I didn’t see from the article if they have a definition of “the algorithm” that means anything?
Like, I know this is preaching to the choir here of all places, but you literally can’t have a social media without “an algorithm”, but I think we all know that’s not what they mean. But what actually do they mean? Do they mean “showing things from people you haven’t followed or subscribed to”, do they mean “showing posts or videos with stats that make them think you’ll like it”? Do they mean any selection algorithm that’s personalized to your account rather than site wide? So you could still have “top of the last 12 hours”, but everyone would have the same top?
Because every platform has more content on it per day than any human could consume that day. Something somewhere must choose what to show you and what order it’s in, because it can’t show everything. So I’m curious how they’ll define what “the algorithm” is…
Thank you for sving me the trouble of typing basically that. heh.
It’s like when they talk about how to define porn and the best definition is basically “you know it when you see it”. But you can’t write law like that (except they can and do and it causes problems).
You uh, didn’t use metacrawler, Altavista, ask Jeeves, yahoo, or Google(back in the day) much did you?
The internet has been more content than a human can experience in a lifetime since it was brought to the masses, and probably even before the pentium was created and a oc3 line was the dream of every computer nerd and geek
I did actually! But each of those used an algorithm to decide which things to show people based on their query. They must, because they couldn’t show everything.
So since they must choose “an algorithm” in the computer science sense, but not “the algorithm” in the pop reporting sense, the question becomes “which algorithms are the algorithm”, or more specifically which features are the actual problem.
Is it statistics? Is it personalization? Is it advertiser influence? That’s the question that’s interesting to me.
I didn’t see from the article if they have a definition of “the algorithm” that means anything?
Like, I know this is preaching to the choir here of all places, but you literally can’t have a social media without “an algorithm”, but I think we all know that’s not what they mean. But what actually do they mean? Do they mean “showing things from people you haven’t followed or subscribed to”, do they mean “showing posts or videos with stats that make them think you’ll like it”? Do they mean any selection algorithm that’s personalized to your account rather than site wide? So you could still have “top of the last 12 hours”, but everyone would have the same top?
Because every platform has more content on it per day than any human could consume that day. Something somewhere must choose what to show you and what order it’s in, because it can’t show everything. So I’m curious how they’ll define what “the algorithm” is…
Thank you for sving me the trouble of typing basically that. heh.
It’s like when they talk about how to define porn and the best definition is basically “you know it when you see it”. But you can’t write law like that (except they can and do and it causes problems).
You uh, didn’t use metacrawler, Altavista, ask Jeeves, yahoo, or Google(back in the day) much did you?
The internet has been more content than a human can experience in a lifetime since it was brought to the masses, and probably even before the pentium was created and a oc3 line was the dream of every computer nerd and geek
I did actually! But each of those used an algorithm to decide which things to show people based on their query. They must, because they couldn’t show everything.
So since they must choose “an algorithm” in the computer science sense, but not “the algorithm” in the pop reporting sense, the question becomes “which algorithms are the algorithm”, or more specifically which features are the actual problem.
Is it statistics? Is it personalization? Is it advertiser influence? That’s the question that’s interesting to me.