Social media divides us, makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we need to touch grass and escape to the real world.
New research shows that we might have largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think.
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Algorithm-free solves a lot of problems.
I’m not sure you understand what an algorithm is. They’re simply a sequence of steps you apply to get some end result, comparable to eg. a recipe in baking.
Lemmy still has multiple ways for you to choose how posts are sorted; “hot”, “active”, “new” etc. Each of those is an algorithmic sorting, and there’s literally no other option except to have an algorithm that is used to determine which posts you see
edit: I think many people who think Lemmy is “algorithm-free” may mean that it has a transparent algorithm for post selection. It’s still an algorithm, but we can all go look at source code and documentation to be able to know exactly how it works – with eg. Facebook the exact workings of the post sorting algorithm is secret
I mean, I have a BS and MS in computer science, so you can use that as guidance as to whether or not I know what an algorithm is. :)
In this context, though, it should be clear that “The Algorithm” refers to a specific social networking algorithm that chooses the content you see in order to maximize advertising revenue.
So yes, Lemmy has algorithms that show different content based on your input, but that’s a wildly different animal. Notably, I’m the one deciding, and also they’re not trying to maximize ad revenue.
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I agree that open, controllable recommendation algorithms would be great. But right now using none of the currently widespread social media recommendation algorithms at all (and just matching keywords instead) makes for a less-abusive, more positive experience. IMHO.