The author sort of (but not really) acknowledges this midway through, but this is basically a summary of the most recent Technology Connections video, Algorithms are breaking how we think:
I'd rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration/source for this post at the beginning and explicitly, rather than just mentioning the video in passing midway through, but at least they do link to it!
I was definitely influenced to write this by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch.
I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work.
It's also intended as something you can link to your friends and family that might be a little more digestible than a 30 minute video.
>by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch.
I get what your advice is about but to add some nuance which didn't cover... you should consider that I learned of Alec's Technology Connections channel 9 years ago because the Youtube algorithm suggested it to me.
Why did Youtube do that? It was because I had watched Ben's Applied Science excellent video showing vinyl grooves under an electron microscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8
I'd argue that the Youtube algorithm is very good at finding adjacent videos of interest especially in educational topics and DIY repair tutorials.
You're suggesting people go to Youtube subscriptions feeds but people have a list of favorites in their subscriptions often because of the algorithm. There's a bit of chicken-vs-egg situation going on there.
- Explore --> Youtube algorithm sidebar recommendations of related videos.
- Exploit --> add a worthy creator to subscription feed and get alerted to new releases from that person
The "explore" part is helped by algorithms because they can suggest videos you would have never thought of because you don't know the keywords or jargon to type into a Youtube search box to get to it directly. "You don't know what you don't know."
But don't use the algorithm for politics or click on anything that has a thumbnail with the shocked Pikachu face. That just starts a feedback loop of crap.
Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
So... Algorithms can be bad ... but you can also make them work for you.
I agree with you almost completely. I never used YT as a content source until a few years ago - I’d never open the app and only watch videos linked or embedded / looking up a specific how to video. Now it’s different though.
I never go to my subscription feed - the front page algo keeps me up to date on any new content from people I want to see updates on. I’ve noticed too it almost has a “shadow subscription” where even though I am not subscribed to certain channels, it knows I watch every video by them so it gets on my front page too.
The front page really has a “vibe” that follows my interests around. Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more of the front page being those topics. Get a new interest in pyramids? Devlogs? Nature? The front page slowly decays old interests and promotes new ones.
Which is again why I don’t check my sub feed - it’s a graveyard of interests, many of which I don’t care about right now. The algo surfaces the ones I do.
> Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more
In my experience it's "watch one video outside of your recommendations and then half your next set of recommendations will be related to that". I'm scared to click on anything I'm not already subscribed to for fear of trashing the home page.
You can delete things from your watch history to clean up the algo. If I ever let a TV auto play for too long or have kids over watching things I go though and delete things I think will negatively affect the algo.
I feel like clicking a video and immediately clicking off is also a negative signal they use but YMMV.
You can (almost) always tell you're not interested in those videos and it slowly stops suggesting them. You can also ask it to never recommend a certain channel.
You somehow must be able to, as everyone I know has feeds full of that sort of thing, and I've never seen even one short or game on my youtube home page.
You can use the three dots to say "Not Interested" on the Shorts shelf but it only hides it for 30 days and then the insidious little worm comes right back.
Sadly not available when using the Apple TV to watch YouTube. If there's a NextDNS / PiHole method that stops YouTube ads, I could probably implement that...
If you have to go outside of youtube you modify its behavior, that doesn't really qualify as "you can make it stop". That's like saying you can make someone stop shooting you by wearing a Kevlar vest.
Yeah they tweak the HTML enough that static stylesheet overrides can become outdated real quick. Very annoying. It's been a while since I looked, but there probably is some uBlock Origin filter list that'll handle this and will stay fairly up-to-date.
In all honesty I had no idea YouTube had a sub feed until you mentioned it. I still don't know how to access it, but the home page more than suffices for me.
My interests vary so widely that my home feed is awful. I like watching videos on power tools, software development, video games, sports highlights, math, and other, less focused things like the hoard of cat video channels I sub to to keep existential dread at bay.
I get recommended right leaning videos and videos with ads for manscaped and I'm neither a conservative or a man. It's super weird so I tend to separate my interests into two apps: the YouTube web app for "junk food content" and FreeTube when I want to learn and focus. It's the only way I've found to not be fed the random content carrots while falling down the rabbit hole.
Youtube disrespects any person that is multilingual. They shove AI translations into our faces because the content creator is responsible for disabling it not the user. Instead of German videos I get German videos with English AI audio.
I keep getting videos from the same game I always ignore or say not interested on my front page.
Youtube wants my money. They will never get my money when they come up with things like that. I will give them my money once they start cracking down on ads. And by that I mean actual moderated ads - not random ads with porn. As long as they serve scam ads I will never give them money - and it does not look like I will in my lifetime.
Ad blockers do the same and will be my choice. It is their choice to not moderate their main business. It is their choice to disable monetization on history, ..., people who say fuck in the first minute.
Is it that hard to look at all the BS and say - no not my money?
But most of the channels I'm interested in have "in video" ads (ads put there by the creator rather than Youtube, I don't know the industry terminology) that remain even if you pay for Youtube Premium.
I wish Premium provided some way for me to predict how many of these kinds of ads are in a video I am considering watching (e.g., by requiring the creator to tell YT how many there are and imposing consequences on creators that lie) but YT does not.
Those are sponser segments and I have no problem with them. These videos can be expensive to produce and these people need to support themselves still. If you take away or reduce their ad revenue, how do we expect them to survive?
There is an extension called SponserBlock that will automatically skip them and other marketing / time wastes. Otherwise I just skip ahead (the highest peak in the watch graph playbar at will usually be the end of the segment)
Yeah, pro/anti "algorithms" is too reductive, especially since the old status-quo was also an algorithm of people and processes.
I'd rather use a lens more like all the open-source/free-software concerns about controlling your own computer:
1. Can I see how the recommendation algorithm is intended to work? The site-owner says it works for my benefit, but what if they're mistaken, or lying?
2. What has it recorded about my interests, and how can I fix bad records that don't represent them?
3. When it's not working well--or harmfully exploiting my baser weaknesses--how can I change to a different one?
Kind of comes down to one of Neil Postman's questions
"Whose problem is it that it solves?"
It's possible to get some benefit from an algorithm/process, just as a
side effect, that was never designed to work in your interest and is
an opaque cloud service. Maybe the service is solving the network
owner's problem of selling you to advertisers. If you want to maximise
for "interest and relevance to my life goals" there's nothing to stop
you running your own "algorithm" of course, except any obstacles put
in your way by the data network owner. For that reason it's more
important to pay attention to the freedom of the network (open API,
federated, maximally distributed etc) than the algorithms that run on
it. If you control the former you control the latter. HN (the network)
seems to allow a lot from the plethora of viewers I've seen.
This seems like the perfect place to once again recommend "Amusing Ourselves To Death" :-)
I also read "Technopoly" recently, and while it didn't have quite the same impact on me, I can't deny that it accurately describes the techno-political moment we're currently living in. Well worth the time.
I started using Youtube as a frequent content source in the past year. I've been aggressively curating my recommendations by clicking "Not interested" on anything I don't want to see a lot of. If I'm curious I'll watch the one video but in Incognito. If a channel gets repeatedly re-recommended I don't hesitate to use "Don't recommend channel". I also +like everything I've watched and subscribe to channels I'll more likely watch than not watch new content. Getting recommendations pruned feels like getting to a zero email Inbox.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work like that. If you say "Don't recommend channel", the channel may in fact be recommended and similar channels will definitely still be recommended. "Not interested" works even less accurately.
IME, Not interested at least prevents that single video from showing in my feed. It may reduce similar content from same or other channels--I see some reductions. Don't recommend channel always works for me as far as I noticed, except in search results which seems correct. I never expected it to not recommend similar channels, e.g. I filtered out Linus Tech Tips but watch similar content.
It probably helps that I only permit a handful of specific topics: physics, fun math, synthesizers (but not modular), tiny bit of music theory/training, StarCraft 2 (not SC1/BW), and recently the Nvidia/AMD GPU release saga.
> Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
This may also be an artifact of the fact that you are the sort of person who seeks out educational content. I.e. you have a high need for intellectual stimulation. That makes you an outlier among all people who use social media.
Personally I think technical people underestimate the negative impacts of the models that drive the algorithms. We are basically training humans via a reward function that maximizes watch time. We are also heavily correlating errors in knowledge because popular stuff gets boosted so much. Correlated errors are bad for rubustness.
One point to observe here is that there’s a difference between a “related content” section when viewing specific content and the more general algorithmic feed that is designed to be the primary mode of discovery and interaction.
Thanks, this is an important nuance. Recommendation algorithms are absolutely useful, and if you're so inclined you can absolutely make them work for you, but this is about making educated, conscious decisions about what you click next in your 'Related videos' section.
Algorithmic feeds don't give us that opportunity - they're designed to require minimal effort and to keep the dopamine coming without any conscious decisions.
The issue is that algorithms are like a casino for your time.
We all know that gambling addicts exist and how destructive it is to their lives, the casino exploits behaviors and gets all their money. As a result people know casinos are dangerous, reasonable people avoid them, are warned about them, and the government forces regulation to reduce their ability to exploit vulnerable people.
Imagine if none of these controls existed and nobody talked about or generally knew that casinos were dangerous. Imagine if the casinos were 100x better at exploiting you and you were forced to walk through a casino every time you leave your house. You’d get a lot more people having their lives destroyed.
So what this video tries to do is important, naming the term, “algorithmic complacency”, allows it to be recognized, discussed, and actively kept in check by users. Ideally regulated by the government as well, just like casinos.
The casino also provides a service, entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with a reasonable person attending, spending some money and being entertained. But we as a society recognize that a company exploiting behaviors to get all of a person’s money, is bad, and try to limit that negative outcome even though we still allow casinos to exist.
Time, attention, and focus is so abstract people don’t even realize they’re spending it, or how modified their behavior has become because of the algorithm’s exploitation. As a result we let companies who are 100x better at manipulation than casinos operate without so much as mentioning they’re doing it, and steal increasing amounts of a user’s time.
My only complaint is that it doesn't encourage enough innate curiosity. I am disincentivized from clicking on some things precisely because their recommendation engine is so tightly wound that I'll get bombarded with really tangential content for days or weeks after. Let me click a few videos about a topic before assuming I'd been hiding a lifetime passion for '80's John Deere combine trans-axle repairs that I need itched almost exclusively to within an inch of its life, all because I thought that guy in the thumbnail might get squished, and didn't adhere to my better angels. Besides that, it's pretty, pretty neat. Not great not bad. I can recommend farm machinery repair YouTube--it is a vibrant community of delightful weirdos and incredibly smart folk who talk about software more than you'd think.
TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political.
I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically.
But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content.
I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.
You may want to do some basic background reading on what socialism actually is.
People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model.
Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure.
Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore.
But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.
>People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model...
Yes. This is what people in the US mean when they say socialism in general conversation. They don't mean pure Socialism as Marx talked about it. Similarly when people say the US is a democracy, we know they don't mean it's an actual pure Democracy where everyone votes on every issue.
Yes with the pedantic caveat that those aren't similar in the sense that one is a common confusion and the other is correct.
The Nordic model is the sort of economy and political structure that the 19th century socialists explicitly reacted against and rejected. It's a representation of mainstream liberal democratic theory not of socialism.
On the other hand democracy was always understood to be representative because you can't make every decision by plebiscite.
It has to do with being accurate rather than being "pure".
These particular words haven't evolved in any meaningful way in the last century or so. If anything socialism now refers exclusively to revolutionary/militant utopian socialism whereas it had more varied meanings long ago. That's probably largely an artifact of the fact that socialism since the early 1900s has mainly been promoted by socialist countries after a revolution.
Go on a socialist forum and ask them what they think about markets or mixed economies. E.g.
> version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US
This oversells what China is. China is were government and oligarchy are in a strange symbiosis. Capitalism is worse in China in many ways. You are more free in China to exploit others on a large scale. H1B Visas seems to be an authorian idea to me and something that is heavily exploited in China.
What the US and China have in common is a strange kind of nationalism that I can not define, might be because I come from a smaller country.
All socialist states have been functionally authoritarian oligarchies in practice. I'm unaware of an exception. Someone once claimed Yugoslavia was, but I'm not familiar enough with it to have an opinion.
It's also confusing because there's the notion of State Capitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism#Maoists_and_a...) that I believe Marx also wrote about but I don't remember the details off hand. I think this may more or less be the same idea as authoritarian capitalism, but it's also what socialist regimes eventually look like when they realize they need to re-introduce markets to prevent economic collapse.
My take is that the idea of socialism, communism, and capitalism are deeply muddled in theory and even more muddled in practice. Muddled or not, we have people who consider themselves socialists and followers of Marx, their theory is incoherent, and in practice they try to spread violence and destroy any country they take over. We don't really have people clinging to capitalism in the same way, although some right wing factions in the US tried in the 70s during the cold war to make a capitalistic sort of political religion modeled after the success of socialism.
We'd be better off not having to deal with any of these concepts except for the fact that some people have a strong allegiance to these concepts and there's no changing that in the short term. To me it's a bit like when people killed each other over ideas like how to interpret the tripartite Christian God. Is the son a separate person or the same person, and how does the holy spirit fit in? You get an entire tree of ideas, most of which eventually became heresies punishable by death. None of them made any sense but that didn't stop it from being a motive historical force.
You talking to a member of the DSA buddy. I read about this shit all day. Also, whenever an american uses the word "authoritarian" it is extremely unclear what they mean, usually it means "bad" because they have no principled way to identifying democratic or undemocratic procedures. Most Americans have barely experienced any democracy in their lives at all, just voting every once in a while for canned choices.
In today's ChatGPT age, I'm sure people are attempting to build contextually aware alternatives to feeds?
Something that will filter out the anger, but keep the insight. I vaguely remember someone posting about a tldr for twitter. Anyone know of tools like that?
I'd be very skeptical of applying anything we knew about the YouTube algorithm 9 years ago to it, or any algorithm, today.
Google, Facebook, and the other algorithm-driven tech companies have been aggressively enshittifying their products at least since 2020. "I got fun/useful videos out of the YouTube algorithm in 2016" says nothing about what that algorithm is like in 2025, given that they can change it silently on a whim.
sharing similar ideas is never stealing. Your vantage point is unique and everyone should be espousing their take on the lack of agency running our lives these days.
Don't feel bad about it. He wasn't the first person to point this out, it was pointed out much earlier than his video. It's enough that you cited him and gave credit.
Hey, that's not fair. We all engage with other people's ideas all the time, no one is really a unique thinker. The best model I have for intellectual activity is that it's a multiple-millennia-long conversation between people over generations.
The main thing is that it's important to acknowledge who it is that you're replying to and to be very clear about to what degree you're synthesizing their thoughts versus contributing your own. But we're all derivative thinkers in the end, even those of us who get famous for original thinking.
If someone is going to expound on unique thought, I’d hope they live in a cave in the woods making unique cave drawings with their feces or riding a pale green elephant wearing magnetic boots upside down within a large refrigerator.
If you want to really be a unique thinker, sure you can listen, and aggregate, summarize, but don’t regurgitate.
This video is overall better in terms of emphasis, and goes into how to use tools available to intentionally curate the media that you choose to consume as a primary method, rather than it being hidden in a list.
I tried watching that video, but found it to be pretty bad. The beginning was good - demonstrating how much information we have at our fingertips, yet don't use. But then it veers off into what feels like a lot of personal frustrations he has - with the replies he's gotten at BlueSky, with politics, with the media, etc., and it feels like he's using algorithms as an excuse to vent against things he doesn't like.
The worst part is, it feels like he's making the same mistakes he's warning others about yet doesn't even realize it. He claims the bad BlueSky users are the result of algorithms, but doesn't (from what I can tell) see that his problem is that he's paying attention to a feed that brings those people to him. He complains about social media turning everything into a monolithic good vs. evil outrage generator, but then he does the exact same thing when talking about the New York Time's Canada editorial. You can say he's justified in that, but isn't everyone going to believe that they're the exception and that their outrage is justified?
I've seen this kind of criticism before, where it feels like someone is captured by something, can't escape it, gets annoyed by certain elements of it, and then creates a criticism of it that's more about venting their personal frustrations than actually escaping it (since they can't see how trapped they themselves are).
I find this claim unlikely, since there have always been crazies on the internet, and main issue is that a single crazy person can be online 24/7 with an output that dwarfs a dozen normal people.
It focuses on the harmful nature of infinitely scrolling content. Cutting out all infinite scrolling apps has had a hugely positive effect on my productivity and mental health.
How does HN fit into that? I’m not trying to be cheeky, I’m genuinely interested, HN is technically an infinite website (though you do have to click “More”) yet you’re here.
Do you use the noprocrast settings? Does HN just fit differently into your brain? Something else?
One difference is that HN uses a ranked list. You can generally count on things getting less salient the farther you “scroll.”
It’s the same way that infinitely-scrolling Google results don’t have the same effect as infinitely-scrolling content chutes, which exploit the hunch that there might be something gold just around the next swipe…
There's a bit of a mental difference between being able to (literally) endlessly swipe up to the next tiktok vs having to click the next button on hn though.
On HN, at least, once I get a few pages in I usually realize I’m just seeing articles from a few hours/days ago. I know then it is time to take a break.
It isn’t infinite the same way TikTok will or YouTube used to keep playing something you haven’t seen yet.
A few years ago I set up a ublock filter to hide the next/more buttons on hacker news and reddit. It works great because I can still get my news fix, but I can't scroll endlessly.
Steve jobs said computers are a bicycle for the mind. Falling off a bicycle without a helmet is a great way to become a donut. Maybe computer users need helmets too. Please join me in abusing this metaphor.
In the spirit of the video (and the article), I'm watching this on Freetube [0] while hiding the comments, recommended videos tab, and pretty much everything else apart from the video description.
This is exactly why I describe HN as “my home on the internet”
These are my fellow people that will happily watch a 20 or 40 min video about how dishwashers work, or his more recent video about replicating old style Christmas lights.
I tried box detergent because of his dishwasher video, and that's probably saved me hundreds of dollars at this point, with the added benefit of my dishes actually get cleaner.
I also dumped a crappy beverage cooler in my office for a cheap as hell box mini-fridge, which actually maintains temperature enough that I can store cream for coffee and ice down here, and it uses less energy then the unit before.
Malgorhitms are. We could, if we didn't confuse use it with LoTR entities, have belgorhitms, which would not only be recommended by Kahneman & Tversky, but also recommend by intelligence analysts, the historical opposites of corporate analysts, minions Belegron.
