There's a reason why humans are and will remain judges&jury.The point of a punishment is redemption, not malice or revenge.If it's not redemption then the judge will be affected by his own hand, sooner or later.He will thus become more just in his actions.No this cannot happen behind a screen<p>Then again this discussion is pointless, since big corporations enjoy both the privileges of being "private"(ironically while also treated as public forums by the legal systems) while not being hold responsible for their own content.Something censored by 'the alg'?Well, Section 230 vaguely says anything can be censored as long as the motivation behind it is also vaguely explained,and of course they cannot be held under scrutiny because technically "it's a private company[...]".<p>What people should remember is that every action has a price.You not only vote for your favorite candidate when elections come but you also vote with your wallet, the products you buy, services you use, every decision you make in your life.Complain about google when registered with a gmail account? Not an argument.We cannot allow ourselves to continue in an uneven playing field due to morality.The bigger player doesn't have morals.
The problem I see here is that there is no alternative to an algorithm. What do you expect Twitter to do? Twitter's users want to see the content that is most interesting to them, and to do that Twitter <i>has</i> to design algorithms to achieve that. Maybe that algorithm is literally just "Here's everything anyone you follow has posted chronologically" - but that's got problems, firstly <i>obviously</i> you're more interested in what some people have to say than others so you're going to have a low average value reading all the tweets, secondly it'll incentivize people spamming the timeline because they know their tweets will be buried by other tweets if people aren't reading live and that will damage how much influence they have. So, I don't think Twitter using such a simple algorithm would be good and I think a competitor would likely beat it with a better algorithm. So a state where Twitter doesn't use algorithms is likely to tend to a state where twitter is bankrupt and some other company <i>is</i> using algorithms.<p>I think it's pretty clear you need <i>some</i> algorithm. Ok, so maybe the line we draw is that we don't make value judgements on the content and only prioritize by meta data. Ie, your algorithm looks at engagement, reach etc. This is <i>basically</i> what Facebook did, and what they found was that it was much easier for people to produce highly engaging content by playing on peoples fears, misrepresenting information, and all the classic "click bait" tricks. High value content is expensive and time consuming to make, and since it doesn't get rewarded by the algorithm it gets priced out of the market. So sure, it's possible to draw that line, but again, I don't think that that's actually a neutral position, we <i>know</i> the type of content that benefits from content neutral algorithms. And remember - engagement at the end of the day is just a way of measuring what impact the content of the article is having, you're saying you want to promote content that is "engaging" as opposed to other priorities that you might have such as "truthful" or "High quality".<p>It's difficult not to think that what we're actually seeing is that the beneficiaries of the previous algorithms - the voices that were raised up by the facebook style algorithm are simply angry now that the algorithm has changed and not to their benefit. The author cites how popular their facebook pages used to be, but that wasn't a neutral algorithm either - they were just happy when the algorithm was rigged to benefit them rather than harm them.
This article is only half-right. Some of the other things you don't see because the algorithm doesn't promote them are:<p>- scientists and educators that make 1 hour long videos to explain how something is incorrect. Example: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H95VCYLBh-A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H95VCYLBh-A</a> (less than 0.1% reach of the original)<p>- long threads of detailed analysis with cross-references<p>- long educational material that explaines e.g. confounders in order to explain why some statistical results observed are not possible to interpret in a certain way<p>The reason you don't see this kind of content is simple: the level of its engagement is low. Its not clickbaity, its not exciting, it doesn't have a rebel perspective, it doesn't claim to uncover something nobody has ever seen before. Its often kind of a downer too, pointing out other people's mistakes.<p>Social media sites make their money through engagement. The longer you stay on their site, the more ads they can show you. As such, their default algorithms promote engagement <i>at any cost</i>.
It turns out that this trains creators to spread clickbaity, potentially misleading, false but exciting and novel "information" (see paper [1] as well as Veritasium's youtube specific explanation [2])<p>You know what other thing spreads a lot? Outrage. Extreme reactions to spread of misinformation are <i>also</i> engaging. People will fight over them due to strong feelings: one side frustrated by seeing the effort put into debunking having absolutely no effect (because it doens't get promoted by the algorithms, nobody finds out about it) while the other side feeling like the core values we have (free speech) are under attack.<p>Unfortunately, there is no way for social media companies to fix this problem without taking huge hits in revenue. The only way we can fix it is by becoming aware that what we're seeing isn't free speech, its some distorted picture of the world designed to engage us longer at any cost.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8</a>
> You've probably noticed this if you've tried to search YouTube for videos which don't align with the official narratives of western governments and media lately.<p>You want your unpopular ideas to be promoted, and you think that it's your right. Everything cannot be promoted, what is there suggestion of the article? To promote the less popular ideas, the most extreme.<p>I see social problems there, but morality apart, it becomes a "Nazi Bar problem", you don't want to appeal mainly to niche audiences because money.<p>In the author's opinion. We should also remove HN voting system, as popular ideas to up and unpopular are hidden.