▶ Igloo Mag’s Best of 2022
▶ While this article is about DVDs versus streaming the same applies to music,
if not more so!
▶ Cory Doctorow: End-to-End
“…dominant social media platforms treat the list of people we follow as suggestions, not commands. When you identify a list of people you want to hear from, the platform uses that as training data for suggestions that only incidentally contain the messages that the people you subscribed to.
There are various reasons for this, but they all boil down to the platform shifting value away from its users to its shareholders. Obviously that is the case with ads: the volume of “sponsored posts” that enshittify your feed is titrated to be just below the threshold where the service becomes useless to you.”
▶ It is frustrating to see Twitter slowly degrading to FaceBook level algorithmic worthlessness. For my use, I have FaceBook under control now: I have disabled all notifications (& wow that took some time, FB really wants to distract you!) and have unfollowed everyone and everything. Why? So I choose what I view. I do not see what the FB algorithm wants to show me, as it now has nothing to draw from. I only see what I choose to. If I want to see what someone is up to, I view their profile and see their latest posts. If I want to see what has been posted to a group that I follow, I visit the groups page and see the most recent posts. Simple. Human. No algorithm required.
By comparison, I’ve always found Twitter easy to manage thanks to using first Tweetdeck and now Tweeten app. Using these apps I choose which of my lists I view, and the Twitter algorithm is restricted to just one column out of 20+ and I really don’t pay much attention to it. But recently, when using Twitter via either their own website or their iOS app, the default is to display the algorithmic feed, via the ‘FOR YOU’ feed. When I don’t notice this and start scrolling, within minutes I find myself becoming irritated… And then realise ah: Twitter has become FaceBook! It’s using a profoundly stupid algorithm in an attempt to increase my engagement with clickbait & polarised posts designed to provoke. And to avoid it by default is not currently possible. Every single time I have to manually switch to ‘Following’ to see a feed from the people I actually follow.
These platforms need an ‘ENSHITIFIED’ badge.
▶ Musk and the Sad Mod Theory of Social-Media CEOs
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