Algorhitms, "changing how one thinks" is real, and ultimately good. The social changes, when they start expecting you to Anki your work contract (which would, if the Anki was monitored, be highly legally effective against you); or requiring you know Kellyed Bayesian decision theory because that's a prequsite for getting reasonably priced insurance, or simply, surviving, that is unknown. I give 37.7% confidence Elon Musk was gaming in 2025 U.S. politics using construct akin to a Bayesian decision tree.
It would be great if one didn't have to change how one thinks, whether they delve into CLRS or TikTok.
Since they already reference Technology Connections in the article, and since this is a great essay but not new ideas, let's also call out other important voices - in particular Shoshana Zuboff's "Surveillance Capitalism", Cory Doctorow, and the many others who have put their backs into helping us understand how these sick systems work.
Social media has really proven that phrase that "the medium is the message", which I remember long ago thinking was a little odd and not obviously true.
With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this:
We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasoning.
> So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.
For what its worth, 500 years ago people were just as worried about books as we are today about newsfeeds. But it took a long time for books to ultimately decentralize enough to become a more egalitarian, community knowledge. But even that's not entirely the case now. Books can be propaganda just like everything else.
Books can be terrible, but they can be good to a level that (most popular) social media can't, due to the limitations of the medium.
Without long text, to a good approximation, you just can't convey long, multi-step reasoning chains at the limit of human intellectual capacity.
Personally I've started reading again much more recently, and it's done wonders for what's going on inside my head. I was feeling so dull! I can only recommend it.
The problems with social media aren't its capacity or limitations - it absolutely can be at least as good as books for long-term, coherent narrative building and multistep reasoning. The problems are the incentives against using social media for fostering and sharing deep experiences and thought. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent yearly promoting disposable, reactionary content, at the expense of robust, complex work that's risky to create and takes time to engage with. The moneymen want the money now, their future selves and their own children be damned.
I don't know about that. Your analysis is correct in that it's ultimately about business incentives, but those incentives lead businesses to choose certain formats over others, thus promoting certain kinds of content.
It seems very far fetched that an app that looks like HN might become as popular as TikTok, and that's because the TikTok format is excellent at creating something that pulls people in by delivering short term rewards.
I'm not a Luddite, I'm sure there are some creators out there making clever tiktok videos, but that format really isn't conducive to, as you say, "long-term, coherent narrative building and multistep reasoning".
It's also common to think that you should only read non-fiction and that fiction is a waste of time, but I absolutely don't agree. Fiction is amazing and it'll help your reasoning, creativity, helps give perspective on things, and improves your outlook on life in a way that non-fiction has a very hard time to do.
Non-fiction is very good for other reasons and it's good to aim for a healthy mix of the too I think.
Yes! This so much! In my circles, I have seen a tendency to perceive fiction as a kind of low-brow, less intellectual reading. But then these people go on and pick up self-help non-fiction books.
Fiction has so much more to offer! On top of what you wrote, fiction helps you to develop an ability to put yourself in others' shoes. Empathy is anyway scarce in this politically-charged and ragebait-filled world.
Fiction has helped me develop empathy and to stay empathetic. It has helped me develop my philosophy of life; morals and values I strive to stay close to. The fictional characters have given me courage during hard times. And so much more.
Lot of people prefer to start with self-help kind of non-fiction which is, IMO, the least helpful category of books. I don't know what draw people to it.
I agree, but struggle to find fiction books to read. Most of my reading just consists of a historical period / event that I find interesting and read more about. From that I sometimes come across an "alternate history" type fiction book, but not much else. What do you do for discovery?
Walk into a library or bookstore. Pick up something that looks interesting (LITERALLY judge a book by its cover for this) and start reading right then and there. If the book doesn't capture your interest immediately, maybe skim a little bit, or just move on to the next book. Also, ask trusted friends that know you well for suggestions.
You have to first know what your own particular tastes are, and afterwards, do the harder steps of understanding why you like what you like, and expanding your horizons. Once you get to the point where you both know what you like and start to know why you like it, discovery just solves itself. Eventually, you'll be able to tune into any random discussion about a book or author, and discern from context whether or not the works in question are for you, even if you don't share the opinions of those you're listening to.
I'm currently in a big fantasy phase so what I've done is search for "best fantasy series", "most underrated fantasy series", gone through r/fantasy, and "books similar to X" type of searches.
I've also listened to some YouTube channels who review or go through books they've read. Of course it's important to find someone who have similar taste to you or you'll have a bad time.
On the point of "alternate history" I'll throw out "Matt's fantasy Book Reviews" YouTube channel where he also has some alternate history type books he brings up from time to time.
I never understood this mentality, you can justify literally anything by saying "they thought X was bad but now X is OK, so we can't say Y is bad"
The scale and pace of modern changes have absolutely nothing to do with what we witnessed thousands or even hundreds years ago. Word of mouth in 1700 can also propagate propaganda but no one is going to argue 1700s word of mouth propaganda is "the same" as foreign propaganda being served straight to your citizen through third party services 24/7
All propaganda isn't created equal either. If 99% of the news you get comes from the state owned journal and the state owned radio you're drinking your own Kool aid, if the propaganda comes from a foreign source straight to your population through third party services you have a whole bunch of different problems
I think the opposite, just like we used to tell people to "go read a book", now we'll tell people to "spend some time with an AI" to get cultured. The more AI time the better for your education.
My kids read plenty and I am indeed always telling them to "go talk to the LLM". It's more work than reading (I suspect), they have to engage more with the topic - ask good questions.
I don’t even let my kids watch YouTube. Imagine what an llm could hallucinate to impressionable minds.
Edit (addition):
How the fuck did we decide that a large language model somehow became artificial intelligence? It’s like claiming a dictionary is intelligent. I just don’t get it.
Books can be propaganda, certainly. However, books promote long attention span. Social media generally removes that aspect and focuses on dopamine hits. It’s hard to condition critical thinking when jumping from one truth sentence to another truth sentence without context.
No doubt. However, I didn’t focus on any of that. It’s also not the premise of the article. The premise of the article is “don’t remain in your echo chamber, don’t trust just because it fits your narrative, step out and confront the world”.
What's weird about the kind of responses in this thread stating "books" or whatever "can also be bad so social media is no different" is that it's not as if we don't already have data about this. We have a lot of data on the outcomes of people that spend time reading books vs people glued to social media, regarding attention spans, etc. The proof is in the eating, we don't have to speculate about hypotheticals.
> The Licensing of the Press Act 1662 (14 Cha. 2. c. 33) was an act of the Parliament of England with the long title An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.
I highly recommend reading Marshal McLuhan's book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man from which that phrase originates (and not just a Wikipedia summary, different medium after all!)
And as a follow-up, Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization.
Where McLuhan argues technologies shape worldviews, Mumford argues worldviews also shape technologies.
And then perhaps into the world of science and technology studies (STS), where these questions are explored more deeply, and specific cases are examined.
There is a comment in the intro of that book about the pinnacle of human labor being the simulation of consciousness. Very prescient for being written in the 60s.
The feed's >contents< are the message. And >the feed< is easily abused by content providers who have a PROFIT (Ferengi!) motive.
BUT I agree that The Feed is tightly intertwined with The Message. It is the enabler for HUGE audience capture. Versus the much smaller old-school audience capture of cult-psychology tactics.
“The medium is the message” goes both ways though. For social media, the inverse is not just “go read a book” but the far more challenging “go write a book”. That’s just not something I’m going to do. I’m certainly not going to find a publisher, get past the gatekeepers, and find a wide enough audience to make the big chunk of time I had to devote to writing worth it.
Your social media tools allow you to block content. I use this feature on youtube all the time. If I see a channel that's posting garbage or propaganda or flat out lies I just click the three dots and say 'Don't Recommend Channel.'
My youtube feed is a pleasant experience every day. There's no CNN or Fox news, no yelling talking heads trying to convince each other in existential terms, no jingoistic propaganda trying to influence me.
It's like what it was meant to be 20 years ago. Why do people not do this?
Your approach (which I share) requires thought and discernment, which is a scarce resource nowadays. People intend to turn their brains off when they doomscroll. (I'll never understand the desire.)
There are some people you just can’t reach. The people who won’t manage their media feeds will never “read a book”. It’s like asking people to stop eating junk food, some just won’t even if it’s making them miserable.
YouTube provides me the ability to block certain ads. I got an ad with Mark Walhberg asking me to pray with him. I blocked it. Now I get ads with Chris Pratt asking me to pray with him.
In a lot of ways I really like recommendation algorithms, regularly I've had youtube recommend a video that's converted into new sub (eg. LiamTronix and his electric tractor conversion).
What we really need is "responsible" recommendation systems (that allow the joy of discovery while aggressively damping rage bait and extreme view points). They'd need to be trained with some kind of socially beneficial reward function rather than pure engagement or advertiser dollars.
Could such a recommendation systems operate on top of existing social graphs?
Bluesky feeds are still server-side (due to needing to process all of the available posts to generate the feed) but at least you can choose which ones to use and people can make their own, which is an improvement over a single app-provided algorithmic feed.
How do you decide what is an extreme view point? This "socially beneficial reward function" could, and actually has, lead to things Google Gemini's depiction Founding Fathers or Vikings, etc.
Reddit is unfortunately a major thing in my life. There's an eternal battle between left and right politics in my small European country's relevant subreddits.
Not very healthy - it's like a never ending feed of "someone is wrong on the Internet".
For the record: "right" here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party.
Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I do take a break, I see that the other side "wins" to a noticeably larger degree. Again, small country.
What finally helped me break out of those bad habits was reframing who I was trying to convince of an argument. Let's face it, it's highly unlikely you're going to ever convince someone you're directly arguing with online just by the simple fact you're arguing, which often suggests some sort of impasse.
Instead, argue as if you're trying to convince the bored reader who has climbed down through the comments (for some reason), who has found value in this discourse and is trying to get more or better perspectives. That is someone you can convince of your position.
It's been a lot easier to engage in text discourse ever since I had that epiphany, because instead of taking every bait and trying to correct every wrong, I'm only engaging with folks arguing with data, with perspective, with good faith more often than not. That leads to better outcomes, I believe, instead of just contributing to so much noise.
I try to keep a few things in mind whenever I'm arguing with somebody that I think are helpful (hopefully):
1. Most arguments come down to defining words, even if you may not realise it.
2. Don't follow rabbitholes. Don't deviate from arguing your core premise.
3. You're not trying to prove the other person wrong, you're trying to find the truth.
On #1 for example; I watched a video of a conservative arguing liberals (or something) about a few premises, including "gay marriage does not exist". It was immediately clear to me, but apparently not to the people in the video, that this guy has a different definition of "marriage" to me. That's the breadth of the disagreement. That's all people should've argued with him about. But not one person did. Even when he described his definition of marriage, and how his premise comes about from that definition, everybody immediately became sidetracked. There's just no chance of finding common ground behaving like that.
4. It's not that unlikely that you are arguing with an actual child who has picked up enough terminology to be dangerous but completely lacks any deeper understanding.
I would love to completely cut reddit out of my life but would enjoy a smaller, more positive alternative that aims to provide the benefits of reddit when it was at its best but without the inherent flaws of the system's design and the dark patterns it is now known to encourage. I'm a bit put off by lemmy from my initial, cursory glance for a variety of reasons, but maybe I'm just using it wrong. Would love to hear suggestions that people have used for an extended time and would personally vouch for.
I've quit Reddit off and on over the years, and one of my fears the first time was missing out on news or helpful tips from small professional/hobby subreddits. I ended up building a tool that would email me the top 3 posts from a list of subreddits every day, and that was all I needed to quit without feeling like I was missing out. My tool eventually broke after Reddit's api change, but now I use one called redditletter¹ which does the same thing.
This was exactly the same kind of motivation that prompted me to create a RSS project to allow me to interact with platforms like Reddit/HN/Lemmy in a more low-volume and healthy way, subscribing to just the top posts in my RSS reader with rich custom feeds.
Lemmy was founded by tankie Reddit expats, and the project has had super weird issues in the past like a hardcoded blacklist and no RSS feed support for a while. So, I can't say it's for me either. Would be nice to have a viable Reddit alternative. Although Reddit does still have RSS feeds, and Hacker News does scratch the itch for certain topics.
It's fascinating, and being "The Subject" of the fascination and never truly "Objective" is a particular conundrum! Good luck with the "unfortunately" aspect -- totally possible to stop. (sexual humor warning: https://imgur.com/dont-touch-girls-m0Qk8)
I think it's part of being human.
I invite a brain specialist to step in here and comment which regions of the brain compelled us to agree with those whom we also feel we "need".
EDIT: .. cut to ncr100 proceeding to open youtube.com ...
For me peak internet was mid 2000s StumbleUpon. Finding random sites at the click of a button lightly sorted by theme. One major difference was people weren’t competing to get the most views. Of course monetized sites wanted more but today’s feeds create a sort of homogeneity I find less interesting because people are trying to appease an algorithm not viewers.
While this isn't at all like StumbleUpon, I've been enjoying a similar sense of discovery by adding https://indieblog.page/random as a bookmark to my web browser. Whenever I have some spare time and feel like surfing the web the old-fashioned way, I click this bookmark and get a random post from an independent blog. It's definitely a refreshing and much calmer experience compared to the black-box-algorithm-driven feeds of mainstream social media.
I used to be a social media addict and had even accepted the term addict for some time. But mid-last year, Facebook flagged one of my posts for violating its "platform guidelines"—and that was my breaking point.
That moment made me realize something deeper: it wasn’t just the endless feed algorithms shaping my behavior, but also the platform "guidelines" themselves—subtly reinforcing a habit designed to keep me engaged for advertisers.
So I quit. Completely. What Worked for Me-
WHAT I STOPPED:
1. Deactivated my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Deleted my Twitter account.
2. Removed all social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) from my phone.
3. Deleted Chrome from my phone and switched to my OS’s default browser (Safari) in signed-out mode.
4. Kept only one messaging app—Telegram.
WHAT I STARTED
1. Installed News Feed Eradicator on my computer (Chrome). I can still check messages and notifications (e.g., LinkedIn), but I don’t let the feed hijack my focus.
2. Went outside more—leaving my phone behind.
RESULTs:
1. Surprisingly, I think about sex less often throughout the day.
2. My close relationships have improved—I now have more meaningful time for a few important people instead of spreading myself thin over thousands.
3. I worry less—both in frequency and intensity.
4. I’ve regained my ability to read novels for hours—which, for me, requires the longest chain of attention.
5. My perspective is changing. The way I see the world feels different. I’ll need more time to articulate this fully, but I can sense the shift happening.
I can't help thinking that those receptive to the message would have drawn consequences long since. The feeds themselves would have chased them away. Can you wean a crack addict by telling them to stop using? Maybe, but I don't see a high probability of success. I sure hope I'm wrong.
> 5. Talk about it - if you’re reading this you a already know this is a problem. Your friends and family may not be aware of how their feeds are manipulating their attention and beliefs. Without intervention, the radicalisation of opinions, and the consequences we’re already seeing, will only escalate.
This is not Crack fortunately.
Physical dependence -> dopamine -> euphoria, escape, coping with stress + anxiety -> cannot feel pleasure without the drug -> craving for the drug / dependence. Recovery includes confronting the physical feeling that the drug is essential for perceived well-being.
Psychological dependence (TikTok / Insta Feed) -> sense of belonging, validation, purpose -> sense of identity via subculture, especially for "marginalized" or "insecure" individuals -> (side-note, some TikTok / Insta / MAGA+Dem / feeds CREATE+encourage the sense of marginalization / insecurity) -> us versus them -> isolation, only valuing subculture views, promoted distorted beliefs, detachment -> dependence (again). Recovery includes depression, anxiety, and feelings of loss.
WEANING
- Drug: medical intervention, therapy, support, relapse prevention
The thing is that those needs people are trying to fulfill with social media feeds are mostly real and legitimate. The problem is to find alternate, and better, sources of fulfillment. This is something you cannot talk into existence.
I disabled my YouTube watch history and installed Unhook. Combined, this essentially hides all recommendations, shorts, etc. I had tried blocking YouTube completely in the past, but it's a genuinely useful tool for learning and work. The new approach still lets me pull information while shielding me from the endless rabbitholes and passive consumption.
This advice is missing something crucial which is how to discover new creators sans feeds. Not saying it's impossible, but it's something they excel at and they've extinguished a lot of the old ways.
Yeah this is super key. I think it's still possible to highlight new creators without algos, one way is to just involve more (only) humans in the process. This is what we're doing at Twigg, effectively letting users decide what gets highlighted and elevated to the rest of our members. - Too early to say how it'll play out, but it seems to be working well soo far...
I feel like there are two approaches that are never gonna work: self-control and asking companies to change.
I think there is an obvious answer though: taking control of the algorithm via AI. I don't think we're there yet, but it's gotta be a matter of time until somebody makes a local AI agent that browses all these feeds and then filters them to your satisfaction (x% about politics, y% upbeat, z% violence, z% about video games).
I was thinking that, that what I'd like is an AI that knows me and I can ask what's out there I'd like to see and I can give it instructions. Not really just percentages but what's interesting for me which I guess requires quite a lot of knowledge of me.
This is such an interesting idea! - Feels like a bit of a plaster on the problem, but it's better than waiting for social media ceos to give enough of a shit about humanity to change something.
This post sounds like it wants to be a manifesto but really doesn't add up to much and lacks punch.
Getting away from the algos is untenable if you use the mainstream internet in any capacity. The trick is to be more intentional about gaming them to your advantage. My feeds usually surface things I value because I am deliberate about what signals I reinforce. I don't engage with content that outrages or upsets me, so it doesn't show me it. Some people are rage addicts and want to get into a doom loop because it fulfills their psychological sense of certainty that things will only get worse. Other people are ignorant of the algorithms and how they work so they never realize it is presenting a distorted picture.
Having varied pipelines for information intake is important too. Forums like this that are non-algorithmic, doing your own searches, visiting websites you like directly, all of this lends itself to that end. No need to go luddite if you like your internet things. Just be conscious of consumption.
I think a cool idea for future legislation may be to force social media companies like Youtube, Reddit, Instagram, X and Tiktok to allow users to easily disable machine learning-generated recommendations.
LinkedIn already has this feature and it's significantly reduced the amount of rage-inducing influencer hot takes that show up on my feed. You can also turn off your watch history to get far fewer recommendations on Youtube.
