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Meta conducted an experiment where thousands of users were shown chronological feeds on Facebook and Instagram for three months. Users of the chronological feeds engaged less with the platforms and were more likely to use competitors like YouTube and TikTok. This suggests that users prefer algorithmically ranked feeds that show them more relevant content, even though some argue chronological feeds provide more transparency. While the experiment found that chronological feeds exposed users to more political and untrustworthy content, it did not significantly impact their political views or behaviors. The researchers note that a permanent switch to chronological feeds could produce different results, but this study provides only a glimpse into the issue.
I think this is bullshit. I exclusively scroll Lemmy in new mode. I scroll I see a post I already have seen. Then I leave. That doesn’t mean I hate it, I’m just done!
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I’m the opposite, chronological feed made me use social media even more
as soon as instagram lost the chronological feed I stopped using it, it just made it useless to keep track of what friends and family were doing. I dont care they went to dinner two weeks ago, I might have commented something if they were there today though
Instagram went from a friend feed to “Hey you saw a girl with big boobs this one time, here are 100 other girls with big boobs” very quickly.
That and the insane amount of ads made me quit it.
I think the conclusion that people hate chronological feeds is not a very strong conclusion. People also hate some algorithmic feeds, especially when it’s full of crap and there is no chronology anymore. An ideal situation would be if you could choose both and also if you could influence the algorithm.
I’d like to interject for a moment and say,
this isn’t a test for what users like, this is a test for how users are addicted to the platform
algorithm provides content in a way that they become a consoomer and more often than not, we actually feel guilty and sad after an hour of scrolling and realising we wasted so much time (like post masturbation sadness)
ITT: tech people and power users struggle to understand that the masses use devices and services differently than they do.
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I mean, this isn’t that surprising as the algorithm is intended for full dopamine distribution. It’s like a fucking dopamine faucet and we are all just a bunch of apes.
@・ꈊ・@
In a mother news: “drug dealers proved that drug addicts hate not getting their daily dose”
Is it possible to design a content recommendation algorithm that isn’t game-able? As it stands right now I don’t think that algorithms are fundamentally bad, just that capitalism ruins everything.
I don’t think the idea should be to make the algorithm’s ungameable because I feel like that is literally impossible with humans. The first rule of web dev or game dev is that the users are going to find ways to use your site, app, software, or api in ways you never intended regardless of how long you, or even a team of people, think about it.
I’d rather see something where the algorithm is open and pieces of it are voted on by the users and other interested parties. Perhaps let people create and curate their own algorithm’s, something like playlist curation on spotify or youtube but make it as transparent as possible, let people share them and such. Kind of like how playlists are shared.
I’d rather see something where the algorithm is open and pieces of it are voted on by the users and other interested parties. Perhaps let people create and curate their own algorithm’s, something like playlist curation on spotify or youtube but make it as transparent as possible, let people share them and such. Kind of like how playlists are shared.
Isn’t that already how it works, sans the transparency part?
You press “like” on something you like, and the algorithm shows you more that are related to that thing you just liked. Indirectly, you’re curating your feed/algorithm. Or maybe you can look at this from another angle, maybe the “like” button isn’t just for the things you like, but also the things that you don’t particularity like, but would like to see more.
Then there’s other people around you, your Facebook friends, their likes also affect your feed, as you can see the algorithm suggests things that “people that are interested in things you’re interested in, are also interested in”.
The question is what do you use to measure quality?
Engagement is useful but leads to this, obviously. But unless people are constantly rating content they like and don’t like (Reddit was the closest to a robust way to do that), it’s hard to train what content they want.
In the 80’s, Pepsi was gaining quickly on Coca Cola with the Pepsi challenge: having tasters blindly tasting Pepsi versus Coke and choosing which one they liked better. Pepsi won a majority of these. But over the decades, it turns out that consumer preference for a sip of each didn’t necessarily translate over an entire can, or an entire case of cans. When asked to drink 12-20 ounces (350 to 600 ml) of the soft drink, regularly, people behaved differently than what they did for a 2 ounce (60 ml) taste.
Asking consumers to rate things in the moment still suffers from their less reliable momentary ratings of things they experience all day, day after day. Especially of things that tend to be associated with unhealthy addictions.
Yeah, you’re right that even having users rate content is still limited.
