we think of ourselves as liberated from the corrosive engagement-maximizing forces of social media. There is *some* truth to that, but in typical "humanity was the real monster all along" fashion, it undersells what these ML models are actually *doing*.
Twitter, Instagram, et. al. are maximizing engagement by showing you *more* of the kind of posts that'll keep you on the site longer. The kind of posts that distract people, deactivate our collective prefrontal cortex, make us anxious, and generally want to push the lever to get another pellet.
Opting out of the turbo-charging aspect where reactions beget more reactions does *not* opt us out of the fundamental truth that the anxiety-inducing, identity-affirming, mass-audience posts are just going to draw more attention and more approval. We want approval. This is human nature.
Case in point: if I write a long-form blog post that takes me 8 hours to write, that reflects my core competency (Python programming) I will usually get 100 or so 'favs' on it. An anxious (but pithy) post about a recent political development that I am peripherally aware of might do 10x better.
It takes me less time to write, it takes you less time to process, more of you will find it relevant, the whole reward system optimizes for this result. And, even here, there are structural things that reward this as well, although they apply in different degrees to different people.
If I want to take some pictures and post about finding joy in natural beauty, I'm going to get yelled at failing to put in alt text. The website will even yell at me automatically now, to prevent me from posting in the first place. Guess I'll just vent about anxiety instead.
If I want to post links to long-form writing elsewhere, I get yelled at about the "hug of death", or (if I were using a slower webserver or a static website, shout out to Twisted and Pelican) get hugged to death myself and spend a bunch of time on sysadmin bullshit.
The easiest response to getting yelled at for posting stuff people *don't* like is just … not posting. Drift away from the site, avoid things that are uninteresting to your followers, or even anyone who might see your stuff out of the corner of their eye on the "Explore" tab. Go use bsky instead.
(Shout out to @mattblaze here who has enough reach to get yelled at for just posting things that are not precisely matched to some random person's aesthetic preferences. The people getting mad about black & white photos *existing* are a real socioemotional puzzle in their own right.)
Applying stop-energy to objectionable things is not enough, if you want this to be a fun place with interesting and thought-provoking posts. You need to seek out stuff, not just the stuff that you immediately respond to, but the stuff that *you want to see more of*, and fav it and boost it.
We talk a lot about the negative aspects of (sigh) "algorithms", but *this is a thing that "algorithms" can do too*, and in the absence of such a tool, we need to do it ourselves; it will not happen automatically, because there's no automation to do it.
Be the boost you want to see in the world.
Next time you find yourself looking at a post from me that savagely dunks on some detestable scumbag and get a dopamine hit and think "get 'em glyph!!" instead of reaching for the boost button, scroll right over that and find a link to my blog or a PyPI release or something and boost that instead.
⚯ Michel de Cryptadamus ⚯@glyph as far as "being the boost", i built a customizable algorithm for your mastodon feed... kind of the best of both worlds IMHO. hard for me to look at mastodon without it at this point.
⚯ Michel de Cryptadamus ⚯ (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] i built on #fedialgo to make a customizable feed algorithm that is pretty much how i interact with #mastodon these days. it's available as an #npm package. here's the demo app: https://github.com/michelcrypt4d4mus/fedialgo_demo_app_foryoufeed this is what the demo app looks like: #CustomFeeds #FediDevs #FediverseCustomFeeds #FediverseFeeds #FediverseUX
@cryptadamist the UX nerd in me flinches just a little bit at that collection of sliders and its presentation but the idea here — giving users direct control and agency over their *own* algorithm, and using an *actual explicable algorithm* and not a huge inscrutable neural network full of training data of dubious quality — is fundamentally incredibly important to the next generation of social media and I really hope it gets some traction
@glyph what you're looking at is just the demo app for the library. while i personally actually do use it to peruse mastodon it's not really meant to be a user facing situation.
the internals are implemented as a node library. there's been some discussion of integrating it into the standard mastodon web experience.
* fedialgo library: https://github.com/michelcrypt4d4mus/fedialgo
* demo app: https://github.com/michelcrypt4d4mus/fedialgo_demo_app_foryoufeed
@glyph i think the right UX probably involves having like 4 or 5 preconfigured settings ("prefer recent", "prefer friends", "prefer trending" - things along those lines) with an "advanced" interface for people who want to nerd out on 20 sliders.