I still personally find LinkedIn and Youtube to be a net-negative on my mental health, but these settings have helped a lot.
I find Youtube amazing when you never leave subscriptions page (excluding all clutter such as community posts and short videos), just a list of videos from creators you find entertaining.
Reddit, in my opinion, is the absolute worst platform for this. It's incredibly easy to manipulate the appearance of consensus opinion. Also, the degree of power the individual moderators have on shaping conversations means instead of an algorithm choosing what you see, someone who spends up to 8 hours a day on Reddit chooses what you see. Lots of these moderators are not the sort of people who should have any place shaping conversations.
Absolutely. The known ease with which voting manipulation is possible and the lucrative incentives for motivated actors and organizations to do so, and the fundamentally flawed moderation structure are the two key issues that, unless they are radically changed, systemically compromise the integrity of the entire platform. This is the natural, inevitable state of a system such designed.
I wish Aaron Swartz were still here. Such an absolute injustice.
I don't think it's a flaw as much as the system is operating outside the intended design capacity. Imagine how sideways HN would go if nothing at all changed in the way the site operates, and it scaled up to 100x the userbase.
Reddit absolutely had issues in the early days (ie: violentacrez), but the issue was mostly a dogmatic concept of free speech, rather than the moderation, and manipulation now. When your subreddit's user-base in in the hundreds, or thousands, rather than millions, it's much easier to pin down bots, and bad actors.
Most subreddits tend towards complete bubbles, where anything that goes against the prevailing opinions gets down voted into oblivion or outright deleted by mods.
I used to think that the people who accused Reddit mods of being "power hungry" were overreacting and were just using that to deflect from their own bad behavior.
Then, weird things started to happen. Some of the things I would post/comment would only get one upvote, and my posts would frequently get immediately removed by an auto-mod. A year or so later, Reddit updated their UI, and the posts with one upvote had a message from Reddit saying they were intentionally hidden.
I conclude it's most likely a combination of subreddits auto-blocking people who post in certain subs, and in some cases the Reddit spam algorithm going completely off the rails. I think a few of my blocked posts criticized Reddit or another social media platform, but most weren't really that notable.
This might be obvious, but to me, it was an important realization that a lot of subreddits that deal with, say, chronic health issues, are going to skew towards people who have extreme conditions. People who get better aren't necessarily going to want to be hanging around in such spaces.
Even subreddits that don't deal with health conditions are going to skew a certain way over time just as a result of who hangs out there all the time and who is accepted, so the "reality" you see in a subreddit is not necessarily the true reality of the greater population. (Again, this should be obvious, but it's easy to forget this when you start reading a reddit post and thinking, "I don't agree with all these people, but there are many people with this opinion. Should I be thinking more like they do?")
Even so, reddit is a huge echo chamber. The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do. And the upvote system encourages groupthink. Votes being hidden on HN I think is excellent.
> The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do.
That's true of any real community in the physical world, too.
I'd go as far as saying that it's impossible to have fully inclusive and 100% objectively fair community that's also interesting, or even a community. It's not how humans operate, it's not what they want from a community, and even trying to enforce this "perfection" would require infinite resources feeding an omnipresent bureaucracy to moderate perfect order and compliance into people.
I would disable all short videos in the feed on every platform because they are completely useless but it is not possible in these apps.
I can't remove the apps because I might need them to check something important or write someone, so I forced to use my willpower to skip these videos everyday.
Last year I realized I could block things on facebook with the ublock ad blocker. Now when I go to facebook there's a clean empty page and I can navigate to just what I want to see. If you're using something app based that won't work though
For the past year or so I've only been watching YouTube in private browser windows to avoid getting too stuck in an algo niche. Sometimes I'll have the window open for a few days at a time and build up different interests in the recommendations. Eventually either an unplanned restart or intentionally closing the window makes me start from scratch.
Its especially interesting recently as Youtube encourages you to search for something before giving you recommendations, so you get to "seed" your session with topics you like. If nothing comes to mind I'll just start with Practical Engineering and go from there.
The only downside is that I can't "like" content to help the creators, since I'm not logged in
YouTube for me as a search results never a destination. And my search browser is anonymous. It clears all data when I exit. If I could "like" content without logging in I would - but I can't.
I’ve turned off all my social media feeds and use Tapestry now which presents posts from some of them in pure chronological order. This include this site, Bluesky, RSS feeds, YouTube and more. I am enjoying it a lot.
I no longer see Facebook, Instagram or X and I’m okay with that.
`We don’t all have the freedom, interest or willpower to delete social media from our lives entirely.`
i am really against this notion. why do we have to surrender ourselves to this forced reality. i really don't find any other beneficial use of social media except of advertise and making profit. (personally i see it immoral to feed this evil machine and run away).
so the only real solution is to delete social media altogether or don't tap on user's backs and guide them to more moderate use because it doesn't makes a difference.
exactly... can confrim it's possible to live a normal fulfilling life after deleting Facebook, then twitter, then IG, then reddit as each transitioned from fun to ad/propaganda platforms. it's sad to see the addict brain justification "I literally can't delete it because $reason" become an immutable truth.
Similar criticism was made of television: "The great thing about television is that it's so passive." - Ted Turner (TBS, CNN). A sizable fraction of the population has a TV on all the time.
His more important point is that recommendation algorithms combined with replies create terrible conversations. That helps explain why it's so hard to discuss anything complicated on social media.
I have two thumb rules about social media scrolling:
1. Use social media at only one particular time of the day. Inside a strict time window. That's it. Even if you are sitting idly on a car, traveling, or even standing in a queue for something, don't open the scroller app. Just be. Even if you are sick and in bed, don't open the scroller. Make a conversation, read a book, watch a movie, listen to a talk, but never open the scroller. This I learned from Cal Newport, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I will say this has made my life better. And if you do this for some months, you will like the changes in your brain.
2. Don't consume any content without premeditated intent. Don't aimlessly scroll, ever. This point is there in the OP. I scroll a particular FB group only for ~10 ninutes a day. I scroll my very narrow CS/Math/Programming YouTube account for ~15 minutes and add videos to Watch Later. That's it.
I would pay tons of money for control of the algorithms. It’s annoying I can’t tell YouTube, twitter, etc. what type of content I want to see, what I do not, the frequency, etc.
The complete lack of control by users of their feed makes Feed Providers publishers imo. Give me control or take responsibility for the content.
Read Filterworld by Kyle Chayka (<https://bookshop.org/p/books/filterworld-how-algorithms-flat...>); it's a fine enough read, and while I thought myself already avoiding a lot of algorithmic stuff, he did a good job pointing out the places where I was still being dictated to (e.g. what businesses a map surfaced, what flights the search engine promoted). His discussion of tastemakers and curation were the most interesting part, I thought, and in particular how algorithms push toward the boring.
>Taste is an abstract, ineffable, unstable thing. A listener to music or reader of a book cannot truly tell if they will enjoy something before they experience it; pleasure in a piece of art is never guaranteed. So when encountering an artwork, we immediately evaluate it by some set of mental principles, and, hopefully, find the beauty in it, feel affirmed, even if we can't quite describe what that beauty is or how exactly we determined it in the first place. Taste is supposed to be ambiguous. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben summarized in his 1979 monograph on taste, "Taste enjoys beauty, without being able to explain it."
and then
>As taste requires surprise, it also thrives on challenge and risk, treading too far in a particular direction. Safety may avoid embarrassment, but it's also boring.
and so
>The bounds of aesthetic acceptability become tighter and tighter until all that's left is a column in the middle. While popular styles shift, like moving targets, the centralization and normalization persist.
I suggested a few years ago an alternative business model for platforms[1]. Rather than selling ads, sell people the ability to filter. Buy some in-platform filtration either from a provider or from another user of the platform. It had been a particularly frustrating day.
If you're a longtime YouTube consumer, you know that the platform has become just as enshittified as Twitter or Instagram, jumping on the micro-attention infini-scroll band-wagon with YouTube Shorts.
My solution to the horrendous algorithmic recommendations that YouTube tees up these days is DF Tube (Distraction Free YouTube). It's a plugin available on the Firefox & Chrome app stores, perhaps others. As with all browser plugins, decide whether you're willing to trust the developer.
DF Tube goes the full mile by attacking the YouTube DOM and eliminating (with extreme prejudice) anything other than a search bar, a video, and core menu functions. That means the following are gone:
- Notification Bell
- Feed
- Autoplay
- Trending
- Comments/Live comments
- Related videos
I've actually been working on something tackling exactly this for a little while now. It's a social network where you post to your own curated tags, and people can follow any subset of those. So you can post both your "local small town history" and also "important cs papers", and those interested in either or both can follow as they choose. It's alts by default. And to start, it's focused on links.
Reverse chronological is sacrosanct and it will always remain ad free to keep incentives aligned with it being a place I like to spend time. Every tag also has its own RSS feed.
The basic idea with tags sounds very similar to Reddit. Especially with the initial focus on links. Reddit has degenerated into something a bit different, however. Why would your app stay true to the original concept in the face of scaling and financial pressure?
For one, the revenue model for lynkmi is user subscriptions rather than ads. I'm taking a hard stance on never doing ads as that distorts the incentives. I want the money to come from people who like the product.
Also tags are more personal like "tmoravec/cryptozoology" rather than a global "cryptozoology", so intentionally focused on keeping social circles smaller.
I agree with the sentiment that algorithms do affect what we see in our feeds and often the things we see are chosen because they are deemed more engaging by said algorithm, but I also think we're overstating the effects of the algorithms and putting too much blame on them. I think we need to recognize that the technology we've built is inherently addictive and also making human connections more impersonal.
If you took away the algorithms, I don't think you'd necessarily have a relaxing social media feed. You'd still have people sharing so-called "engaging" material and you'd still have to deal with "context collapse" and disagreeable discussions. I think the anonymous nature of online connections inherently make them more impersonal compared with actual face to face ones. And being constantly connected to other human beings digitally (even strangers) is incredibly addictive.
Well, I agree with you. I would add that in some ways this entire thread is an example of the problem it's trying to address. There is a kind of bubble here of virtue signaling how much you disable all recommendations or get off entirely of social media, unless it is only used some Correct, Zen sort of way. This acts a social contagion if you like and how the Correct Opinion is established. I think certainly for impressionable minds, it is quite problematic. For adults that have self-control, maybe it is good to have the feeds so you can test yourself? A lot of people talk about how their mental health has improved so dramatically now they follow the Correct Way and disable social media or whatever... that's good, I mean, I'm happy for them, but maybe it could help you establish mental resilience by facing those feeds without adverse mental health outcomes? I don't know.
I've mentioned this in another comment but the Freetube [0] client for YouTube has settings that let you hide pretty much every distraction apart from the video. You can even exclude videos in your search result if they contain a set phrase (great for avoiding political bait). I know there are extensions that do all these things but I find this to be a nice all-in-one solution, and the UI is more responsive too. (It does suffer from expiring sessions and the like though.)
The real issue is control. Facebook allowed you to go back to chronological view by appending &sk=chr to the URL, but they removed that safety valve at some point. Depending on context you may want to sort your feed chronologically, by relevance (which requires training or AI), or more exotic ways, but none of the platforms will give you that modicum of agency.
You also need filtering to remove the manufactured pop-culture dross like the Kardashians that is the new opium of the people.
Additionally, take action to shape your feeds to your desires rather than Big Tech's desires. Block buttons exist for a reason, as does the "don't recommend this channel" button on YouTube. Clickbait? People raging about politics who clearly have no desire to seriously consider the other side? Stupid memes that will do little to benefit your time? All of them get the chopping block.
As a space fan, I necessarily see a lot of people on Twitter who are blindly pro- or anti-Elon. Both types get blocked, not because I disagree with them but because I don't need that sort of rabid content in my feed.
Quick edit to add: block all parody accounts on Twitter as well. They almost never are actually worthwhile.
Also, did you know you can block advertisers on Twitter? It's very catarthic.
World can be a very futuristic experience, or it can be (almost) as it would be say 2005 or even earlier.
My parents and most of their generation experience it in a very similar way. I would say even despite missing out few cool things overall their life experience is better. Simpler, more positive.
I am aiming desperately for similar position. I dont care about coolest new tech unless i can/have to use it directly at my work. I stopped watching most of politics since there is no win there, just mental abyss. I know its sort of giving up, but I cant win this fight so why bother, just wait it out.
One effect I can see that comes with massive power - dont let orange man drag you into his pit of unstable misery, its like a black hole. Engaging with any related info has this effect. He is not exceptional in this, had exes with similar 'skill', but his power is a massive multiplier. Be stronger than him, for yourself and your closest ones.
Unfortunately, the Bluesky Discover feed is utterly garbage, seemingly insistent on pushing political content, especially of the resistlib variety, no matter how many times I give "not interested" feedback. It's essentially the mirror version of the twitter For You algorithm; less overtly heinous but still a deeply unhealthy engagement trap. You definitely have to use custom feeds and the other features, but the most prominent and easiest point of entry for new users is a drip feed of ragebait.
Recommendation for the EU, please force social media platforms to offer support for custom feed algorithms/plugins. If they don't offer them, ban them from the EU market.
Long term, once we figure out how to generate feeds that are aren't socially corrosive dumpster fires. Mandate platforms default to using one of a set of approved models (maybe we need a recommendation engine benchmark that scores social divisiveness).
You don’t need legal solutions for something that technology can fix. Agents can gather, filter, rank, and display information in a way that works for you. Gatekeepers control both the information and the interface, but agents take that control back—especially local agents, which offer privacy and freedom from restrictive oversight. LLMs can adapt endlessly in how they present information. There’s no need to disconnect entirely or remain at the mercy of tech companies. I suspect advertising is headed for a rough patch soon, as agents will slice through spam and ads.
> force social media platforms to offer support for custom feed algorithms
This sort of legislature could bankrupt a startup—and, by extension, discouragement investment—by driving them to pursue a technical achievement that's out of their league, and for potentially no reward.
I've a rudimentary familiarity with control systems, yes. Glad we're on the way same page!
I'm not satisfied with your response, but I'm losing my grasp on the analogy.
What are we dampening? Inertia, no? Imparted by the environment, and/or our own (fundamentally, inevitably) inaccurate thrust vectors?
It's a metaphor, so I guess we can only argue about the level of abstraction at which to apply it. I'm certainly glad I don't need to mutate and grow new internal organs just to cross the street, but I can be grateful for the mutation and growth of an ability to synthesize Vitamin D which allowed my ancestors to cross glaciers—two activities which are, arguably, helpful in maintaining homeostasis.
I think you might want to read up on the history of Japan post Warring States, to learn what happens when you priveledge "social stability" over innovation.
Wouldn't it be much better for the European Union to do what it would prefer which is to simply jail anyone that produces any content that doesn't follow correct opinions?
After watching the Technology Connections video, I realized that YouTube ReVanced has an option to default to the subscriptions tab rather than the home page. It doesn't seem that different in my case, but I probably am catching some things that I would have missed otherwise.
I remember years ago someone talking about the idea of "open algorithms" in the sense that for any given platform the sort algorithm itself could theoretically be made available for users to submit and share their own custom sorting implementations. A company could just release some DSL of config setup that would make it possible to tweak your own feed. Even if this was tricky, you can image users that were more technical creating algorithms that other users could apply.
I understand why this never happened (algorithms are, after all, optimized to the benefit of the company, not the user), but still it's a shame that this was never explored (at least not to my knowledge).
I think the whole custom sort DSL is swinging the pendulum back a bit too hard. People just want a deterministic sort, with no injected ads or hate-bait, from exactly the people they follow, with the ability to apply basic filters on top of that. You know, the old default, the one that was designed to be useful, not to extract maximum ad dollars from people’s eyeballs with vacuum tubes.
I've been building a simple RSS feed reader just for the purpose of taking back control of my attention. It allows me to subscribe to my favorite youtube channels, reddit threads, HN, etc. The best part is I can mute feeds and catch up later without the pressure of consumption. I've used it daily for years and don't anticipate going back to social media any time soon.
I've been thinking about this, to get rid of feeds I need something that will allow me to find posts and videos via related keywords. I want to be able to search for information by myself, but in this time, I need to be able to do it at scale. AI Agents that do research for me is a step in the right direction. Also, I think the platforms would resist this by trying to gatekeep information by all means necessary.
I regularly use Twitter's search function with "latest" reverse chrono results, to follow topics without following people, and it works fine. I have a few bookmarked to save the typing and adjust the searches occasionally to refine them, minusing out some word or person, or adding another term to drill in (see advanced search for a decent set of options.)
My point is, search still works. We don't have to take their feed, or even the feed we create following people. We can just search that shit out. And search results bookmarks in a folder work great for managing that.
There is a simple method not to kill FB's algorithm but to use it for your own good. Unsubscribe, unfollow and unlike every page or group. Fb will start showing you the best posts of some groups and, by your choices, you can 'drive' which groups are arriving on the feed. In the end you will receive the best posts from your favorite group of groups
Turned off "Discover" on my Android phone. Was weird first. I felt like I might miss out on something, some important bit of information. "Sometimes it does show me interested things" I thought. And, true, sometimes I get shown a scientific article that would missed otherwise.
But just like when I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts years back, I did not miss any important event.
This is spot on and exactly why I built digest. You bypass the algos entirely and are shown only what you want to see, not what the algos want you to see.
There will always be something dictating what you think until you really feel interested in actually thinking yourself and develop a critical and exploratory mindset. The active audience of this website probably is predominantly blessed with having this kind of mindset already but the general population probably lacks any incentive for developing it.
The general population figures out all kinds of complex things and loves it when tech provides solutions to those complexities. Commercials suck and Tivo flew off the shelves in part because of 30 second skip. Half of browser users have an ad blocker. No one was handed these by their Big Tech overlords, they sought them out and used them to fix their "feeds". Give people some credit that if we make good tools available, they'll avail themselves of those. The active audience of this website is probably capable of building some of those. So, get to it instead of lamenting the fall.
For most of my life I've generally relied on advice or information about potential sources from trusted peers and sources I know are reliable because they can and will back up their reasoning with reliable references.
So far that doesn't include any algorithms I've run into.
Cohost was an attempt to do exactly this, a chronological-only feed that just showed the users and tags you had explicitly decided to follow. And it died. Things aren't looking great these days.
