alt Hacker NewsCan we just ban algorithms for content and go back to chronological feeds circa 2004 Facebook?
Or maybe ban all content that the user isn't explicitly subscribed to.
Those both have problems too, I'm sure.
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We have that in the EU, they mandated it. It finally made instagram use-able for me again. Did instagram geo-gate that feature? Wouldn't surprise me, but still.
Chronological feeds tend to be gameable by growth hacking. Still better than a lot of things.
One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.
It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.
I build a safari extension to do just this (block all content that isn't explicitly subscribed to by the user) and it's a remarkably better experience. This is my hot take that most people seem to disagree with: the vast majority of culture wars we are having today would not exist without content recommendation algorithms.
I think the major issue is, people still have the option of those older forms of feeds, people just don't like them.
New social media competitors (ie Tiktok) have won users by having even more powerful algorithms rather than other options.