@ink You are right of course that algorithms are not *inherently* bad. It's just that 99% of the existing ones are. And that's why there's such enormous rhetorical power in being able to say of Mastodon "There is no algorithm".
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@ink this is cool, thanks for sharing. love the concept of feed as stream vs task. I downloaded it and will be trying it out :3
@lake same, i need a bit of help understanding the controls now that i'm looking at the ui. i'd be interested to hear what you think if you do experiment with it.
I know it is kind of pedantic, but I would argue that these are still algorithmic festures. It's just that design effort has made the algorithms legible and explicitly modifiable--they are not something inscrutable and Implicit happening behind the scenes. I feel like "algorithms" have been given a bad rap by social media platforms that use them as a foil. The question is, can you understand in principle what the algorithm is doing and can you control it...
@ink You are right of course that algorithms are not *inherently* bad. It's just that 99% of the existing ones are. And that's why there's such enormous rhetorical power in being able to say of Mastodon "There is no algorithm".
@mike rhetorical power or marketing 😄 either way it operates to prevent people from understanding that there are other useful ways of ordering their online lives than by a chronological algorithm. the important question that remains is how much transparency and agency do they have...