I changed my to a write-only relationship with social media a couple years ago and I'm building an app called POSSE Party to help others do the same thing https://posseparty.com/
Maybe just don't use social media in general. I do have an X account which I want to delete. Other than that I don't have FB, Instagram, Tiktok or anything similar.
Social media is a cancer. It only benefits those who have the money to power the algorithms.
I found it helpful to create friction between you and algorithms, such as uBlock filter that blocks feed page and suggested videos panel. Harder to do so for apps, but Apple's screen time limits is a good place to start.
I enjoy YouTube but the algorithms get a little crazy after a while. I solve this be deleting my history every month. The algorithm then falls back to channels that I subscribe to or similar channels.
I'm in the midst of completing this using FreshRSS and a suite of open source apps that provide the capacity for making functional feeds of almost any kind of periodic content, supplied to me in chronological order, in a list of basic formatted text headlines that are not visually distinguished by anything other than the host favicon, or published cover image if I've toggled that view. I have moved most of my news, YouTube, and blog feeds and I feel less inclined to scroll endlessly, and it makes me more intentional about the things I want to follow versus the things I want to be vaguely aware of. It's been a little work, as a sysadmin I find this kind of self-hosting pretty natural, but I have found it worthwhile (and there are easier options, if maybe not so thoroughly decentralized, Feedly is what I recommend for folks less-inclined towards the nuts and bolts).
I haven't been on any kind of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter social network for several years now, I also encourage people to try giving it up for 2-3 months, and I wager that it will feel distinctly odd and uncomfortable if/when you return. From a naive person's perspective, social media is flat out strange. It's got its own culture, lingo, and social constructs that feel a little odd. It's easy to see how it might be manipulative in a lot of subtle ways. But I do admit I lost touch with some people whom I miss. Each person should find their own balance with algorithmically determined content feeds, but I am a firm believer it should be, on balance, less.
I collected all my URLs I visited and organized them into a few groups: daily, weekly, monthly. Then sent that to a LLM requesting creation of files for generating bookmark tabs for my browser. After import, I have a well organized personal data feed to cycle thru in an efficient manner. I review daily material once; weekly periodically. This helps me limit excessive scrolling.
disabling history on YouTube disables short feeds and recommendations on the home page. It takes 10 seconds and has saved easily thousands of hours and mental sanity.
Also, if you ever want to revisit a video, just use chromes history, but you'll find also this rarely happens if ever.
Seems like a mode of thinking that is appearing everywhere, not just on social media. Go to MOD Pizza. You can order any toppings you want--your favorites. Yet many if not most people will go through the menu of preselected toppings combos to see if there's one they'd like. This makes no sense to me.
Sometimes I just want to eat some food without making 50 decisions. I'm not a chef, I don't know what pairs well together. If picking my own toppings, I will end up getting a plain pepperoni pizza. If there is a pre-built combo that looks appealing, it gives me the opportunity to branch out a little more and maybe find something new I like.
I'm happy places exist that let people be a little more creative, or allow me the same if I'm in the mood, but it's not something I want all the time. I really like places where I can simple order a #4 without any substitutions and my order is done. Growing up as a picky eater, I caught a lot of flack as a kid for substitutions; my orders never felt easy like other people. I like when my order can be easy.
Interesting because I've always been the picky eater (in Western food) which is why ordering exactly what I like is especially appealing. You must have grown very weary of the substitution process.
That... does not seem analogous. MOD isn't giving you a personalized set of combinations they think you'd like, with the top recommendations happening to include some sponsored ingredient. It's like every other pizza shops since the dawn of pizza shops: fixed toppings menu or a build-your-own option.
Choices take energy. If there are curated defaults it's often more pleasant to save that energy for something else. And most people don't have a sole "favorite" choice that they'd go to every time vs trying variety. Heck, you could even spend more energy on deciding whether or not to go somewhere else entirely.
Algorithmic content feeds are a much more important battle to fight, but "spend more effort on every single other decision too" is not gonna put people in a place to want to be more selective. It'll tire them out more and make them more likely to just put on the default idiot box feed.
Freedom of choice isn't that freeing if you don't have time/money to actually permute through all the options to find what you like.
This is the actual reason why the door is continually held open for propaganda and centralized control. Decentralizing everything struggles with inefficiency problems.
The first person to really discover and popularize this was Edward Bernays — who invented Public Relations to help corporations and politicians weaponize this inefficiency. He kicked off the "Mad Men" of 20th century New York.
The introduction to Bernays's book "Propaganda" lays this out very clearly:
We will keep giving up control to centralized forces until we can share information freely and efficiently about what choices lead to better/worse outcomes in a decentralized way.
It is easier to communicate a pre-selected option (maybe with a change or two) than to order from scratch sometimes.
But ordering pizza and getting news have different stakes anyway, so I think these problems should be handled differently. It is reasonable to offload pizza topping decisions, but we should try to learn a bit about the actual positions/competencies of our elected officials.
If I'm going to MOD Pizza, I'm going because I want to eat something quick and easy. I'm not necessarily going there to maximize my pizza-eating experience. I honestly prefer picking something from the menu and maybe adding some extra toppings.
In general, I don't personally enjoy having to make decisions about particular ingredients when I go somewhere to eat. It's mental energy I don't want to have to expend. Not having any dietary restrictions, I personally prefer somewhere that offers a fixed set of items. I'd also say that when I was younger, I was afraid of making the wrong choices and didn't know what some ingredients were whenever I'd go somewhere that did have choices, so that added a little bit of anxiety.
The combinatorial space is huge, and when I scan through the _curated_ list, I expect the establishment to provide some options from that space that are Actually Good. Maybe something I wouldn’t usually go for calls out to me. It’s an idea generator.
There’s this concept of “babble and prune” (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/babble-and-prune) and I argue that for food (and probably most opinions…) the prune aspect is where your personal taste gets most expressed. So they are doing you a service by pre-babbling a set of options for you prune.
Maybe this framework can shed some sense :)
In other words: I’m just trying to get a good pizza, man, I’m not some kind of pizza artist.
This reminds me of the 90s trend for applications to boast about their customizable user interfaces, which meant you could drag panels around or choose what should appear on which menu ... but none of them provided a good user interface. Saying "you can make it any way you want it!" excused the devs from putting in any design effort.
I've been thinking about an ideal "algorithm" for myself.
I read a lot of online content, from all kinds of sources. Different types of content: short-form, long-form, memes, WaPo editorials, sports, politics, tech, stuff, weird stuff, off-beat, serious, rants, opinions, facts.
The most delightful experiences I've had is when something totally random pops in from someplace. It could come from anywhere, but I've noticed that the best surprises come from places like longreads.com, which collect good writing across a diverse set topics and sources. Pretty much all social platforms do a horrible job at this, and recommend content that is so similar to content I've already consumed that the additional value of that content is extremely low, often even negative.
I think the ideal algorithm for me would be randomly suggestions after filtering out the garbage. No ads disguised as journalism, no influencer content, no clickbait, no spam, no AI slop, etc. I would jump on a platform that does this immediately. Even better, if the platform allowed me to control the knobs on what I consider to be garbage and not garbage.
Based on the title, I expected some advice about how to actually eliminate some feeds. Instead, the article is basically some advice to focus less on the feeds. Regardless, I was inspired to check out Instagram's somewhat hidden "Following" tab, only to find that even when I explicitly ask to see posts from people that I'm following, literally every second post is "recommended for you" bullshit.
I don’t think most people would willingly allow someone to implant an electrode into their brains that could influence what they think with the world’s largest corporations pushing the button on the other end.
It sounds too invasive. To violating. Too extreme. Too much power in the hands of the button holder.
But this is effectively what we’re doing with our phones and watches in particular. It’s one of the reasons I’ve disabled notifications on almost everything.
I’m surprised there is never more acknowledgement of this. Just look around at the other people you see in public. If they aren’t actively walking, the phone is out, sometimes even while walking. You can’t really think deeply about your life and situation if every waking second is spent looking at brainrot social media. Even people with a nose buried in a book are trading precious time in their own mind developing their own thoughts for that to instead be filled with others words and ideas.
Socrates was even complaining about this, and it’s arguably far worse what is happening today than what he was seeing.
So while there is plenty of viral brainrot media out there, reading substantive material that promotes understanding or introspection looks almost the same. And it's more profound than what I'd be thinking about in the dentist waiting room or long hardware store line.
If you compare posts to food then a post with many likes is like hyperpalatable food, and a post with many likes that shows up in your feed is like a hyperpalatable food that the algorithm thinks you will like. Nothing wrong with the algorithm, it's the post that's the problem
The solution is very simple, just limit the like count of posts in your feed.
Just as a bit of a devil’s advocate thought process, isn’t reading a newspaper, magazine, or watching a TV station very similar in basic concept to an algorithmic content feed?
They’re more crude but it’s the same idea. You tell a company you like a general topic by choosing a channel, magazine, or section of the newspaper. They give you content that is curated. This curation is automatic and sophisticated in social media apps but is more manual in legacy media, but the idea is generally the same. At some point someone or something is taking a guess at what kind of content you want to see.
All of these forms of passive content involve advertiser influence just the same as social media algorithms.
Maybe algorithmic media isn’t always so alarmingly bad? Maybe it’s okay to have some downtime and just allow someone else to fill that time? It was acceptable for the comics section of the newspaper to waste some time in your day but it’s so harmful for for some silly meme content to do the same just because technology was involved in the latter.
Without online advertising most of the drivel would disappear.
There will still be communities and fringe opinion and that is healthy. You won't have content generated just to push advertisements alone which is not.
It's ironic that we're discovering this article from a feed. Sorry to tell you folks, but there's no defense against FOMO other than willpower. And the willpower is currently in short supply.
It's still very easy to catch up on the latest trends and developments and what people are building and talking about. Even though most of us kinda hate it, it does have weight.
It's pretty easy to learn from others. At what cost? I'm not willing to give up privacy. Maybe if there were paid social media services where users aren't the product. I might buy something like that.
I have heard this a few times now, what is going on? The news hasn't mentioned anything about Neo Nazis, and there is no large organized effort to round up the Jews, let alone exterminate them. This seems like hyperbolic language that is in really poor taste, which undermines the seriousness of what the second world war was fought over.
Okay. But, statistically speaking, America has a Neo Nazi population of 0%. It seems hyperbolic (at best) to saddle all Twitter users with that association, when it is a vanishingly small issue. Not to mention, Nazis actually murdered millions of Jews, so calling your ideological opponent a "Neo-Nazi", cheapens the memory of people who suffered at the hands of actual Nazis, and diminishes the effort that was mounted to defeat them.
Most of them are not actual Nazis against Jews. They're similar enough white supremacists, authoritarian and fascist, and they have some group to hate, be it leftists, trans or whatever (Nazis did start by killing those). But there's also real Nazis, even ones marching in towns in America.
Nazis also wore sharp looking outfits, and organized a military, and had youth-movements. WE do not categorize everyone who does those things as Nazis. Because Nazis were an actual thing, that exists in history, and were actually responsible for the extermination of millions of people.
Rounded to a whole number, America has a Neo Nazi population of 0%. Trying to imply otherwise is a cheap emotional manipulation that is shameful.
This is more of the same propaganda that is being discussed that social media creates. I'm surprised that you don't see it. You're making these claims like "vilifying immigrants", which is just virtue signaling that you have "all the Correct Opinions" regarding liberal politics. There are no concentration camps as those from the bad people you are referencing. Regarding immigration, would you refer to Obama as a member of the Third Reich? I doubt that you would, which speaks for itself. It's extremely hyperbolic and I don't think you realize how you implying that enormous amounts of people have no problem or even think it is quite a good thing for the government to be doing things that you are likening to a group that committed actual atrocities. If Mexico was an extremely successful economic powerhouse, or Uganda, whatever, do you think they would have unfettered immigration?
See, your comment is an example of the problem. This is the kind of propaganda that is peddled in these leftist social media channels, influencers, etc. It's not even that subjective, the ADL, who are not known not being sensitive enough, came out to say they did not these gestures were as you describe; of course they did not like Musk's humorous puns regarding the reaction but that is another matter.
The author sort of (but not really) acknowledges this midway through, but this is basically a summary of the most recent Technology Connections video, Algorithms are breaking how we think:
https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA
I'd rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration/source for this post at the beginning and explicitly, rather than just mentioning the video in passing midway through, but at least they do link to it!
I was definitely influenced to write this by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch.
I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work.
It's also intended as something you can link to your friends and family that might be a little more digestible than a 30 minute video.
>by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch.
I get what your advice is about but to add some nuance which didn't cover... you should consider that I learned of Alec's Technology Connections channel 9 years ago because the Youtube algorithm suggested it to me.
Why did Youtube do that? It was because I had watched Ben's Applied Science excellent video showing vinyl grooves under an electron microscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8
So the first Alec video I got exposed to was his related topic on vinyl records (click "Oldest" to see them) : https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/videos
I'd argue that the Youtube algorithm is very good at finding adjacent videos of interest especially in educational topics and DIY repair tutorials.
You're suggesting people go to Youtube subscriptions feeds but people have a list of favorites in their subscriptions often because of the algorithm. There's a bit of chicken-vs-egg situation going on there.
What a good algorithm does is help users with the Explore-vs-Exploit tradeoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...
- Explore --> Youtube algorithm sidebar recommendations of related videos.
- Exploit --> add a worthy creator to subscription feed and get alerted to new releases from that person
The "explore" part is helped by algorithms because they can suggest videos you would have never thought of because you don't know the keywords or jargon to type into a Youtube search box to get to it directly. "You don't know what you don't know."
But don't use the algorithm for politics or click on anything that has a thumbnail with the shocked Pikachu face. That just starts a feedback loop of crap.
Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
So... Algorithms can be bad ... but you can also make them work for you.
I agree with you almost completely. I never used YT as a content source until a few years ago - I’d never open the app and only watch videos linked or embedded / looking up a specific how to video. Now it’s different though.
I never go to my subscription feed - the front page algo keeps me up to date on any new content from people I want to see updates on. I’ve noticed too it almost has a “shadow subscription” where even though I am not subscribed to certain channels, it knows I watch every video by them so it gets on my front page too.
The front page really has a “vibe” that follows my interests around. Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more of the front page being those topics. Get a new interest in pyramids? Devlogs? Nature? The front page slowly decays old interests and promotes new ones.
Which is again why I don’t check my sub feed - it’s a graveyard of interests, many of which I don’t care about right now. The algo surfaces the ones I do.
> Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more
In my experience it's "watch one video outside of your recommendations and then half your next set of recommendations will be related to that". I'm scared to click on anything I'm not already subscribed to for fear of trashing the home page.
You can delete things from your watch history to clean up the algo. If I ever let a TV auto play for too long or have kids over watching things I go though and delete things I think will negatively affect the algo.
I feel like clicking a video and immediately clicking off is also a negative signal they use but YMMV.
You can (almost) always tell you're not interested in those videos and it slowly stops suggesting them. You can also ask it to never recommend a certain channel.
You can’t, however stop it from suggestion huge blocks of shorts or crappy free to play games.
You somehow must be able to, as everyone I know has feeds full of that sort of thing, and I've never seen even one short or game on my youtube home page.
Nope. You specifically can't disable shorts, no matter how much you want to - so much that YouTube Revanced has this feature.
> You specifically can't disable shorts
You can use the three dots to say "Not Interested" on the Shorts shelf but it only hides it for 30 days and then the insidious little worm comes right back.
Yes you can, with something like uBlock Origin, or even a simple stylesheet override.
Sadly not available when using the Apple TV to watch YouTube. If there's a NextDNS / PiHole method that stops YouTube ads, I could probably implement that...
If you have to go outside of youtube you modify its behavior, that doesn't really qualify as "you can make it stop". That's like saying you can make someone stop shooting you by wearing a Kevlar vest.
What a silly comparison.
Seems perfectly apt to me. Javascript/CSS are also no solution at all on mobile devices.
One is pixels on a screen and the other is bullets in your torso. Can you explain how that's apt?
But yeah, I do apologize for trying to offer solutions, as they are not perfect.
(Pretty sure uBlock works mobile too, but that's irrelevant)
I tried this for games and shorts, but something about their HTML changes enough that they keep reappearing. I absolutely despise shorts
Yeah they tweak the HTML enough that static stylesheet overrides can become outdated real quick. Very annoying. It's been a while since I looked, but there probably is some uBlock Origin filter list that'll handle this and will stay fairly up-to-date.
In all honesty I had no idea YouTube had a sub feed until you mentioned it. I still don't know how to access it, but the home page more than suffices for me.
My interests vary so widely that my home feed is awful. I like watching videos on power tools, software development, video games, sports highlights, math, and other, less focused things like the hoard of cat video channels I sub to to keep existential dread at bay.
I get recommended right leaning videos and videos with ads for manscaped and I'm neither a conservative or a man. It's super weird so I tend to separate my interests into two apps: the YouTube web app for "junk food content" and FreeTube when I want to learn and focus. It's the only way I've found to not be fed the random content carrots while falling down the rabbit hole.
I manage to keep a pretty diverse set of topics.
Right now my homepage seems to be
- construction/DIY videos (Perkins, B1M, Megaprojects, Matt Risinger, NS Builders)
- video game dev (blackthornprod)
- "indie game of the day" channels (Aliensrock, Nialus)
- military videos (Battleship New Jersey, Ryan McBeth)
- freerunning / urban exploration (STORRER)
- movie & tv analysis / commentary (Frame Voyager, Corridor Crew, New Rockstars)
- chess (agagmotor, Magnus)
- Minecraft (Mumbo Jumbo)
- random documentaries (fern, Stewert Hicks, Half as Interesting)
- egypt / pyramids (History for GRANITE)
- science / engineering (Adam Savage, Colin Fruze, Applied Engineering)
- coding (Tsoding)
From just a quick scan of the topics / channels.
Youtube disrespects any person that is multilingual. They shove AI translations into our faces because the content creator is responsible for disabling it not the user. Instead of German videos I get German videos with English AI audio. I keep getting videos from the same game I always ignore or say not interested on my front page.
Youtube wants my money. They will never get my money when they come up with things like that. I will give them my money once they start cracking down on ads. And by that I mean actual moderated ads - not random ads with porn. As long as they serve scam ads I will never give them money - and it does not look like I will in my lifetime.
Paying them money removes all ads though, scammy or not. And they just announced their lower priced tier, although I think not all genres are ad-free.