@glyph i ended up adding a set of preconfigured settings to FediAlgo after this convo
video: https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/114395249311910522
⚯ Michel de Cryptadamus ⚯ (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 video Ω🪬Ω New release of #FediAlgo (customizable #algorithm for your #Mastodon timeline) has a couple of cool features: 1. Configuration presets (so you can easily put discussions or trending toots at the top of your #timeline without fiddling with the individual settings) 2. A "What's Trending" section that will show you the top trending hashtags, links, and posts scraped from 30 or so of the most popular Mastodon servers All the old features like filtering for particular languages / hashtags / users or a minimum number of replies / boosts / etc. are still there. For now you still need to use the command line to run it (it's easy tho). If there's interest I can deploy the demo publicly. * Usable demo: https://fedialgo.thms.uk/ * Code: https://github.com/michelcrypt4d4mus/fedialgo_demo_app_foryoufeed * Library: https://github.com/michelcrypt4d4mus/fedialgo #FediTools #FediTips #Fediverse #Mastodon #activitypub #mastohelp #Fedi #foss #nodejs #opensource #MastoAdmin #Feed #timeline #algorithmicFeed #algorithmicTimeline #TL #algorithm #node #nodejs
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)
Matt Campbell@glyph Damn, I guess I, and maybe others as well, do need to lighten up about that. Not all media is for everyone; I get that.
@matt FWIW when I see actually visually-impaired people, yourself included, asking for alt text that you're immediately going to _use_, it hardly bothers me at all. And I've extremely rarely felt particularly "yelled at" by you or by any of my other blind followers.
@matt the thing that is really annoying is when someone shows up and says "This Is The Fediverse And Everything Must Be Immediately Accessible Or You Are A Monster, Why Would You Ever Post Without Alt Text". When people post a reply that includes usable alt text I almost always go back and edit it in.
Brian Campbell@glyph So, this subthread reminded me of your old personal website, 20+ years ago, where the alt text for the Glyph symbol was something like, "sorry if you're blind, but this is hard to describe, and if you're not, then just use a graphical browser." And that reminded me of the 2015 post where you finally broke down the symbol and what it means: https://blog.glyph.im/2015/01/the-glyph.html
My intent isn't to shame you for that alt text; that was clearly a difficult image to describe well.
@glyph I thought the post explaining the glyph was really interesting. If you do ever get back to Divunal, would it still be a text-based adventure game, or more visual?
@matt oof that is hard to say. I have not enjoyed the direction that the text-based game community has gone in the last few years in a couple of ways so I am pretty out of touch with the state of the art, and not really excited about the medium any more. I wish I were though and perhaps this question is a prompt to get me back into it …
@glyph I'm curious about what you don't like about the recent direction of the text-based game community.
@matt before I start criticizing I should make it clear that these are just ways in which the genre has failed to conform to my aesthetic preferences, not things that I think are fundamentally a problem. In fact many of these choices arguably made the genre more mainstream
@matt for one thing dark-on-light has taken over, as well as using dedicated launchers and executables rather than distributing e.g. .z5 files for use with frotz. I have some visual issues that make "light mode" pretty uncomfortable for me, and this very minor issue has unfortunately made it impossible to play any of these games for very long.
@matt parser games have fallen out of fashion and hyperlink-based games are much more popular. again, this streamlines the games and makes them more accessible to players who don't want to engage in frustrating "guess the verb" exercises, but it also removes the biggest thing that I appreciated about the genre of a child, the "anything can happen, anything is possible" nature of a blank prompt
@matt games have gotten shorter, both as a budgetary necessity (almost all text-based games are indie efforts these days) and as an aesthetic choice (games have leaned in to the literary aspects of their construction, making them much more short-story like and aiming for emotionally resonant gut-punches rather than big weird ambient world-building efforts)
@matt as a corollary of that, simulationism is in decline, and games are much more on rails rather than being the result of interacting systems or procedural puzzles. again, understandable: simulation systems can fail in lots of spectacularly un-fun ways and they never got very popular to begin with. "beyond zork"'s foray into stat-based adventuring was, honestly, kind of broken and involved all kinds of weird opportunities for stat-based soft locks
@glyph Ignoring the system-wide setting and forcing either dark or light mode is an accessibility issue, full stop, so that's disappointing. As for distributing launchers rather than bytecode files for an interpreter, I don't like that either, not least because being able to choose one's own interpreter is a way of working around accessibility problems.
@matt this is really the only thing I am looking for from the accessibility community more broadly: accessibility has big costs! It also has big benefits but we are so used to criticizing billion-dollar corporations who are saving like 0.01% on their gross margins by being shit at accessibility that we use the same language to confront people whose entire budget (in time, money, or both) would be immediately destroyed by even a cursory accessibility effort
@matt I am glad I wrote that post and I am glad you personally got something out of it, but as you note it took about fifteen years to get around to and if I had been required to start with it I just wouldn’t have a blog at all.
@matt Although, funny story, the reason the alt text was phrased like that is that (due to the fundamental nature of my audience) 99% of the complaints I got came from sighted people using Lynx and I just … did not really feel like investing effort into that particular trajectory of web technology. It did not feel like skating to where the puck was going
@glyph Yeah, I think I understood even back then that it was directed primarily to people using Lynx.