I’d argue it almost definitely has to be better than engagement, though. It also has the potential to be less punitive to people who actually are thoughtful with what they like by using the likes as more of a classification problem and less shoving the same trash in everyone’s face.
It’s a hard problem, but sites aren’t even attempting to actually attempt to do anything but tie you to a shitty dopamine loop.
I’d argue it almost definitely has to be better than engagement, though.
Totally agree. I think those who design the algorithms and measure engagement need to remember that there is a difference between immediate dopamine rush versus long term user satisfaction. User votes can sometimes be poor predictors of long term satisfaction, but I imagine engagement metrics are even less reliable.
They don’t want satisfaction.
They want addiction.
That’s not a sustainable model, either. Zynga had a decent run but ended up flaming out, eventually purchased by a large gaming company.
That’s to say nothing of the business models around gambling, alcohol, tobacco, and addictive pharmaceuticals. Low level background addiction is the most profitable, while intense and debilitating addictions tend to lead to unstable revenue (and heavy regulation).
Goodhart’s Law: Any statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed on it for control purposes.
Or, to paraphrase, any metric that becomes a target ceases to be a good metric. Ranking algorithms, by their nature, use some sort of quantifiable metric as a heuristic for quality.
It is not at the moment. Models are built on the assumption of stability, i.e. that what they are modelling doesn’t change over time, doesn’t evolve. This is clearly untrue, and cheating is a way the environment evolves. Only way to consider that, is to create a on-line continous learning algorithm. Currently this exists and is called reinforcement learning. Main issue is that methods to account for an evolving environment are still under active research. In the sense that methods to address this issue are not yet available.
It is an extremely difficult task tbf
Ok, then what about algorithms that are reasonably difficult to game?
It requires continuous expansive improvements. It is like real world. Building a system robust to frauds works on the short term, but on the mid and long term is impossibile. That is why laws change, evolve, we have governments and so on. Because system reacts to your rules and algorithms, making them less effective.
And these continous expensive improvements are done daily, but it is a difficult job
If you weighted things by clicks vs time viewing maybe? The true issue is lack of moderation.
Non genuine accounts boost the post for whatever reason. This creates engagement. This is good for the marketer and the platform because they make their money through advertising. They don’t care if marketing firms are using thousands of zombie accounts to boost posts.
Mix addictive ingredients into food and the consumer will eat more than naturally, but it’s not better for him. Saying “more is better” and confusing “to engage” with “to like” is eval.
I think there’s a time and a place for algorithmic feeds. When it comes to Facebook i personally think it makes sense to have a way of filtering the important things first, based on who you interact with. It’s a social network in the definitive sense; we care about some people more than others depending on where in the network they are. However we’ve seen how things go when Facebook use it with pages/news stories (which is really concerning).
For things like Twitter, I want chronological. It’s a real time platform based on sharing information across a larger audience. Its use in breaking news makes timing important. It’s largely gone to shit now because Musk, but in its heyday anyway.
Ideally there should always be a choice, or at least some transparency around how the algorithms work. That way everyone can choose what works for them based on how they use the platform.
The actual problem is that they think they should just force one or the other on us. Give us a choice to sort our feed and we’ll figure out what we like best.
But then people can choose the option that does not have them scrolling for hours. Which means less time and less views on the platform. Why would they give you that option?
Goes to show I am getting tired. Why didn’t I think of that. Ofcourse meta wants to keep you on their platform as long as possible. Thanks for pointing that out to me.
Disappointed with Wired writing totally wrong title. Meta didn’t prove anything. It was a claim, not a proof.
The headline is ridiculous and leaving instagram for youtube and tiktok is a weird point since they are very different to what people use instagram for?
But why does everything in the world have to be so THIS or THAT??? Why can’t i have a chronological feed that gives me a “recommended” post every 3rd or so post? I want to see everything from everyone I follow while sometimes seeing new stuff and then when ive caught up i want to close the app and go on with my day.
I dont want For You or Following tabs. I want to choose how often im recommended content and see/change what its basing the recommendations off of. Everything in life doesnt have to be a war between red or blue hats for crying out loud
i want to close the app and go on with my day
That’s exactly the “problem” being portrayed here, the expected/ideal mode of interaction with social media is compulsive and perpetual. It’s the best way to maximize advertisement exposure. I’m not opposed to the slot machine of content, but it’s absolutely reasonable to expect users to want to go on with their day.