Ad blockers do the same and will be my choice. It is their choice to not moderate their main business. It is their choice to disable monetization on history, ..., people who say fuck in the first minute.
Is it that hard to look at all the BS and say - no not my money?
But most of the channels I'm interested in have "in video" ads (ads put there by the creator rather than Youtube, I don't know the industry terminology) that remain even if you pay for Youtube Premium.
I wish Premium provided some way for me to predict how many of these kinds of ads are in a video I am considering watching (e.g., by requiring the creator to tell YT how many there are and imposing consequences on creators that lie) but YT does not.
Those are sponser segments and I have no problem with them. These videos can be expensive to produce and these people need to support themselves still. If you take away or reduce their ad revenue, how do we expect them to survive?
There is an extension called SponserBlock that will automatically skip them and other marketing / time wastes. Otherwise I just skip ahead (the highest peak in the watch graph playbar at will usually be the end of the segment)
>If you take away or reduce their ad revenue, how do we expect them to survive?
I want YT to pay them out of what I pay for YT Premium.
They do, and its a pittance.
Yeah, pro/anti "algorithms" is too reductive, especially since the old status-quo was also an algorithm of people and processes.
I'd rather use a lens more like all the open-source/free-software concerns about controlling your own computer:
1. Can I see how the recommendation algorithm is intended to work? The site-owner says it works for my benefit, but what if they're mistaken, or lying?
2. What has it recorded about my interests, and how can I fix bad records that don't represent them?
3. When it's not working well--or harmfully exploiting my baser weaknesses--how can I change to a different one?
Kind of comes down to one of Neil Postman's questions
"Whose problem is it that it solves?"
It's possible to get some benefit from an algorithm/process, just as a side effect, that was never designed to work in your interest and is an opaque cloud service. Maybe the service is solving the network owner's problem of selling you to advertisers. If you want to maximise for "interest and relevance to my life goals" there's nothing to stop you running your own "algorithm" of course, except any obstacles put in your way by the data network owner. For that reason it's more important to pay attention to the freedom of the network (open API, federated, maximally distributed etc) than the algorithms that run on it. If you control the former you control the latter. HN (the network) seems to allow a lot from the plethora of viewers I've seen.
This seems like the perfect place to once again recommend "Amusing Ourselves To Death" :-)
I also read "Technopoly" recently, and while it didn't have quite the same impact on me, I can't deny that it accurately describes the techno-political moment we're currently living in. Well worth the time.
I started using Youtube as a frequent content source in the past year. I've been aggressively curating my recommendations by clicking "Not interested" on anything I don't want to see a lot of. If I'm curious I'll watch the one video but in Incognito. If a channel gets repeatedly re-recommended I don't hesitate to use "Don't recommend channel". I also +like everything I've watched and subscribe to channels I'll more likely watch than not watch new content. Getting recommendations pruned feels like getting to a zero email Inbox.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work like that. If you say "Don't recommend channel", the channel may in fact be recommended and similar channels will definitely still be recommended. "Not interested" works even less accurately.
IME, Not interested at least prevents that single video from showing in my feed. It may reduce similar content from same or other channels--I see some reductions. Don't recommend channel always works for me as far as I noticed, except in search results which seems correct. I never expected it to not recommend similar channels, e.g. I filtered out Linus Tech Tips but watch similar content.
It probably helps that I only permit a handful of specific topics: physics, fun math, synthesizers (but not modular), tiny bit of music theory/training, StarCraft 2 (not SC1/BW), and recently the Nvidia/AMD GPU release saga.
> Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
This may also be an artifact of the fact that you are the sort of person who seeks out educational content. I.e. you have a high need for intellectual stimulation. That makes you an outlier among all people who use social media.
Personally I think technical people underestimate the negative impacts of the models that drive the algorithms. We are basically training humans via a reward function that maximizes watch time. We are also heavily correlating errors in knowledge because popular stuff gets boosted so much. Correlated errors are bad for rubustness.
One point to observe here is that there’s a difference between a “related content” section when viewing specific content and the more general algorithmic feed that is designed to be the primary mode of discovery and interaction.
Thanks, this is an important nuance. Recommendation algorithms are absolutely useful, and if you're so inclined you can absolutely make them work for you, but this is about making educated, conscious decisions about what you click next in your 'Related videos' section.
Algorithmic feeds don't give us that opportunity - they're designed to require minimal effort and to keep the dopamine coming without any conscious decisions.
RIYL: Tom Scott's There Is No Algorithm For Truth [1] delivered to the Royal Society in October 2019.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU
The issue is that algorithms are like a casino for your time.
We all know that gambling addicts exist and how destructive it is to their lives, the casino exploits behaviors and gets all their money. As a result people know casinos are dangerous, reasonable people avoid them, are warned about them, and the government forces regulation to reduce their ability to exploit vulnerable people.
Imagine if none of these controls existed and nobody talked about or generally knew that casinos were dangerous. Imagine if the casinos were 100x better at exploiting you and you were forced to walk through a casino every time you leave your house. You’d get a lot more people having their lives destroyed.
So what this video tries to do is important, naming the term, “algorithmic complacency”, allows it to be recognized, discussed, and actively kept in check by users. Ideally regulated by the government as well, just like casinos.
The casino also provides a service, entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with a reasonable person attending, spending some money and being entertained. But we as a society recognize that a company exploiting behaviors to get all of a person’s money, is bad, and try to limit that negative outcome even though we still allow casinos to exist.
Time, attention, and focus is so abstract people don’t even realize they’re spending it, or how modified their behavior has become because of the algorithm’s exploitation. As a result we let companies who are 100x better at manipulation than casinos operate without so much as mentioning they’re doing it, and steal increasing amounts of a user’s time.
I dislike any politics or clickbait too and it doesn’t come back.
I have no complaints about my Instagram and YouTube feeds. They give good recommendations.
My only complaint is that it doesn't encourage enough innate curiosity. I am disincentivized from clicking on some things precisely because their recommendation engine is so tightly wound that I'll get bombarded with really tangential content for days or weeks after. Let me click a few videos about a topic before assuming I'd been hiding a lifetime passion for '80's John Deere combine trans-axle repairs that I need itched almost exclusively to within an inch of its life, all because I thought that guy in the thumbnail might get squished, and didn't adhere to my better angels. Besides that, it's pretty, pretty neat. Not great not bad. I can recommend farm machinery repair YouTube--it is a vibrant community of delightful weirdos and incredibly smart folk who talk about software more than you'd think.
You're basically training their advertising model for them, so yay for the Algorithm, I guess.
> I dislike any politics
TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political.
I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically.
But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content.
I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.
good, they should sprinkle socialist values in. what's the other option, passive acceptance of capitalist exploitation? people need to be educated.
You may want to do some basic background reading on what socialism actually is.
People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model.
Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure.
Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore.
But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.
>People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model...
Yes. This is what people in the US mean when they say socialism in general conversation. They don't mean pure Socialism as Marx talked about it. Similarly when people say the US is a democracy, we know they don't mean it's an actual pure Democracy where everyone votes on every issue.
Yes with the pedantic caveat that those aren't similar in the sense that one is a common confusion and the other is correct.
The Nordic model is the sort of economy and political structure that the 19th century socialists explicitly reacted against and rejected. It's a representation of mainstream liberal democratic theory not of socialism.
On the other hand democracy was always understood to be representative because you can't make every decision by plebiscite.
It has to do with being accurate rather than being "pure".
Words evolve with time and usage. If someone said they were gonna send you a mail, would you expect an actual paper letter or an email?
These particular words haven't evolved in any meaningful way in the last century or so. If anything socialism now refers exclusively to revolutionary/militant utopian socialism whereas it had more varied meanings long ago. That's probably largely an artifact of the fact that socialism since the early 1900s has mainly been promoted by socialist countries after a revolution.
Go on a socialist forum and ask them what they think about markets or mixed economies. E.g.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/w03n2p/what_...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/19558...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/19ewm26/can_...
- https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+socialism+mixed+econo...
It's harder to search other socialist forums like the darknet ones, but you see the same patterns there
> version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US
This oversells what China is. China is were government and oligarchy are in a strange symbiosis. Capitalism is worse in China in many ways. You are more free in China to exploit others on a large scale. H1B Visas seems to be an authorian idea to me and something that is heavily exploited in China.
What the US and China have in common is a strange kind of nationalism that I can not define, might be because I come from a smaller country.
You are maybe thinking of something called "Authoritarian Capitalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_capitalism
All socialist states have been functionally authoritarian oligarchies in practice. I'm unaware of an exception. Someone once claimed Yugoslavia was, but I'm not familiar enough with it to have an opinion.
It's also confusing because there's the notion of State Capitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism#Maoists_and_a...) that I believe Marx also wrote about but I don't remember the details off hand. I think this may more or less be the same idea as authoritarian capitalism, but it's also what socialist regimes eventually look like when they realize they need to re-introduce markets to prevent economic collapse.
My take is that the idea of socialism, communism, and capitalism are deeply muddled in theory and even more muddled in practice. Muddled or not, we have people who consider themselves socialists and followers of Marx, their theory is incoherent, and in practice they try to spread violence and destroy any country they take over. We don't really have people clinging to capitalism in the same way, although some right wing factions in the US tried in the 70s during the cold war to make a capitalistic sort of political religion modeled after the success of socialism.
We'd be better off not having to deal with any of these concepts except for the fact that some people have a strong allegiance to these concepts and there's no changing that in the short term. To me it's a bit like when people killed each other over ideas like how to interpret the tripartite Christian God. Is the son a separate person or the same person, and how does the holy spirit fit in? You get an entire tree of ideas, most of which eventually became heresies punishable by death. None of them made any sense but that didn't stop it from being a motive historical force.
You talking to a member of the DSA buddy. I read about this shit all day. Also, whenever an american uses the word "authoritarian" it is extremely unclear what they mean, usually it means "bad" because they have no principled way to identifying democratic or undemocratic procedures. Most Americans have barely experienced any democracy in their lives at all, just voting every once in a while for canned choices.
In today's ChatGPT age, I'm sure people are attempting to build contextually aware alternatives to feeds?
Something that will filter out the anger, but keep the insight. I vaguely remember someone posting about a tldr for twitter. Anyone know of tools like that?
I'd be very skeptical of applying anything we knew about the YouTube algorithm 9 years ago to it, or any algorithm, today.
Google, Facebook, and the other algorithm-driven tech companies have been aggressively enshittifying their products at least since 2020. "I got fun/useful videos out of the YouTube algorithm in 2016" says nothing about what that algorithm is like in 2025, given that they can change it silently on a whim.
sharing similar ideas is never stealing. Your vantage point is unique and everyone should be espousing their take on the lack of agency running our lives these days.
Don't feel bad about it. He wasn't the first person to point this out, it was pointed out much earlier than his video. It's enough that you cited him and gave credit.
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Hey, that's not fair. We all engage with other people's ideas all the time, no one is really a unique thinker. The best model I have for intellectual activity is that it's a multiple-millennia-long conversation between people over generations.
The main thing is that it's important to acknowledge who it is that you're replying to and to be very clear about to what degree you're synthesizing their thoughts versus contributing your own. But we're all derivative thinkers in the end, even those of us who get famous for original thinking.
> We’re all derivative thinkers in the end
Some more derivative than others.
If someone is going to expound on unique thought, I’d hope they live in a cave in the woods making unique cave drawings with their feces or riding a pale green elephant wearing magnetic boots upside down within a large refrigerator.
If you want to really be a unique thinker, sure you can listen, and aggregate, summarize, but don’t regurgitate.
Can you just link the video at the very top and indicate in the first paragraph that you were directly inspired by the video? It's only fair.
This video is overall better in terms of emphasis, and goes into how to use tools available to intentionally curate the media that you choose to consume as a primary method, rather than it being hidden in a list.
I tried watching that video, but found it to be pretty bad. The beginning was good - demonstrating how much information we have at our fingertips, yet don't use. But then it veers off into what feels like a lot of personal frustrations he has - with the replies he's gotten at BlueSky, with politics, with the media, etc., and it feels like he's using algorithms as an excuse to vent against things he doesn't like.
The worst part is, it feels like he's making the same mistakes he's warning others about yet doesn't even realize it. He claims the bad BlueSky users are the result of algorithms, but doesn't (from what I can tell) see that his problem is that he's paying attention to a feed that brings those people to him. He complains about social media turning everything into a monolithic good vs. evil outrage generator, but then he does the exact same thing when talking about the New York Time's Canada editorial. You can say he's justified in that, but isn't everyone going to believe that they're the exception and that their outrage is justified?
I've seen this kind of criticism before, where it feels like someone is captured by something, can't escape it, gets annoyed by certain elements of it, and then creates a criticism of it that's more about venting their personal frustrations than actually escaping it (since they can't see how trapped they themselves are).
I find this claim unlikely, since there have always been crazies on the internet, and main issue is that a single crazy person can be online 24/7 with an output that dwarfs a dozen normal people.
Alec also cited this video as at least a partial motivator for his video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNOol5OTasw
It focuses on the harmful nature of infinitely scrolling content. Cutting out all infinite scrolling apps has had a hugely positive effect on my productivity and mental health.
How does HN fit into that? I’m not trying to be cheeky, I’m genuinely interested, HN is technically an infinite website (though you do have to click “More”) yet you’re here.
Do you use the noprocrast settings? Does HN just fit differently into your brain? Something else?
One difference is that HN uses a ranked list. You can generally count on things getting less salient the farther you “scroll.”
It’s the same way that infinitely-scrolling Google results don’t have the same effect as infinitely-scrolling content chutes, which exploit the hunch that there might be something gold just around the next swipe…
I think the 'More...' link at the bottom is definitely invoking the same hunch.
Maybe! To me it’s more of a “OK, that’s the end of the important stuff, this way to the also-rans if you’re extra bored today”
There's a bit of a mental difference between being able to (literally) endlessly swipe up to the next tiktok vs having to click the next button on hn though.
Definitely, but as you said, it's only a bit.
Things like hn or old.reddit still carry most if not all of the negative effects of infinite feeds.
What I would give credit to hn for is that being text only, it forces you at least to think a bit and not blindly consume a video for example.
On HN, at least, once I get a few pages in I usually realize I’m just seeing articles from a few hours/days ago. I know then it is time to take a break.
It isn’t infinite the same way TikTok will or YouTube used to keep playing something you haven’t seen yet.
It is not the same for sure. But it is still not harmless imo.
How you justify your addiction is entirely up to you though ;)
A few years ago I set up a ublock filter to hide the next/more buttons on hacker news and reddit. It works great because I can still get my news fix, but I can't scroll endlessly.
Ublock Origin: ! 2020-10-11 https://news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com##.morelink
I'm sure Alec would celebrate that his ideology, which is also not original, is spreading.
Steve jobs said computers are a bicycle for the mind. Falling off a bicycle without a helmet is a great way to become a donut. Maybe computer users need helmets too. Please join me in abusing this metaphor.
Great video, but this is something lots of people have been talking about for over a decade.
In the spirit of the video (and the article), I'm watching this on Freetube [0] while hiding the comments, recommended videos tab, and pretty much everything else apart from the video description.
[0] https://freetubeapp.io/
… and you are watching it because the HackerNews algorithm put this link on the top of its feed.
No algo, but upvotes plus some curation from @dang.
Technology connections is great. I've never been more excited to listen to a man talk about dishwashers for 20 minutes.
This is exactly why I describe HN as “my home on the internet”
These are my fellow people that will happily watch a 20 or 40 min video about how dishwashers work, or his more recent video about replicating old style Christmas lights.
I tried box detergent because of his dishwasher video, and that's probably saved me hundreds of dollars at this point, with the added benefit of my dishes actually get cleaner.
I also dumped a crappy beverage cooler in my office for a cheap as hell box mini-fridge, which actually maintains temperature enough that I can store cream for coffee and ice down here, and it uses less energy then the unit before.
Still can't find powder where I am. It's all tabs. I need that prewash, dammit!
In the UK the only supermarket I can find that sells powder (after trying lots) is Sainsbury's.
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-conce...
I asked in Tesco and the young lad who worked there (probably 18-19) had never heard of it.
I still dispense it from a Finish powder bottle I've had for more than a decade.
I just cut off a slice of tab (using one of the dirty knives) and throw it in the bottom of the dishwasher before starting it.
You’re still paying the premium for tabs.
Malgorhitms are. We could, if we didn't confuse use it with LoTR entities, have belgorhitms, which would not only be recommended by Kahneman & Tversky, but also recommend by intelligence analysts, the historical opposites of corporate analysts, minions Belegron.
Algorhitms, "changing how one thinks" is real, and ultimately good. The social changes, when they start expecting you to Anki your work contract (which would, if the Anki was monitored, be highly legally effective against you); or requiring you know Kellyed Bayesian decision theory because that's a prequsite for getting reasonably priced insurance, or simply, surviving, that is unknown. I give 37.7% confidence Elon Musk was gaming in 2025 U.S. politics using construct akin to a Bayesian decision tree.
It would be great if one didn't have to change how one thinks, whether they delve into CLRS or TikTok.
Thanks! I immediately thought of the TC video when I saw the title, and wondered if there was a point to the article beyond the video.
Since they already reference Technology Connections in the article, and since this is a great essay but not new ideas, let's also call out other important voices - in particular Shoshana Zuboff's "Surveillance Capitalism", Cory Doctorow, and the many others who have put their backs into helping us understand how these sick systems work.
Social media has really proven that phrase that "the medium is the message", which I remember long ago thinking was a little odd and not obviously true.
With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this:
We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasoning.
So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.
> So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.
For what its worth, 500 years ago people were just as worried about books as we are today about newsfeeds. But it took a long time for books to ultimately decentralize enough to become a more egalitarian, community knowledge. But even that's not entirely the case now. Books can be propaganda just like everything else.
Books can be terrible, but they can be good to a level that (most popular) social media can't, due to the limitations of the medium.
Without long text, to a good approximation, you just can't convey long, multi-step reasoning chains at the limit of human intellectual capacity.
Personally I've started reading again much more recently, and it's done wonders for what's going on inside my head. I was feeling so dull! I can only recommend it.
The problems with social media aren't its capacity or limitations - it absolutely can be at least as good as books for long-term, coherent narrative building and multistep reasoning. The problems are the incentives against using social media for fostering and sharing deep experiences and thought. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent yearly promoting disposable, reactionary content, at the expense of robust, complex work that's risky to create and takes time to engage with. The moneymen want the money now, their future selves and their own children be damned.
