#btw I didnt even touch on the predatory aspects of social media

[junajunajunajuna]

Not to mention how it skews culture and makes people into mindless consumers because they dont get to cultivate their own communities or curate their feeds.

I'mma expand this into my own list of reasons I dislike the prevalence of algorithms, actually

1. They make people grow complacent, the lack of opportunities for direct individual action to filter out unwanted content makes it so people rely on whoever owns the platform to take care of problems, and if they dont, well, they just gotta deal with it. This is especially harmful when people who grow up with such feeds venture out into the rest of the internet, an internet without algorithms, one which relies on user filtering. They request the same level of centralised control on the content they view on all websites, which can cause serious damage if the trend continues toward such people becoming the majority

2. People do not earn the skills and knowhow for navigating the internet without being served the content on a silver platter. In a lot of cases, they do not know this is even possible, and since their algorithms would never prompt them to consider that they will never seek out the knowledge themselves. I am guilty of such consumerism myself, be it my fault or not, which is something I want to fix, but it makes me rage all the more against algorithmic social media which makes it so much harder for so many people to find their own information.

3. The post above ^

4. The combination of complacence and lack of knowledge results in a general movement where people dont seek out information and instead consume whatever their algorithm gives them, some people even fearing having to go out and do their own research. For so many people "doing your own research" is searching things up on youtube now, because it's so much more involved than anything they're used to (mostly scrolling) that it feels like research by itself. Even I rarely go into deep dives, partly because of point 5 but also because I have a general struggle when it comes to doing new things (probably a neuro thing) and stuff like that is very, very new. I know I am not alone in this, I know that especially susceptible people feel like this, which is another reason I believe algorithmic media is bad.

5. This absolute domination of algorithmic media harms the very process of finding information, from Google altering results according to the data it has on you to struggling to find what you're looking for on Youtube or Twitter because even the search function relies on an algorithm which makes its very purpose null. Not only is it harder to filter out unwanted content, the magnitude of unwanted content that needs to be filtered out is significantly higher when people cater to the algorithm rather than making it easier for the user to filter the information.

Might edit some parts and tweak the arguments, might make this its own independent post, maybe even a thread, idk, it's 3:30am and I have to sleep

An explainer for why I don't fuck with algorithmic social media

If you give a pigeon a little button to peck that releases pigeon food, it will push the button when it's hungry.

If you give a pigeon a button to peck that releases food every 5 pecks, it will peck it more often.

If you give a pigeon a button to peck that releases food at a randomly selected, always shifting number of pecks, the pigeon will peck that fucking button all day long.

Algorithm based social media is not set up to give you the best most fun stuff all the time, it is set up to give you a bunch of stress and nothingness with a randomized reward of something that actually makes you happy, because they want you pecking that button all damn day. It is a slot machine of content, meant to keep you putting in quarters made of your time and attention till you've nothing left.

At least if I'm having a shit day on my own Tumblr home feed it's because I've made a bad choice about who to follow and I can fix it.