I’m sorry, but those “suggestions” sound wrong - a chronological feed exposes users to untrustworthy content. The point is an algorithmic feed is unknown manipulation UNLESS the algorithm is known and published. Engaging less is also NOT a bad thing at all, unless you are the platform itself. The inference is that an algorithm will expose users to less political and untrustworthy content? Well, certainly not if the platform wants to generate continuous engagement through provocation and the creation of outrage.
But OK, it is an experiment by Meta, so let’s just leave it at that.
We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong.
But in all seriousness, this feels like the chronological feed given to users was just a straw man intended to make their algorithm look better. Also the claim in the article that Meta’s algorithm does not impact users politics is completely ridiculous and not at all supported by a study like this.
Classic false dilemma. It was never about “algorithm vs chronological”. The problem is the lack of options. Having algorithmic magic be the only way to browse content is the issue. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exits or even that it shouldn’t be the default. There should just me more other ways that the user can switch too.
I have that issue with Youtube, which can be really good at recommending obscure videos with a couple of hundred views that are exactly about the topic you are looking for. But there is no way for me to actively select the topic that the recommendation machine recommends, it’s all based and watch history can very easily get screwed up when you watch the wrong videos. Worse yet, it can’t handle multiple topics at once, so one topic will naturally end up suppressing the other. The workaround for that is to run multiple browser profiles, train each of them on a topic and than be very careful what video you watch with what profile. But that’s frankly stupid, such functionality should be in the UI. Youtube has a topic-bar at the top which looks like it might help, but it’s far to unspecific to be useful, something like “Gaming” isn’t one topic, it’s thousands of topics bundled into one, the recommendation algorithm understands each of the thousand topics individually, the UI does not.
Give users choice.
The algorithm is designed to keep you on the platform with endless feeds of content you might click on. And the site is designed to force you towards the algorithm as much as possible. They don’t want to give you choice about how you might want to view content, they just want you to stay on the platform.
Personally I like just putting all the new content from my subscription that I am interested in, in a watch list then playing through that list and leave when I am done. But youtube is making that workflow harder and harder. Just recently they moved the add to watch later button from the hover on the video to a submenu, resulting in a lot more clicks to do what I used to. And it is now very hard to actually manage your subscriptions in bulk.
Youtube has a topic-bar at the top which looks like it might help
One annoying thing is that the topic bar isn’t always there, the UI isn’t consistent and things show up on the page when YouTube feels like it.
I think this is bullshit.
I think it is exactly how people are behaving. And I can even recall witnessing many people first hand who flip a newspaper to the sports section. Never learning anything about science news, medical news, unless it’s some kind of social column about a diet.
People wanting to cut out and block things they don’t want to read in a newspaper is what I consider the “default behavior” of most of humanity. No surprise they do not care about the news their friends share. An intelligent computer system that filters out (based on topic/content study) what they don’t want to see before-hand is always going to be popular with such people.
“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” — Marshall McLuhan.
Accidentally deleted my comment instead of saving edits. Here it is again.
I favor OP’s perspective, but that’s because I sub to/follow the stuff I find interesting so I can ignore everything else. I already “made” my own algorithm by only following the stuff I care about, now show it to me chronologically instead of according to your algorithm (because honestly, either your algorithm is optimized for engagement and shows tons of ragebait because it gets engagement and it gets me mad, or it’s actually good and I spend more time online than I wanted to and feel bad. Yes, I know not being able to just cut myself off is a problem, but there’s something to be said for engineering addictive algorithms too).
My experience with algorithms and “for you” is algorithms shoving ragebait in my face and me not always being able to resist clicking. Content delivery algorithms have not been good to me, which heavily influences my view.
I favor OP’s perspective, but that’s because I sub to/follow the stuff I find interesting so I can ignore everything else. I already “made” my own algorithm by only following the stuff I care about, now show it to me chronologically instead of jamming in the stuff you think I’ll like (because honestly, either your algorithm is optimized for engagement and shows tons of ragebait because it gets engagement, or it’s good and I spend more time online than I wanted to and feel bad. Yes, I know not being able to just cut myself off is a problem, but there’s something to be said for engineering addictive algorithms too).