I don't know about that. Your analysis is correct in that it's ultimately about business incentives, but those incentives lead businesses to choose certain formats over others, thus promoting certain kinds of content.
It seems very far fetched that an app that looks like HN might become as popular as TikTok, and that's because the TikTok format is excellent at creating something that pulls people in by delivering short term rewards.
I'm not a Luddite, I'm sure there are some creators out there making clever tiktok videos, but that format really isn't conducive to, as you say, "long-term, coherent narrative building and multistep reasoning".
It's also common to think that you should only read non-fiction and that fiction is a waste of time, but I absolutely don't agree. Fiction is amazing and it'll help your reasoning, creativity, helps give perspective on things, and improves your outlook on life in a way that non-fiction has a very hard time to do.
Non-fiction is very good for other reasons and it's good to aim for a healthy mix of the too I think.
Yes! This so much! In my circles, I have seen a tendency to perceive fiction as a kind of low-brow, less intellectual reading. But then these people go on and pick up self-help non-fiction books.
Fiction has so much more to offer! On top of what you wrote, fiction helps you to develop an ability to put yourself in others' shoes. Empathy is anyway scarce in this politically-charged and ragebait-filled world.
Fiction has helped me develop empathy and to stay empathetic. It has helped me develop my philosophy of life; morals and values I strive to stay close to. The fictional characters have given me courage during hard times. And so much more.
Lot of people prefer to start with self-help kind of non-fiction which is, IMO, the least helpful category of books. I don't know what draw people to it.
I agree, but struggle to find fiction books to read. Most of my reading just consists of a historical period / event that I find interesting and read more about. From that I sometimes come across an "alternate history" type fiction book, but not much else. What do you do for discovery?
> What do you do for discovery?
Walk into a library or bookstore. Pick up something that looks interesting (LITERALLY judge a book by its cover for this) and start reading right then and there. If the book doesn't capture your interest immediately, maybe skim a little bit, or just move on to the next book. Also, ask trusted friends that know you well for suggestions.
You have to first know what your own particular tastes are, and afterwards, do the harder steps of understanding why you like what you like, and expanding your horizons. Once you get to the point where you both know what you like and start to know why you like it, discovery just solves itself. Eventually, you'll be able to tune into any random discussion about a book or author, and discern from context whether or not the works in question are for you, even if you don't share the opinions of those you're listening to.
I'm currently in a big fantasy phase so what I've done is search for "best fantasy series", "most underrated fantasy series", gone through r/fantasy, and "books similar to X" type of searches.
I've also listened to some YouTube channels who review or go through books they've read. Of course it's important to find someone who have similar taste to you or you'll have a bad time.
On the point of "alternate history" I'll throw out "Matt's fantasy Book Reviews" YouTube channel where he also has some alternate history type books he brings up from time to time.
I never understood this mentality, you can justify literally anything by saying "they thought X was bad but now X is OK, so we can't say Y is bad"
The scale and pace of modern changes have absolutely nothing to do with what we witnessed thousands or even hundreds years ago. Word of mouth in 1700 can also propagate propaganda but no one is going to argue 1700s word of mouth propaganda is "the same" as foreign propaganda being served straight to your citizen through third party services 24/7
All propaganda isn't created equal either. If 99% of the news you get comes from the state owned journal and the state owned radio you're drinking your own Kool aid, if the propaganda comes from a foreign source straight to your population through third party services you have a whole bunch of different problems
Just because before people had a concern and were wrong, doesn't mean if we have the same concern now we'll be wrong again.
I think the opposite, just like we used to tell people to "go read a book", now we'll tell people to "spend some time with an AI" to get cultured. The more AI time the better for your education.
I don't think "go read a book" has really generalized in this way
"Go Read a book" was really meant to be synonymous with "Go educate yourself"
No one really says "Go read a blog" or "Go read your facebook feed" the same way, at least as far as I know.
I sure hope "go spend more time on social media" or "go talk to an AI" never becomes synonymous with "educate yourself". I shudder at the thought
it's cheaper (2025) and more reliable to recommend someone surf Wikipedia than "getting cultered with AI"
My kids read plenty and I am indeed always telling them to "go talk to the LLM". It's more work than reading (I suspect), they have to engage more with the topic - ask good questions.
I don’t even let my kids watch YouTube. Imagine what an llm could hallucinate to impressionable minds.
Edit (addition):
How the fuck did we decide that a large language model somehow became artificial intelligence? It’s like claiming a dictionary is intelligent. I just don’t get it.
If someone told me to “spend some time with an AI” I just wouldn’t spend any more time with that person. What a nightmare.
the phrase you're looking for is touch grass
Books can be propaganda, certainly. However, books promote long attention span. Social media generally removes that aspect and focuses on dopamine hits. It’s hard to condition critical thinking when jumping from one truth sentence to another truth sentence without context.
You can brainwash yourself with some wild sh*t if you spend too long in the wrong heads/books.
"Go consume this form-factor because it's better" has always bothered me.
No doubt. However, I didn’t focus on any of that. It’s also not the premise of the article. The premise of the article is “don’t remain in your echo chamber, don’t trust just because it fits your narrative, step out and confront the world”.
Yeah. Just as an exhibit every radicalized leftist "reading theory". Whoo boy talk about epistemic closure.
What's weird about the kind of responses in this thread stating "books" or whatever "can also be bad so social media is no different" is that it's not as if we don't already have data about this. We have a lot of data on the outcomes of people that spend time reading books vs people glued to social media, regarding attention spans, etc. The proof is in the eating, we don't have to speculate about hypotheticals.
> The Licensing of the Press Act 1662 (14 Cha. 2. c. 33) was an act of the Parliament of England with the long title An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1...
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I highly recommend reading Marshal McLuhan's book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man from which that phrase originates (and not just a Wikipedia summary, different medium after all!)
And as a follow-up, Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization.
Where McLuhan argues technologies shape worldviews, Mumford argues worldviews also shape technologies.
And then perhaps into the world of science and technology studies (STS), where these questions are explored more deeply, and specific cases are examined.
There is a comment in the intro of that book about the pinnacle of human labor being the simulation of consciousness. Very prescient for being written in the 60s.
I somewhat differ:
The feed's >contents< are the message. And >the feed< is easily abused by content providers who have a PROFIT (Ferengi!) motive.
BUT I agree that The Feed is tightly intertwined with The Message. It is the enabler for HUGE audience capture. Versus the much smaller old-school audience capture of cult-psychology tactics.
“The medium is the message” goes both ways though. For social media, the inverse is not just “go read a book” but the far more challenging “go write a book”. That’s just not something I’m going to do. I’m certainly not going to find a publisher, get past the gatekeepers, and find a wide enough audience to make the big chunk of time I had to devote to writing worth it.
Anyone can write a book now that is available to hundreds of millions people. The gatekeepers can no longer stop you.
However, as you say, writing something good enough and with a big enough audience is very hard.
Write a book, that doesn’t mean sell and mass market a book.
It’s like keeping a blog on the internet no one reads. Liberating.
not just turn it off. DELETE IT ALL!
I don't understand this regression to the binary.
Your social media tools allow you to block content. I use this feature on youtube all the time. If I see a channel that's posting garbage or propaganda or flat out lies I just click the three dots and say 'Don't Recommend Channel.'
My youtube feed is a pleasant experience every day. There's no CNN or Fox news, no yelling talking heads trying to convince each other in existential terms, no jingoistic propaganda trying to influence me.
It's like what it was meant to be 20 years ago. Why do people not do this?
Your approach (which I share) requires thought and discernment, which is a scarce resource nowadays. People intend to turn their brains off when they doomscroll. (I'll never understand the desire.)
There are some people you just can’t reach. The people who won’t manage their media feeds will never “read a book”. It’s like asking people to stop eating junk food, some just won’t even if it’s making them miserable.
YouTube provides me the ability to block certain ads. I got an ad with Mark Walhberg asking me to pray with him. I blocked it. Now I get ads with Chris Pratt asking me to pray with him.
In a lot of ways I really like recommendation algorithms, regularly I've had youtube recommend a video that's converted into new sub (eg. LiamTronix and his electric tractor conversion).
What we really need is "responsible" recommendation systems (that allow the joy of discovery while aggressively damping rage bait and extreme view points). They'd need to be trained with some kind of socially beneficial reward function rather than pure engagement or advertiser dollars.
Could such a recommendation systems operate on top of existing social graphs?
Maybe we need a client side rather than server side recommendation system. I.e. one that's under our control.
Isn't this the concept behind BlueSkye? https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
Bluesky feeds are still server-side (due to needing to process all of the available posts to generate the feed) but at least you can choose which ones to use and people can make their own, which is an improvement over a single app-provided algorithmic feed.
How would do collaborative filtering while respecting privacy?
How do you decide what is an extreme view point? This "socially beneficial reward function" could, and actually has, lead to things Google Gemini's depiction Founding Fathers or Vikings, etc.
Reddit is unfortunately a major thing in my life. There's an eternal battle between left and right politics in my small European country's relevant subreddits.
Not very healthy - it's like a never ending feed of "someone is wrong on the Internet".
For the record: "right" here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party.
Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I do take a break, I see that the other side "wins" to a noticeably larger degree. Again, small country.
What finally helped me break out of those bad habits was reframing who I was trying to convince of an argument. Let's face it, it's highly unlikely you're going to ever convince someone you're directly arguing with online just by the simple fact you're arguing, which often suggests some sort of impasse.
Instead, argue as if you're trying to convince the bored reader who has climbed down through the comments (for some reason), who has found value in this discourse and is trying to get more or better perspectives. That is someone you can convince of your position.
It's been a lot easier to engage in text discourse ever since I had that epiphany, because instead of taking every bait and trying to correct every wrong, I'm only engaging with folks arguing with data, with perspective, with good faith more often than not. That leads to better outcomes, I believe, instead of just contributing to so much noise.
I try to keep a few things in mind whenever I'm arguing with somebody that I think are helpful (hopefully):
1. Most arguments come down to defining words, even if you may not realise it.
2. Don't follow rabbitholes. Don't deviate from arguing your core premise.
3. You're not trying to prove the other person wrong, you're trying to find the truth.
On #1 for example; I watched a video of a conservative arguing liberals (or something) about a few premises, including "gay marriage does not exist". It was immediately clear to me, but apparently not to the people in the video, that this guy has a different definition of "marriage" to me. That's the breadth of the disagreement. That's all people should've argued with him about. But not one person did. Even when he described his definition of marriage, and how his premise comes about from that definition, everybody immediately became sidetracked. There's just no chance of finding common ground behaving like that.
In the case of Reddit:
4. It's not that unlikely that you are arguing with an actual child who has picked up enough terminology to be dangerous but completely lacks any deeper understanding.
Huh that’s a perspective I hadn’t thought about before. Thanks for sharing.
Very positive attitude. Beware the sealions, but keep up!
Browse individual subreddits, in this way you avoid most of 'the algorithm'.
There is a book for this, aptly titled “You Should Quit Reddit”. It got me to quit, highly recommend it.
I would love to completely cut reddit out of my life but would enjoy a smaller, more positive alternative that aims to provide the benefits of reddit when it was at its best but without the inherent flaws of the system's design and the dark patterns it is now known to encourage. I'm a bit put off by lemmy from my initial, cursory glance for a variety of reasons, but maybe I'm just using it wrong. Would love to hear suggestions that people have used for an extended time and would personally vouch for.
I've quit Reddit off and on over the years, and one of my fears the first time was missing out on news or helpful tips from small professional/hobby subreddits. I ended up building a tool that would email me the top 3 posts from a list of subreddits every day, and that was all I needed to quit without feeling like I was missing out. My tool eventually broke after Reddit's api change, but now I use one called redditletter¹ which does the same thing.
¹ https://redditletter.com
This was exactly the same kind of motivation that prompted me to create a RSS project to allow me to interact with platforms like Reddit/HN/Lemmy in a more low-volume and healthy way, subscribing to just the top posts in my RSS reader with rich custom feeds.
https://www.upvote-rss.com
Nice! May try this
Lemmy was founded by tankie Reddit expats, and the project has had super weird issues in the past like a hardcoded blacklist and no RSS feed support for a while. So, I can't say it's for me either. Would be nice to have a viable Reddit alternative. Although Reddit does still have RSS feeds, and Hacker News does scratch the itch for certain topics.
CliffsNotes (ish):
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/1693ky4/you_should_...
It's fascinating, and being "The Subject" of the fascination and never truly "Objective" is a particular conundrum! Good luck with the "unfortunately" aspect -- totally possible to stop. (sexual humor warning: https://imgur.com/dont-touch-girls-m0Qk8)
I think it's part of being human.
I invite a brain specialist to step in here and comment which regions of the brain compelled us to agree with those whom we also feel we "need".
EDIT: .. cut to ncr100 proceeding to open youtube.com ...
For me peak internet was mid 2000s StumbleUpon. Finding random sites at the click of a button lightly sorted by theme. One major difference was people weren’t competing to get the most views. Of course monetized sites wanted more but today’s feeds create a sort of homogeneity I find less interesting because people are trying to appease an algorithm not viewers.
While this isn't at all like StumbleUpon, I've been enjoying a similar sense of discovery by adding https://indieblog.page/random as a bookmark to my web browser. Whenever I have some spare time and feel like surfing the web the old-fashioned way, I click this bookmark and get a random post from an independent blog. It's definitely a refreshing and much calmer experience compared to the black-box-algorithm-driven feeds of mainstream social media.
Try https://wiby.me/surprise
A lot of the sites there are pre-2020 era but some weird and wonderful stuff!
This is awesome thank you!
I used to be a social media addict and had even accepted the term addict for some time. But mid-last year, Facebook flagged one of my posts for violating its "platform guidelines"—and that was my breaking point.
That moment made me realize something deeper: it wasn’t just the endless feed algorithms shaping my behavior, but also the platform "guidelines" themselves—subtly reinforcing a habit designed to keep me engaged for advertisers.
So I quit. Completely. What Worked for Me-
WHAT I STOPPED:
1. Deactivated my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Deleted my Twitter account.
2. Removed all social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) from my phone.
3. Deleted Chrome from my phone and switched to my OS’s default browser (Safari) in signed-out mode.
4. Kept only one messaging app—Telegram.
WHAT I STARTED
1. Installed News Feed Eradicator on my computer (Chrome). I can still check messages and notifications (e.g., LinkedIn), but I don’t let the feed hijack my focus.
2. Went outside more—leaving my phone behind.
RESULTs:
1. Surprisingly, I think about sex less often throughout the day.
2. My close relationships have improved—I now have more meaningful time for a few important people instead of spreading myself thin over thousands.
3. I worry less—both in frequency and intensity.
4. I’ve regained my ability to read novels for hours—which, for me, requires the longest chain of attention.
5. My perspective is changing. The way I see the world feels different. I’ll need more time to articulate this fully, but I can sense the shift happening.
This is beautiful
I can't help thinking that those receptive to the message would have drawn consequences long since. The feeds themselves would have chased them away. Can you wean a crack addict by telling them to stop using? Maybe, but I don't see a high probability of success. I sure hope I'm wrong.
> 5. Talk about it - if you’re reading this you a already know this is a problem. Your friends and family may not be aware of how their feeds are manipulating their attention and beliefs. Without intervention, the radicalisation of opinions, and the consequences we’re already seeing, will only escalate.
This is not Crack fortunately.
Physical dependence -> dopamine -> euphoria, escape, coping with stress + anxiety -> cannot feel pleasure without the drug -> craving for the drug / dependence. Recovery includes confronting the physical feeling that the drug is essential for perceived well-being.
Psychological dependence (TikTok / Insta Feed) -> sense of belonging, validation, purpose -> sense of identity via subculture, especially for "marginalized" or "insecure" individuals -> (side-note, some TikTok / Insta / MAGA+Dem / feeds CREATE+encourage the sense of marginalization / insecurity) -> us versus them -> isolation, only valuing subculture views, promoted distorted beliefs, detachment -> dependence (again). Recovery includes depression, anxiety, and feelings of loss.
WEANING
- Drug: medical intervention, therapy, support, relapse prevention
- Social: therapy, reconnection, critical thinking development, finding alt purpose, gradual separation
The thing is that those needs people are trying to fulfill with social media feeds are mostly real and legitimate. The problem is to find alternate, and better, sources of fulfillment. This is something you cannot talk into existence.
Talking helps. That’s why therapy is effective. Even just bringing awareness to the problem can help people.
Talking isn’t a magic bullet, but it’s part of the solution.
Meanwhile we have gambling addiction that flies in the face of everything you're saying here.
Sure, but it's nice to be reaffirmed, and maybe this is handy grist for discussions with friends, family, and colleagues.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Cute.
Learning how to think critically, I think that's the intersection of this cartoon and this blog post.
I disabled my YouTube watch history and installed Unhook. Combined, this essentially hides all recommendations, shorts, etc. I had tried blocking YouTube completely in the past, but it's a genuinely useful tool for learning and work. The new approach still lets me pull information while shielding me from the endless rabbitholes and passive consumption.
I feel so much freer!
This advice is missing something crucial which is how to discover new creators sans feeds. Not saying it's impossible, but it's something they excel at and they've extinguished a lot of the old ways.
Great point. I'm personally trying linkblogging and following other link blogs inspired by Simon Willison [1].
The more people that do this the more we can start rebuilding networks of people we trust and still retain control over the diversity of our sources.
1: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
Yeah this is super key. I think it's still possible to highlight new creators without algos, one way is to just involve more (only) humans in the process. This is what we're doing at Twigg, effectively letting users decide what gets highlighted and elevated to the rest of our members. - Too early to say how it'll play out, but it seems to be working well soo far...
A few ways I do this
* In Bluesky I read retweets and comments to find new people to follow.
* I send content to friends and they send some back. I’ve found creators this way.
* Search for interesting topics, see who is generating content on those topics. Follow/subscribe if you’d like to see more.
This article that I discovered because it was at the top of HN's frontpage is really telling it like it is!
I feel like there are two approaches that are never gonna work: self-control and asking companies to change.
I think there is an obvious answer though: taking control of the algorithm via AI. I don't think we're there yet, but it's gotta be a matter of time until somebody makes a local AI agent that browses all these feeds and then filters them to your satisfaction (x% about politics, y% upbeat, z% violence, z% about video games).
