The level of engineering put into creating feeds and distracting you from your purpose on some websites is terrifying. As part of my attempts to lessen my digital addiction, I wrote filters in ublock origin to block off anything on youtube that was distracting (auto suggestions, feeds). I had to target at least 4 different places to get the site looking clean.<p>There's the home page, the video suggestions at the side of a video you are watching, the video suggestions that pop up when a video ends, and much more. All equally distracting algorithmically-curated rakes that you have to step over. Here are some of the filter strings I used:<p><pre><code> www.youtube.com###secondary
www.youtube.com###chips-below > .ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com###primary > .ytd-two-column-browse-results-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content
</code></pre>
Unreal, in my opinion, how firm of a hold these kinds of sites can get over your brain through dopamine addiction and distraction.
> A feed is a set of algorithmically generated content provided to the user without explicit input.<p>Uhhhhhhhhhhh no? Wrong & harmful, out of the gate. Feeds derive from "RSS Feed", which are non algorithmically generated: they are each blog's, person's or site's semi-realtime "feed" of their individual content. They are not customized algorithmic content. Web feeds[1] are feeds of web sites.<p>There's some ok ideas in this article, but the very beginning is a hard-stop "no", wrong, incorrect. It uses an incorrect definition that dooms an idea (feeds) much older than what the article is scolding.<p>Feeds are wonderful things that allow users & their user agents to create views however the user wants. What the author is talking about is something different. Polluting the idea of the feed by associating it with this Big Tech walled-garden "personal feed" or what-not does injury to the remedy, hurts the chances of real actual & good feeds being able to counter-act the social-network-monopoly "feed"/ween that big tech has us on. This article is harmful.<p>If you want to talk about the consumer point of view, of someone consuming feeds, a bunch of RSS feeds when combined together forms a "river"[2]. That, too, is non-algorithmic, is an in-temporal-order view of all the feeds.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/scripting/river5" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/scripting/river5</a>
> You may be asking: don’t feeds broaden our exposure to new ideas? Yes, they do.<p>I disagree with this. Feeds are carefully crafted to create feedback loops. Did you click X? You're going to see more X on your feed; showing not-X would make no sense from an engagement perspective. They are echo-chambers by <i>design</i>.<p>The feed is harmful, but so is sugar. And just like it's saccharine cousin, I don't see it going away any time soon.
The theme I get from this post is that technology is becoming more and more frictionless at the expense of our agency.<p>And when we lose control of what we do next we lose track of where we want to get to.<p>"The feed" does not fully capture this idea. There are feeds that do not take away your control.<p>My hobby project is a "feed". But the contents of the feed is fully determined by what items you explicitly upvoted and downvoted.<p>When you upvote an item, you get stronger connected to other users who upvoted it. Their other upvoted items start ranking higher for you.<p>When you downvote something, your connection to others who upvoted it becomes weaker. So their future upvote have less weight.<p>This algorithm is transparent and predictable. This makes it possible to meaningfully interact with it. What you vote on has direct consequences for what you will see in the future. It makes you think about your future self. Where you want to be. When you consider to upvote something you need to answer the question: do you want to get more content from people who found this useful?<p>If this sounds interesting to you, give it a try at <a href="https://linklonk.com/register" rel="nofollow">https://linklonk.com/register</a> with invitation code "hn" (a temporary account is created, you don't need to give your email to try). It is very early days, I would appreciate any feedback.
> this definition doesn’t include messaging apps or RSS feeds<p>This is like "assume a spherical cow" or "define red to mean green".
I find it interesting that the article has been flagged. It looks like the HN community is shifting towards using flagging, instead of just plain downvoting, as a standrad means of expressing disagreement.