I dimly remember a time in the 90s when I thought technology was supposed to free us from the tyranny of "judging a book by its cover" and "following the crowd", when you could carry around a personalized algorithm to help you identify things you would like even if they were obscure or un-marketed.
It feels like that didn't happen, and we're still stuck with the same issue of promotions and gatekeepers and tastemakers, because those who control the algorithms (centralized, proprietary, remotely hosted) find it more profitable that way.
Did they ever make last.fm for books? Or other things? One of my ideas back in the day was "last.fm for meeting people", i.e. you could connect based on overlapping interests or aesthetic preferences in any dimension of life. That seems to have still not been invented yet?
I'm unconvinced by the profit motive argument: there's plenty of money to be made in the "long tail" of selling weird things (or experiences) to weird people!
Amazon has owned goodreads since 2013.I have been using thr platform for many years, and the service has been good. Having said that, I haven't seen much innovation being built but that might be a good thing with this product.
Any time it happens, things get twisted, or shut down. Reddit used to be good. Twitter used to be good. But the money people come in, the bots, the astroturfers, the guerrilla marketers, the spammers... If they stay alive regardless, in come the billionaires to offer ridiculous sums.
People complained that TikTok's algorithm was too good at finding niche and interesting content. The marketing was somewhat balanced, and tailored to people's actual tastes. That was before lobbyists and politicians discovered that it was severely interfering with their propaganda. Now I hear you can't so much as post 'Free Palestine', and kids are supposed to be grateful that we're allowed to have it on our phones at all.
All that said, for people with the right skills there is no shortage of entertaining content to discover; far more than could ever be consumed in a lifetime. It's really the most important news and views that gets suppressed the most.
Reddit was good, various forums were good for that too. The best way to get recommendation is through curated lists and you need people that are genuinely involved for that. You can still find some, but they can be very off the beaten path.
That's nonsense. If anything, for the prior decade, Twitter was well-known as the extreme left's judge, jury and executioner. All the cancellations people argue about? Overblown or not, Twitter was always at the center of it, and it was what made them possible.
(Though, to be honest, it wasn't a bias in the service itself, IMHO. Twitter was nothing but a resonance chamber. The bias was in what the outside world reacted to, and how.)
What Musk did to Twitter is unusual. The typical way "money people use money to destroy spaces" is through sterilization of the place to placate advertisers, and then through ongoing enshittification to extract as much as possible from what little users there are left. Other common ways are: buying up and merging with a shittier platform in the same or adjacent space, and a weird-ass pivot that makes business sense to everyone except the actual user base.
Bullshit, frankly. That was what your self imposed bubble was telling to themselves. Whenever measured, twitter bias was right wing - it took much more for them to stop right accounts then left ones.
> What Musk did to Twitter is unusual.
Yes, it is unusual to destroy financial value of a company that fast. I assume he will do the same to the country economics too. And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.
He personally will maybe come off more rich this time, because you can steal from the government but he could really not from twitter. Corruption works for him.
> Whenever measured, twitter bias was right wing - it took much more for them to stop right accounts then left ones.
Was that why a chunk of left-leaning users famously left to form Bag, a "safe space" alternative to Twitter? Oh wait it was right wing and it was called Gab.
Doesn't really matter anyway. Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire, but it would've been half-dead by now anyway like all social media sites, thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.
> And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.
You confuse me with someone else. I'm from the other side of the world, and my only interest in US economy is that the rest of the world kind of depends on the US keeping its shit together.
If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire.
Yeah, Gab is super nice example of the asymmetry - the sort of behavior right wing Gab members displayed was much much less prominent on the left. So yeah, this is nice example of right wing extreme behaving in the worst way and then complaining it is fair people who behave better are not treated the same. When right wing harasses more, it is ok to kick them out more. The reality was that right wing harasses more, they get kicked, so services would kick off comparatively better behaved left wing people just to make right wing happy. That is right wing bias.
> Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire [...] thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.
He was not bored, he had political project. The enshittificationwas entrirely on Musk personal decisions, not on some impersonal rules.
> If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire
I will blame people currently in power and those who voted for them. And nice to complain about polarization while talking about Gab as if it was not the group of people responsible for it.
The problem is, as usual, capitalism. The goal of people making stuff isn't to make good stuff, it's to sell lots of their stuff, at the highest price they can.
Certainly sometimes making bad stuff does make it so people don't want to buy it, and those who do buy it will only buy it for a low price, but surprisingly that's the case less often than you'd expect. (Blame the field of psychological manipulation that is advertising?)
And so on top of that, the algorithms that recommend things are eventually going to be subverted by the people who want to sell you things, so you end up with stuff pushed at you that "sells well" even if much of it doesn't actually match what you want.
One thing that might work is to decouple the recommendation algorithm from the entity trying to sell you stuff. I'd want an independent third party to give me recommendations on what to buy on Amazon, for example, rather than Amazon themselves recommending products to me. But you have to also somehow ensure that this third party isn't motivated by profit in a way that's related to what products you eventually buy.
On top of that, the problem with every good service is that once it gets to a certain size, it attracts the sort of people who will make it a bad service, because bad services can make them more money.
Well, like everyone who "criticizes capitalism" online, they leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine the concrete entailments of what they vaguely propose.
And when you try to, it’s always “um where did they say that?”
If you're going to bring up capitalism in your crusade against... recommendation systems... I think it's fair to ask you to workshop your genius idea a little more past the shower thought stage.
You can critizise something without having to provide alternatives. I dont know why people like you or gp feel the need to become so defensive about it.
Capitalism is the status quo. Like any other system ruling us it should be discussed in order to keep an intellectually honest discourse [1].
It feels like that didn't happen, and we're still stuck with the same issue of promotions and gatekeepers and tastemakers, because those who control the algorithms (centralized, proprietary, remotely hosted) find it more profitable that way.