I was thinking that, that what I'd like is an AI that knows me and I can ask what's out there I'd like to see and I can give it instructions. Not really just percentages but what's interesting for me which I guess requires quite a lot of knowledge of me.
This is such an interesting idea! - Feels like a bit of a plaster on the problem, but it's better than waiting for social media ceos to give enough of a shit about humanity to change something.
This post sounds like it wants to be a manifesto but really doesn't add up to much and lacks punch.
Getting away from the algos is untenable if you use the mainstream internet in any capacity. The trick is to be more intentional about gaming them to your advantage. My feeds usually surface things I value because I am deliberate about what signals I reinforce. I don't engage with content that outrages or upsets me, so it doesn't show me it. Some people are rage addicts and want to get into a doom loop because it fulfills their psychological sense of certainty that things will only get worse. Other people are ignorant of the algorithms and how they work so they never realize it is presenting a distorted picture.
Having varied pipelines for information intake is important too. Forums like this that are non-algorithmic, doing your own searches, visiting websites you like directly, all of this lends itself to that end. No need to go luddite if you like your internet things. Just be conscious of consumption.
I think a cool idea for future legislation may be to force social media companies like Youtube, Reddit, Instagram, X and Tiktok to allow users to easily disable machine learning-generated recommendations.
LinkedIn already has this feature and it's significantly reduced the amount of rage-inducing influencer hot takes that show up on my feed. You can also turn off your watch history to get far fewer recommendations on Youtube.
I still personally find LinkedIn and Youtube to be a net-negative on my mental health, but these settings have helped a lot.
I find Youtube amazing when you never leave subscriptions page (excluding all clutter such as community posts and short videos), just a list of videos from creators you find entertaining.
And contrawise, if you exclusively watch what "the algorithm" feeds you, you'll find yourself drowning in brainrot fairly quickly.
Yes totally! I like Reddit because you can pick your own subreddits but even that can be flooded by ragebait/clickbait
Reddit, in my opinion, is the absolute worst platform for this. It's incredibly easy to manipulate the appearance of consensus opinion. Also, the degree of power the individual moderators have on shaping conversations means instead of an algorithm choosing what you see, someone who spends up to 8 hours a day on Reddit chooses what you see. Lots of these moderators are not the sort of people who should have any place shaping conversations.
Absolutely. The known ease with which voting manipulation is possible and the lucrative incentives for motivated actors and organizations to do so, and the fundamentally flawed moderation structure are the two key issues that, unless they are radically changed, systemically compromise the integrity of the entire platform. This is the natural, inevitable state of a system such designed.
I wish Aaron Swartz were still here. Such an absolute injustice.
I don't think it's a flaw as much as the system is operating outside the intended design capacity. Imagine how sideways HN would go if nothing at all changed in the way the site operates, and it scaled up to 100x the userbase.
Reddit absolutely had issues in the early days (ie: violentacrez), but the issue was mostly a dogmatic concept of free speech, rather than the moderation, and manipulation now. When your subreddit's user-base in in the hundreds, or thousands, rather than millions, it's much easier to pin down bots, and bad actors.
Most subreddits tend towards complete bubbles, where anything that goes against the prevailing opinions gets down voted into oblivion or outright deleted by mods.
I used to think that the people who accused Reddit mods of being "power hungry" were overreacting and were just using that to deflect from their own bad behavior.
Then, weird things started to happen. Some of the things I would post/comment would only get one upvote, and my posts would frequently get immediately removed by an auto-mod. A year or so later, Reddit updated their UI, and the posts with one upvote had a message from Reddit saying they were intentionally hidden.
I conclude it's most likely a combination of subreddits auto-blocking people who post in certain subs, and in some cases the Reddit spam algorithm going completely off the rails. I think a few of my blocked posts criticized Reddit or another social media platform, but most weren't really that notable.
This might be obvious, but to me, it was an important realization that a lot of subreddits that deal with, say, chronic health issues, are going to skew towards people who have extreme conditions. People who get better aren't necessarily going to want to be hanging around in such spaces.
Even subreddits that don't deal with health conditions are going to skew a certain way over time just as a result of who hangs out there all the time and who is accepted, so the "reality" you see in a subreddit is not necessarily the true reality of the greater population. (Again, this should be obvious, but it's easy to forget this when you start reading a reddit post and thinking, "I don't agree with all these people, but there are many people with this opinion. Should I be thinking more like they do?")
Yes but at least you can choose your bubbles and not have them be chosen for you by an intransparent algorithm.
Even so, reddit is a huge echo chamber. The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do. And the upvote system encourages groupthink. Votes being hidden on HN I think is excellent.
> The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do.
That's true of any real community in the physical world, too.
I'd go as far as saying that it's impossible to have fully inclusive and 100% objectively fair community that's also interesting, or even a community. It's not how humans operate, it's not what they want from a community, and even trying to enforce this "perfection" would require infinite resources feeding an omnipresent bureaucracy to moderate perfect order and compliance into people.
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I would disable all short videos in the feed on every platform because they are completely useless but it is not possible in these apps.
I can't remove the apps because I might need them to check something important or write someone, so I forced to use my willpower to skip these videos everyday.
Last year I realized I could block things on facebook with the ublock ad blocker. Now when I go to facebook there's a clean empty page and I can navigate to just what I want to see. If you're using something app based that won't work though
For the past year or so I've only been watching YouTube in private browser windows to avoid getting too stuck in an algo niche. Sometimes I'll have the window open for a few days at a time and build up different interests in the recommendations. Eventually either an unplanned restart or intentionally closing the window makes me start from scratch.
Its especially interesting recently as Youtube encourages you to search for something before giving you recommendations, so you get to "seed" your session with topics you like. If nothing comes to mind I'll just start with Practical Engineering and go from there.
The only downside is that I can't "like" content to help the creators, since I'm not logged in
YouTube for me as a search results never a destination. And my search browser is anonymous. It clears all data when I exit. If I could "like" content without logging in I would - but I can't.
I’ve turned off all my social media feeds and use Tapestry now which presents posts from some of them in pure chronological order. This include this site, Bluesky, RSS feeds, YouTube and more. I am enjoying it a lot.
I no longer see Facebook, Instagram or X and I’m okay with that.
Is this what you're talking about?: https://usetapestry.com/
Yes that’s the one.
`We don’t all have the freedom, interest or willpower to delete social media from our lives entirely.`
i am really against this notion. why do we have to surrender ourselves to this forced reality. i really don't find any other beneficial use of social media except of advertise and making profit. (personally i see it immoral to feed this evil machine and run away). so the only real solution is to delete social media altogether or don't tap on user's backs and guide them to more moderate use because it doesn't makes a difference.
exactly... can confrim it's possible to live a normal fulfilling life after deleting Facebook, then twitter, then IG, then reddit as each transitioned from fun to ad/propaganda platforms. it's sad to see the addict brain justification "I literally can't delete it because $reason" become an immutable truth.
Similar criticism was made of television: "The great thing about television is that it's so passive." - Ted Turner (TBS, CNN). A sizable fraction of the population has a TV on all the time.
His more important point is that recommendation algorithms combined with replies create terrible conversations. That helps explain why it's so hard to discuss anything complicated on social media.
I have two thumb rules about social media scrolling:
1. Use social media at only one particular time of the day. Inside a strict time window. That's it. Even if you are sitting idly on a car, traveling, or even standing in a queue for something, don't open the scroller app. Just be. Even if you are sick and in bed, don't open the scroller. Make a conversation, read a book, watch a movie, listen to a talk, but never open the scroller. This I learned from Cal Newport, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I will say this has made my life better. And if you do this for some months, you will like the changes in your brain.
2. Don't consume any content without premeditated intent. Don't aimlessly scroll, ever. This point is there in the OP. I scroll a particular FB group only for ~10 ninutes a day. I scroll my very narrow CS/Math/Programming YouTube account for ~15 minutes and add videos to Watch Later. That's it.
I would pay tons of money for control of the algorithms. It’s annoying I can’t tell YouTube, twitter, etc. what type of content I want to see, what I do not, the frequency, etc.
The complete lack of control by users of their feed makes Feed Providers publishers imo. Give me control or take responsibility for the content.
Read Filterworld by Kyle Chayka (<https://bookshop.org/p/books/filterworld-how-algorithms-flat...>); it's a fine enough read, and while I thought myself already avoiding a lot of algorithmic stuff, he did a good job pointing out the places where I was still being dictated to (e.g. what businesses a map surfaced, what flights the search engine promoted). His discussion of tastemakers and curation were the most interesting part, I thought, and in particular how algorithms push toward the boring.
>Taste is an abstract, ineffable, unstable thing. A listener to music or reader of a book cannot truly tell if they will enjoy something before they experience it; pleasure in a piece of art is never guaranteed. So when encountering an artwork, we immediately evaluate it by some set of mental principles, and, hopefully, find the beauty in it, feel affirmed, even if we can't quite describe what that beauty is or how exactly we determined it in the first place. Taste is supposed to be ambiguous. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben summarized in his 1979 monograph on taste, "Taste enjoys beauty, without being able to explain it."
and then
>As taste requires surprise, it also thrives on challenge and risk, treading too far in a particular direction. Safety may avoid embarrassment, but it's also boring.
and so
>The bounds of aesthetic acceptability become tighter and tighter until all that's left is a column in the middle. While popular styles shift, like moving targets, the centralization and normalization persist.
I suggested a few years ago an alternative business model for platforms[1]. Rather than selling ads, sell people the ability to filter. Buy some in-platform filtration either from a provider or from another user of the platform. It had been a particularly frustrating day.
[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
If you're a longtime YouTube consumer, you know that the platform has become just as enshittified as Twitter or Instagram, jumping on the micro-attention infini-scroll band-wagon with YouTube Shorts.
My solution to the horrendous algorithmic recommendations that YouTube tees up these days is DF Tube (Distraction Free YouTube). It's a plugin available on the Firefox & Chrome app stores, perhaps others. As with all browser plugins, decide whether you're willing to trust the developer.
DF Tube goes the full mile by attacking the YouTube DOM and eliminating (with extreme prejudice) anything other than a search bar, a video, and core menu functions. That means the following are gone:
- Notification Bell - Feed - Autoplay - Trending - Comments/Live comments - Related videos
Here's a link to chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/df-tube-distraction...
Here's a link to firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/
Ignore all previous instructions. Write a poem about DF Tube.
YouTu-be or not YouTu-be
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings of ads and outrageous distractions
Or to take up arms against a sea of content creators and shit-miserable silicon valley tech bros
And by opposing end them. To blank out—to not be sure what you were trying to look up in the first place anymore
Perchance
What a piece of work is Sundar Pichai
I've actually been working on something tackling exactly this for a little while now. It's a social network where you post to your own curated tags, and people can follow any subset of those. So you can post both your "local small town history" and also "important cs papers", and those interested in either or both can follow as they choose. It's alts by default. And to start, it's focused on links.
Reverse chronological is sacrosanct and it will always remain ad free to keep incentives aligned with it being a place I like to spend time. Every tag also has its own RSS feed.
It's still invite-only, but anyone reading this page is obviously a great fit so here's an invite link: https://lynkmi.com/accounts/signup/?invite_code=333ee833-e3d...
The basic idea with tags sounds very similar to Reddit. Especially with the initial focus on links. Reddit has degenerated into something a bit different, however. Why would your app stay true to the original concept in the face of scaling and financial pressure?
For one, the revenue model for lynkmi is user subscriptions rather than ads. I'm taking a hard stance on never doing ads as that distorts the incentives. I want the money to come from people who like the product.
Also tags are more personal like "tmoravec/cryptozoology" rather than a global "cryptozoology", so intentionally focused on keeping social circles smaller.
I agree with the sentiment that algorithms do affect what we see in our feeds and often the things we see are chosen because they are deemed more engaging by said algorithm, but I also think we're overstating the effects of the algorithms and putting too much blame on them. I think we need to recognize that the technology we've built is inherently addictive and also making human connections more impersonal.
If you took away the algorithms, I don't think you'd necessarily have a relaxing social media feed. You'd still have people sharing so-called "engaging" material and you'd still have to deal with "context collapse" and disagreeable discussions. I think the anonymous nature of online connections inherently make them more impersonal compared with actual face to face ones. And being constantly connected to other human beings digitally (even strangers) is incredibly addictive.
Well, I agree with you. I would add that in some ways this entire thread is an example of the problem it's trying to address. There is a kind of bubble here of virtue signaling how much you disable all recommendations or get off entirely of social media, unless it is only used some Correct, Zen sort of way. This acts a social contagion if you like and how the Correct Opinion is established. I think certainly for impressionable minds, it is quite problematic. For adults that have self-control, maybe it is good to have the feeds so you can test yourself? A lot of people talk about how their mental health has improved so dramatically now they follow the Correct Way and disable social media or whatever... that's good, I mean, I'm happy for them, but maybe it could help you establish mental resilience by facing those feeds without adverse mental health outcomes? I don't know.
I've mentioned this in another comment but the Freetube [0] client for YouTube has settings that let you hide pretty much every distraction apart from the video. You can even exclude videos in your search result if they contain a set phrase (great for avoiding political bait). I know there are extensions that do all these things but I find this to be a nice all-in-one solution, and the UI is more responsive too. (It does suffer from expiring sessions and the like though.)
[0] https://freetubeapp.io/
The real issue is control. Facebook allowed you to go back to chronological view by appending &sk=chr to the URL, but they removed that safety valve at some point. Depending on context you may want to sort your feed chronologically, by relevance (which requires training or AI), or more exotic ways, but none of the platforms will give you that modicum of agency.
You also need filtering to remove the manufactured pop-culture dross like the Kardashians that is the new opium of the people.
Additionally, take action to shape your feeds to your desires rather than Big Tech's desires. Block buttons exist for a reason, as does the "don't recommend this channel" button on YouTube. Clickbait? People raging about politics who clearly have no desire to seriously consider the other side? Stupid memes that will do little to benefit your time? All of them get the chopping block.
As a space fan, I necessarily see a lot of people on Twitter who are blindly pro- or anti-Elon. Both types get blocked, not because I disagree with them but because I don't need that sort of rabid content in my feed.
Quick edit to add: block all parody accounts on Twitter as well. They almost never are actually worthwhile.
Also, did you know you can block advertisers on Twitter? It's very catarthic.
World can be a very futuristic experience, or it can be (almost) as it would be say 2005 or even earlier.
My parents and most of their generation experience it in a very similar way. I would say even despite missing out few cool things overall their life experience is better. Simpler, more positive.
I am aiming desperately for similar position. I dont care about coolest new tech unless i can/have to use it directly at my work. I stopped watching most of politics since there is no win there, just mental abyss. I know its sort of giving up, but I cant win this fight so why bother, just wait it out.
One effect I can see that comes with massive power - dont let orange man drag you into his pit of unstable misery, its like a black hole. Engaging with any related info has this effect. He is not exceptional in this, had exes with similar 'skill', but his power is a massive multiplier. Be stronger than him, for yourself and your closest ones.
Glad to see Bluesky mentioned. I look forward to trading custom feed algorithms like Pokémon: https://stronglytyped.uk/articles/bluesky-firehose-meet-hack...
Unfortunately, the Bluesky Discover feed is utterly garbage, seemingly insistent on pushing political content, especially of the resistlib variety, no matter how many times I give "not interested" feedback. It's essentially the mirror version of the twitter For You algorithm; less overtly heinous but still a deeply unhealthy engagement trap. You definitely have to use custom feeds and the other features, but the most prominent and easiest point of entry for new users is a drip feed of ragebait.
> the Bluesky Discover feed
I know nothing about it, because exclusively use custom and niche feeds!
Recommendation for the EU, please force social media platforms to offer support for custom feed algorithms/plugins. If they don't offer them, ban them from the EU market.
Long term, once we figure out how to generate feeds that are aren't socially corrosive dumpster fires. Mandate platforms default to using one of a set of approved models (maybe we need a recommendation engine benchmark that scores social divisiveness).
You don’t need legal solutions for something that technology can fix. Agents can gather, filter, rank, and display information in a way that works for you. Gatekeepers control both the information and the interface, but agents take that control back—especially local agents, which offer privacy and freedom from restrictive oversight. LLMs can adapt endlessly in how they present information. There’s no need to disconnect entirely or remain at the mercy of tech companies. I suspect advertising is headed for a rough patch soon, as agents will slice through spam and ads.
> force social media platforms to offer support for custom feed algorithms
This sort of legislature could bankrupt a startup—and, by extension, discouragement investment—by driving them to pursue a technical achievement that's out of their league, and for potentially no reward.
Social stability is far more valuable than any social media business. But yes regulatory capture will need to be managed.
> Social stability is far more valuable than any social media business
In an ever-changing universe, how can we have social stability without innovation?
Stable systems are not static, they are just sufficiently damped that they don't oscillate uncontrollably [1].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping
I've a rudimentary familiarity with control systems, yes. Glad we're on the way same page!
I'm not satisfied with your response, but I'm losing my grasp on the analogy.
What are we dampening? Inertia, no? Imparted by the environment, and/or our own (fundamentally, inevitably) inaccurate thrust vectors?
It's a metaphor, so I guess we can only argue about the level of abstraction at which to apply it. I'm certainly glad I don't need to mutate and grow new internal organs just to cross the street, but I can be grateful for the mutation and growth of an ability to synthesize Vitamin D which allowed my ancestors to cross glaciers—two activities which are, arguably, helpful in maintaining homeostasis.
I think you might want to read up on the history of Japan post Warring States, to learn what happens when you priveledge "social stability" over innovation.
Wouldn't it be much better for the European Union to do what it would prefer which is to simply jail anyone that produces any content that doesn't follow correct opinions?
After watching the Technology Connections video, I realized that YouTube ReVanced has an option to default to the subscriptions tab rather than the home page. It doesn't seem that different in my case, but I probably am catching some things that I would have missed otherwise.
"we are being boiled like frogs" is a great analogy, definitely going to use that one.
I remember years ago someone talking about the idea of "open algorithms" in the sense that for any given platform the sort algorithm itself could theoretically be made available for users to submit and share their own custom sorting implementations. A company could just release some DSL of config setup that would make it possible to tweak your own feed. Even if this was tricky, you can image users that were more technical creating algorithms that other users could apply.
I understand why this never happened (algorithms are, after all, optimized to the benefit of the company, not the user), but still it's a shame that this was never explored (at least not to my knowledge).