@glyph Yes, when it comes to visual media in particular, I'm aware that, for example, when I watch a movie that has an audio description track, the only reason we're able to enjoy that is because the likes of Disney can easily afford that extra work. The same goes for accessibility in video games; the big studios can afford to put extra work into accessibility, but indie developers often can't, depending on the kind of game.
Misty@glyph I feel as though some people have maybe forgotten what pre-algorithmic twitter was already like.
Mario Munoz (has moved)@glyph It seems odd that the onus of filtering content on Mastodon is on the sender and not the receiver.
I understand that joining a community (server) maybe insinuates that you are abiding by some mandate to keep things "on topic", whatever that means.
But if that comes at the cost of self-expression, it seems like the tradeoff is not worth it.
Having tools for people to find the content they want (aka algorithms) doesn't seem so bad in this context.
aeva@glyph this is maybe orthogonal to your thread but a bit of a rhetorical puzzle I've been chewing on lately is how to concisely and memorably communicate "stress is literally physically painfully destroying my body, please, I'm begging you, stop posting misleading Headlines and panic speculation if you're going to talk about current events don't crowd source debunking misinformation please just put in the 30 minutes of rigor yourself" without it reading or reducing to "duh hur im apolitical"
council of anthonys@aeva @glyph maybe there's an in between ui/ux option where we don't algorithmically decide what to show, but we do group and label content topics? Kinda how mastodon currently has the jagged separation stubs at the end of sections of content that I think is organized by time posted / posts you missed
@ant @glyph I've got a private discord for a specific group of local friends and we've got basically two rules the first being "do not make me add rules" and the second being "do not post the news" and this has worked great for years. Our "MAU" is awesome. What's really surprised me is that people who have moved away have become more active.
@ant @glyph group curation is an interesting idea, but I'm a bit nervous about group labeling because that also can create consequences to mobbing which I should hope there's ample examples to point to that being something we should avoid.
but we definitely need tools for better community resilience against corrosive things. eg headlines on news webpages are basically designed to be corrosive because they're trying to extract audiences from social media networks.
@aeva @glyph that's neat, I am the two buttons sweating guy meme thinking about the need to spread news to inform versus just amplifying the panic. It entirely depends on the receiving user's ever changing state of mind, so it seems like a technical piece missing is first-class/mandatory preference setting which is a pretty high barrier to entry and won't beat out plug-and-play options. "Don't post the news" unfortunately can't work for a massive federated network
@ant @glyph you are not being educated by a headline, you are being manipulated; and since you don't read the article before posting about it (lol it's paywalled) the hot takes and critical analysis and speculation may as well be completely and fully detached from reality. you are not educating the general public *you have an addiction*.
@ant @glyph like this is literally a public health crisis as much as anything. it's silly to throw up our hands and say "we can't do it! we can't do it! mastodon is just too big!" someone else is going to "solve" the problem for us if we don't assuming our network doesn't just completely collapse before that
@aeva @glyph I completely agree with you and I'm not saying it's too big I'm saying blanket imposing a rule on everyone online that we don't share news is practically impossible. I like your thinking and feel that thoughts like this should be funnelled toward modifying the default behavior of the software that most people necessarily just use rather than inspect. Along your approach we build configurable info bubble shields around local communities, bigger and broader than individual filters
@aeva @glyph totally lol but education and information are very different concerns, I agree that we have generally far too much information to keep pace with the slower task of education. We need a better bouncer to pace our intake, until then we are bottlenecked and can barely think critically about anything.
@ant @glyph here's some information I just made up, the entire state of Nebraska is a death camp! they're shoveling babies into meat grinders! thousands of babies a second! ah! why is nobody talking about this! you've been informed, so now you're complicit too unless you talk about it!
aren't you glad you're "informed" now?
@aeva @glyph while it's very damaging to absorb all the gruesome details all the time, yes, I am glad that I know roughly how bad things are so that I am inoculated against predatory proselytizers who spend billions of dollars trying to convince me that everything is fine and it's actually brown peoples' fault. My strategy has been the more privilege I have the more I should endure the hell for the purposes of inoculation and distillation into consumable, high level stories about the torment
@aeva @glyph if my peers who are more brutalized than me can't take another single hit, but I can, I might be able to stop them from sinking into right wing propaganda because I've built a collage of pain and can easily draw on it to point out that no, it isn't "too much generosity" or "too much tolerance" causing you pain, it's a handful of very powerful people with attitudes that cascade symbiotically with those of gradations of similarly minded cretins' hell-bent on slavery
@aeva @glyph well the person I was having a meaningful conversation with blocked me because they became exasperated that I was articulating a different opinion than them. I suppose this is a great example of their desired UI/UX - little dictators make rules and anyone who doesn't agree enough doesn't exist. I am interested in building a comms interaction that doesn't encourage this, and some people justly having sharp boundaries is not a problem to me.