Chosen as in “subscriptions” / “followed” / “friends”?
So if it picks from among accounts you’ve opted-in to then it’s not the bad algorithm? That’s not meant as a gotcha, it’s a choice one could make to draw the line, but I don’t know if it’s the one they had in mind. There’s still room there to pick which order it shows your selected things in, but maybe that still mitigates the harm.
Does TikTok have the concept of following or subscribing? I don’t even know…
Things like Lemmy are a little trickier because our model is different. I can subscribe to a community, but then the content in that community is posted by strangers, and then those posts have comments by strangers, all of which require some kind of algorithm to curate. So in this definition showing me strangers shitposts is “no algorithm” if I’m subscribed to the shitpost community, but it isn’t allowed to suggest a shitpost if I’m not in that community?
It’s a line that could be drawn, but it remains to be seen if that’s the line they have in their minds.
Lemmy sorts by new, top and comment count, all of which are easily checkable, and I imagine hot and active are too. These aren’t algorithms because their methods aren’t hidden.
Right, I know they do. But “easily checkable” wasn’t our criteria before, this is a different criteria.
Is the criteria just that any algorithm that is transparent is okay? If there was a recommendation system that used your data, but the way they used it was open source, would that be “not an algorithm”? Because that’s also an option, but it’s a different option from this thread’s previous proposal that it be followers only or whatever.
I’m not really advocating for any particular choice here, I’m just saying that if they’re going to make a law around picking which algorithms are okay and which aren’t, they are going to need to figure out where those lines are, and I think that’s going to be harder than the buzzword makes it seem.
Chosen as in “subscriptions” / “followed” / “friends”?
So if it picks from among accounts you’ve opted-in to then it’s not the bad algorithm? That’s not meant as a gotcha, it’s a choice one could make to draw the line, but I don’t know if it’s the one they had in mind. There’s still room there to pick which order it shows your selected things in, but maybe that still mitigates the harm.
Does TikTok have the concept of following or subscribing? I don’t even know…
Things like Lemmy are a little trickier because our model is different. I can subscribe to a community, but then the content in that community is posted by strangers, and then those posts have comments by strangers, all of which require some kind of algorithm to curate. So in this definition showing me strangers shitposts is “no algorithm” if I’m subscribed to the shitpost community, but it isn’t allowed to suggest a shitpost if I’m not in that community?
It’s a line that could be drawn, but it remains to be seen if that’s the line they have in their minds.
Lemmy sorts by new, top and comment count, all of which are easily checkable, and I imagine hot and active are too. These aren’t algorithms because their methods aren’t hidden.
Right, I know they do. But “easily checkable” wasn’t our criteria before, this is a different criteria.
Is the criteria just that any algorithm that is transparent is okay? If there was a recommendation system that used your data, but the way they used it was open source, would that be “not an algorithm”? Because that’s also an option, but it’s a different option from this thread’s previous proposal that it be followers only or whatever.
I’m not really advocating for any particular choice here, I’m just saying that if they’re going to make a law around picking which algorithms are okay and which aren’t, they are going to need to figure out where those lines are, and I think that’s going to be harder than the buzzword makes it seem.