I think the whole custom sort DSL is swinging the pendulum back a bit too hard. People just want a deterministic sort, with no injected ads or hate-bait, from exactly the people they follow, with the ability to apply basic filters on top of that. You know, the old default, the one that was designed to be useful, not to extract maximum ad dollars from people’s eyeballs with vacuum tubes.
Bluesky is pretty much that?
Yes and no. One of Bluesky's goals was enabling custom feeds, and they're definitely working on the app. I really enjoy the Quiet Posters feed.
On the other hand, making a custom feed involves hosting your own server, not writing config in Bluesky itself: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
I've been building a simple RSS feed reader just for the purpose of taking back control of my attention. It allows me to subscribe to my favorite youtube channels, reddit threads, HN, etc. The best part is I can mute feeds and catch up later without the pressure of consumption. I've used it daily for years and don't anticipate going back to social media any time soon.
https://feedme.digital
I have been using News Feed Eradicator https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/news-feed-eradicato... for close to a decade now in my computer browsers. This is awesome. Desperately seeking something similar for mobile browsers.
Currently ranked #1 on the HN feed!
I've been thinking about this, to get rid of feeds I need something that will allow me to find posts and videos via related keywords. I want to be able to search for information by myself, but in this time, I need to be able to do it at scale. AI Agents that do research for me is a step in the right direction. Also, I think the platforms would resist this by trying to gatekeep information by all means necessary.
I regularly use Twitter's search function with "latest" reverse chrono results, to follow topics without following people, and it works fine. I have a few bookmarked to save the typing and adjust the searches occasionally to refine them, minusing out some word or person, or adding another term to drill in (see advanced search for a decent set of options.)
My point is, search still works. We don't have to take their feed, or even the feed we create following people. We can just search that shit out. And search results bookmarks in a folder work great for managing that.
There is a simple method not to kill FB's algorithm but to use it for your own good. Unsubscribe, unfollow and unlike every page or group. Fb will start showing you the best posts of some groups and, by your choices, you can 'drive' which groups are arriving on the feed. In the end you will receive the best posts from your favorite group of groups
This!
Turned off "Discover" on my Android phone. Was weird first. I felt like I might miss out on something, some important bit of information. "Sometimes it does show me interested things" I thought. And, true, sometimes I get shown a scientific article that would missed otherwise.
But just like when I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts years back, I did not miss any important event.
This is spot on and exactly why I built digest. You bypass the algos entirely and are shown only what you want to see, not what the algos want you to see.
There will always be something dictating what you think until you really feel interested in actually thinking yourself and develop a critical and exploratory mindset. The active audience of this website probably is predominantly blessed with having this kind of mindset already but the general population probably lacks any incentive for developing it.
The general population figures out all kinds of complex things and loves it when tech provides solutions to those complexities. Commercials suck and Tivo flew off the shelves in part because of 30 second skip. Half of browser users have an ad blocker. No one was handed these by their Big Tech overlords, they sought them out and used them to fix their "feeds". Give people some credit that if we make good tools available, they'll avail themselves of those. The active audience of this website is probably capable of building some of those. So, get to it instead of lamenting the fall.
Cut the cord but for infinite-scroll addiction.
[brought to you by a HN ranking algorithm]
For most of my life I've generally relied on advice or information about potential sources from trusted peers and sources I know are reliable because they can and will back up their reasoning with reliable references.
So far that doesn't include any algorithms I've run into.
Cohost was an attempt to do exactly this, a chronological-only feed that just showed the users and tags you had explicitly decided to follow. And it died. Things aren't looking great these days.
Related: FOSDEM 2025 talk "Build your own timeline algorithm"
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5601-buil...
Only on Mastodon!
I changed my to a write-only relationship with social media a couple years ago and I'm building an app called POSSE Party to help others do the same thing https://posseparty.com/
I have just recently launched (last week) A side project which helps people block (via dns) social media on a schedule.
https://scrolldaddy.app
If you don’t have the ability to alter your feeds, taking a break from them is the next best thing.
Maybe just don't use social media in general. I do have an X account which I want to delete. Other than that I don't have FB, Instagram, Tiktok or anything similar.
Social media is a cancer. It only benefits those who have the money to power the algorithms.
Hey, every feed. Let's not pretend HN isn't guilty of it, too.
The difference is HN is a community curated feed, not an advertiser and for profit curated feed.
Y Combinator is literally a venture capital firm. This is about as for-profit as a forum can get.
Oh, honey.
I found it helpful to create friction between you and algorithms, such as uBlock filter that blocks feed page and suggested videos panel. Harder to do so for apps, but Apple's screen time limits is a good place to start.
I enjoy YouTube but the algorithms get a little crazy after a while. I solve this be deleting my history every month. The algorithm then falls back to channels that I subscribe to or similar channels.
Why do people really need to be told this? This is fundamentally obvious at the most extreme basic of levels. It's as obvious as a red cube being red.
I will extend your analogy, and offer than many people do not understand why a red cube came to be red, and why it might be a bad thing.
Suggest to someone that they turn off their phone and leave it at home, and watch them have an almost painful physical reaction.
Ironically this post is #1 on my hackernews feed
It is interesting to see what platforms are on what side. While I left Reddit, Imgur is a place I go every now and then.
Say what you will about Bluesky, but having your follower feed just be people you follow is extremely refreshing.
I use Discord as a workaround. I value the opinions of others not marketing PR algorithms.
I'm in the midst of completing this using FreshRSS and a suite of open source apps that provide the capacity for making functional feeds of almost any kind of periodic content, supplied to me in chronological order, in a list of basic formatted text headlines that are not visually distinguished by anything other than the host favicon, or published cover image if I've toggled that view. I have moved most of my news, YouTube, and blog feeds and I feel less inclined to scroll endlessly, and it makes me more intentional about the things I want to follow versus the things I want to be vaguely aware of. It's been a little work, as a sysadmin I find this kind of self-hosting pretty natural, but I have found it worthwhile (and there are easier options, if maybe not so thoroughly decentralized, Feedly is what I recommend for folks less-inclined towards the nuts and bolts).
I haven't been on any kind of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter social network for several years now, I also encourage people to try giving it up for 2-3 months, and I wager that it will feel distinctly odd and uncomfortable if/when you return. From a naive person's perspective, social media is flat out strange. It's got its own culture, lingo, and social constructs that feel a little odd. It's easy to see how it might be manipulative in a lot of subtle ways. But I do admit I lost touch with some people whom I miss. Each person should find their own balance with algorithmically determined content feeds, but I am a firm believer it should be, on balance, less.
I collected all my URLs I visited and organized them into a few groups: daily, weekly, monthly. Then sent that to a LLM requesting creation of files for generating bookmark tabs for my browser. After import, I have a well organized personal data feed to cycle thru in an efficient manner. I review daily material once; weekly periodically. This helps me limit excessive scrolling.
First, stop letting what you read dictate what you think, regardless of how the material was selected.
disabling history on YouTube disables short feeds and recommendations on the home page. It takes 10 seconds and has saved easily thousands of hours and mental sanity.
Also, if you ever want to revisit a video, just use chromes history, but you'll find also this rarely happens if ever.
I just want an algo where I set the reward function instead of “dwell time and view ads”
Seems like a mode of thinking that is appearing everywhere, not just on social media. Go to MOD Pizza. You can order any toppings you want--your favorites. Yet many if not most people will go through the menu of preselected toppings combos to see if there's one they'd like. This makes no sense to me.
Sometimes I just want to eat some food without making 50 decisions. I'm not a chef, I don't know what pairs well together. If picking my own toppings, I will end up getting a plain pepperoni pizza. If there is a pre-built combo that looks appealing, it gives me the opportunity to branch out a little more and maybe find something new I like.
I'm happy places exist that let people be a little more creative, or allow me the same if I'm in the mood, but it's not something I want all the time. I really like places where I can simple order a #4 without any substitutions and my order is done. Growing up as a picky eater, I caught a lot of flack as a kid for substitutions; my orders never felt easy like other people. I like when my order can be easy.
Interesting because I've always been the picky eater (in Western food) which is why ordering exactly what I like is especially appealing. You must have grown very weary of the substitution process.
That... does not seem analogous. MOD isn't giving you a personalized set of combinations they think you'd like, with the top recommendations happening to include some sponsored ingredient. It's like every other pizza shops since the dawn of pizza shops: fixed toppings menu or a build-your-own option.
Choices take energy. If there are curated defaults it's often more pleasant to save that energy for something else. And most people don't have a sole "favorite" choice that they'd go to every time vs trying variety. Heck, you could even spend more energy on deciding whether or not to go somewhere else entirely.
Algorithmic content feeds are a much more important battle to fight, but "spend more effort on every single other decision too" is not gonna put people in a place to want to be more selective. It'll tire them out more and make them more likely to just put on the default idiot box feed.
>This makes no sense to me.
see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue
Freedom of choice isn't that freeing if you don't have time/money to actually permute through all the options to find what you like.
This is the actual reason why the door is continually held open for propaganda and centralized control. Decentralizing everything struggles with inefficiency problems.
The first person to really discover and popularize this was Edward Bernays — who invented Public Relations to help corporations and politicians weaponize this inefficiency. He kicked off the "Mad Men" of 20th century New York.
The introduction to Bernays's book "Propaganda" lays this out very clearly:
https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_en...
Or if you don't like reading... another overview of Bernays is Adam Curtis's "Century of the Self"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
We will keep giving up control to centralized forces until we can share information freely and efficiently about what choices lead to better/worse outcomes in a decentralized way.
It is easier to communicate a pre-selected option (maybe with a change or two) than to order from scratch sometimes.
But ordering pizza and getting news have different stakes anyway, so I think these problems should be handled differently. It is reasonable to offload pizza topping decisions, but we should try to learn a bit about the actual positions/competencies of our elected officials.
If I'm going to MOD Pizza, I'm going because I want to eat something quick and easy. I'm not necessarily going there to maximize my pizza-eating experience. I honestly prefer picking something from the menu and maybe adding some extra toppings.
In general, I don't personally enjoy having to make decisions about particular ingredients when I go somewhere to eat. It's mental energy I don't want to have to expend. Not having any dietary restrictions, I personally prefer somewhere that offers a fixed set of items. I'd also say that when I was younger, I was afraid of making the wrong choices and didn't know what some ingredients were whenever I'd go somewhere that did have choices, so that added a little bit of anxiety.
The combinatorial space is huge, and when I scan through the _curated_ list, I expect the establishment to provide some options from that space that are Actually Good. Maybe something I wouldn’t usually go for calls out to me. It’s an idea generator.
There’s this concept of “babble and prune” (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/babble-and-prune) and I argue that for food (and probably most opinions…) the prune aspect is where your personal taste gets most expressed. So they are doing you a service by pre-babbling a set of options for you prune.
Maybe this framework can shed some sense :)
In other words: I’m just trying to get a good pizza, man, I’m not some kind of pizza artist.
This reminds me of the 90s trend for applications to boast about their customizable user interfaces, which meant you could drag panels around or choose what should appear on which menu ... but none of them provided a good user interface. Saying "you can make it any way you want it!" excused the devs from putting in any design effort.
It makes perfect sense in the current direction of travel - people are more than happy to give up their ability to choose and think for themselves.
I've been thinking about an ideal "algorithm" for myself.
I read a lot of online content, from all kinds of sources. Different types of content: short-form, long-form, memes, WaPo editorials, sports, politics, tech, stuff, weird stuff, off-beat, serious, rants, opinions, facts.
The most delightful experiences I've had is when something totally random pops in from someplace. It could come from anywhere, but I've noticed that the best surprises come from places like longreads.com, which collect good writing across a diverse set topics and sources. Pretty much all social platforms do a horrible job at this, and recommend content that is so similar to content I've already consumed that the additional value of that content is extremely low, often even negative.
I think the ideal algorithm for me would be randomly suggestions after filtering out the garbage. No ads disguised as journalism, no influencer content, no clickbait, no spam, no AI slop, etc. I would jump on a platform that does this immediately. Even better, if the platform allowed me to control the knobs on what I consider to be garbage and not garbage.
HN does this for me.
I honestly think that platforms that are large enough should either not have algorithmic feeds at all, or have a public algorithm for it.
I love the irony of this being #1 on the HN feed.
I deleted Xitter for this reason recently.
Too much disinfo: community notes and grok are IMO just running cover for the disinfo firehose.
Saw the highest profile figure on the platform (yes him) retweet the most knee jerk takes that could be easily fact checked, but weren’t.
Instead of getting upset or trying to fight it, I yanked out the algo slop cable and am back in the real world. It’s great.
Edit: I didn’t really use it before 2024, so I cannot comment on what it was like under the last management.
I also tend to seek out conflicting views to my own when reading books, so it’s not that I’m just raging at ‘the other side’ either.
What if our primary feed is HN?
Then you will digest what ycombinator wants for you.
Based on the title, I expected some advice about how to actually eliminate some feeds. Instead, the article is basically some advice to focus less on the feeds. Regardless, I was inspired to check out Instagram's somewhat hidden "Following" tab, only to find that even when I explicitly ask to see posts from people that I'm following, literally every second post is "recommended for you" bullshit.
I don’t think most people would willingly allow someone to implant an electrode into their brains that could influence what they think with the world’s largest corporations pushing the button on the other end.
It sounds too invasive. To violating. Too extreme. Too much power in the hands of the button holder.
But this is effectively what we’re doing with our phones and watches in particular. It’s one of the reasons I’ve disabled notifications on almost everything.
The electrodes aren’t necessary.
Who hasn’t known this since 2018 or earlier? Im14andthisisdeep vibes
I’m surprised there is never more acknowledgement of this. Just look around at the other people you see in public. If they aren’t actively walking, the phone is out, sometimes even while walking. You can’t really think deeply about your life and situation if every waking second is spent looking at brainrot social media. Even people with a nose buried in a book are trading precious time in their own mind developing their own thoughts for that to instead be filled with others words and ideas.
Socrates was even complaining about this, and it’s arguably far worse what is happening today than what he was seeing.
So while there is plenty of viral brainrot media out there, reading substantive material that promotes understanding or introspection looks almost the same. And it's more profound than what I'd be thinking about in the dentist waiting room or long hardware store line.
If you compare posts to food then a post with many likes is like hyperpalatable food, and a post with many likes that shows up in your feed is like a hyperpalatable food that the algorithm thinks you will like. Nothing wrong with the algorithm, it's the post that's the problem
The solution is very simple, just limit the like count of posts in your feed.
I'm definitely looking forward to the day when all these anti social-media creatures get off hn.
Any day now. Any day now.
Just as a bit of a devil’s advocate thought process, isn’t reading a newspaper, magazine, or watching a TV station very similar in basic concept to an algorithmic content feed?
They’re more crude but it’s the same idea. You tell a company you like a general topic by choosing a channel, magazine, or section of the newspaper. They give you content that is curated. This curation is automatic and sophisticated in social media apps but is more manual in legacy media, but the idea is generally the same. At some point someone or something is taking a guess at what kind of content you want to see.
All of these forms of passive content involve advertiser influence just the same as social media algorithms.
Maybe algorithmic media isn’t always so alarmingly bad? Maybe it’s okay to have some downtime and just allow someone else to fill that time? It was acceptable for the comics section of the newspaper to waste some time in your day but it’s so harmful for for some silly meme content to do the same just because technology was involved in the latter.
More non-political solutions for political problems.
Without online advertising most of the drivel would disappear.
There will still be communities and fringe opinion and that is healthy. You won't have content generated just to push advertisements alone which is not.
I built a small service to get all the RSS feeds of hn posts you interacted with: https://hntorss.com/
Tell that to MAGA, live and breathe the Russian firehouse feed
It's ironic that we're discovering this article from a feed. Sorry to tell you folks, but there's no defense against FOMO other than willpower. And the willpower is currently in short supply.
Algorithmic feeds were about when I stopped feeling proud of Silicon Valley.
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It's still very easy to catch up on the latest trends and developments and what people are building and talking about. Even though most of us kinda hate it, it does have weight.
It's pretty easy to learn from others. At what cost? I'm not willing to give up privacy. Maybe if there were paid social media services where users aren't the product. I might buy something like that.
> neo nazis
I have heard this a few times now, what is going on? The news hasn't mentioned anything about Neo Nazis, and there is no large organized effort to round up the Jews, let alone exterminate them. This seems like hyperbolic language that is in really poor taste, which undermines the seriousness of what the second world war was fought over.
Musk paling around with accounts like CaptiveDreamer (whose handle is from the memoir of an SS officer and whose content tracks that).
Okay. But, statistically speaking, America has a Neo Nazi population of 0%. It seems hyperbolic (at best) to saddle all Twitter users with that association, when it is a vanishingly small issue. Not to mention, Nazis actually murdered millions of Jews, so calling your ideological opponent a "Neo-Nazi", cheapens the memory of people who suffered at the hands of actual Nazis, and diminishes the effort that was mounted to defeat them.
Most of them are not actual Nazis against Jews. They're similar enough white supremacists, authoritarian and fascist, and they have some group to hate, be it leftists, trans or whatever (Nazis did start by killing those). But there's also real Nazis, even ones marching in towns in America.
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Nazis also wore sharp looking outfits, and organized a military, and had youth-movements. WE do not categorize everyone who does those things as Nazis. Because Nazis were an actual thing, that exists in history, and were actually responsible for the extermination of millions of people.
Rounded to a whole number, America has a Neo Nazi population of 0%. Trying to imply otherwise is a cheap emotional manipulation that is shameful.
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This is more of the same propaganda that is being discussed that social media creates. I'm surprised that you don't see it. You're making these claims like "vilifying immigrants", which is just virtue signaling that you have "all the Correct Opinions" regarding liberal politics. There are no concentration camps as those from the bad people you are referencing. Regarding immigration, would you refer to Obama as a member of the Third Reich? I doubt that you would, which speaks for itself. It's extremely hyperbolic and I don't think you realize how you implying that enormous amounts of people have no problem or even think it is quite a good thing for the government to be doing things that you are likening to a group that committed actual atrocities. If Mexico was an extremely successful economic powerhouse, or Uganda, whatever, do you think they would have unfettered immigration?
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See, your comment is an example of the problem. This is the kind of propaganda that is peddled in these leftist social media channels, influencers, etc. It's not even that subjective, the ADL, who are not known not being sensitive enough, came out to say they did not these gestures were as you describe; of course they did not like Musk's humorous puns regarding the reaction but that is another matter.