The effects of algorithms on the public discourse

> Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs

What I think it comes down to is us, on one level, grasping the benefits of elitist gatekeeping, but, on another level, not wanting to acknowledge that such mechanisms have benefits.

The elitism I speak of isn’t one of wealth, family or schooling. Instead it’s intellectual curiosity. That seems to correlate with the foregoing; hence the discomfort (at least in democratic societies).

Simply: when the internet was peopled by the curious and clever, it was fun. When it had to—or could—cater to a lower common denominator, it did. And that gave us this crap.

The problem for people who preferred the text-based approach is that previously they were over-represented and found things they liked everywhere. Like you say, the vast majority of people prefer image reels, short-form video, microblogs like Twitter, or comments on aggregators like Reddit or HN. That's the truth, but that original cohort of people lost their place and there's no obvious substitute.

I think that's primarily because there's no Schelling point for this. There's no single place where everyone who preferred the other form would go to. Perhaps there are webrings out there and stuff like that, but I haven't seen anything.

I've submitted my friends' blogs to the Kagi Small Web (and I'm in there as well) and almost everything there has a human feel to it, but it does not have cluster-navigation.

> What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video. It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people.

I think you're right about the waves of migration, but I disagree that the product is "better".

What we've really traded are in-person friendships for anonymous online interactions, and that's definitely worse for everyone, in my opinion.

What's distinctive of the old blogging era is that the amount of online content at the time was extremely limited. You couldn't endlessly scroll through blogs. You went online, read some stuff, and then went offline. Now people never go offline. Now the amount of online content is practically unlimited, and not only that, it's the type of content that people typically consume alone. We get sucked into spending so much time alone, our only company being online strangers who we've never met and never will meet. You talk about YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, but that million-to-one ratio of viewer to YouTuber precludes most direct human interaction.

The fact that both we and the masses in general have been sucked into this situation, this depersonalization, separation from in-person interactions, is a great societal harm. And I don't think it's ironic that I'm saying this online to anonymous strangers; I just think it's sad, another symptom of the problem.

It wasn't just about the subscribers. Blogs were incredibly useful as long-form documentation of unique problems and experiences, too. I used to write in my blog (Standalone SysAdmin), and it had over a million hits per year a few times, and the majority of those hits which didn't come from going viral about ashtrays in airplane bathrooms were people searching for the same problems I'd encountered and written about.

> Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010

That's what's kind of insane, community forums took maybe 20-30 people to feel "active", but you can't get a big enough slice of attention from that many people to actually use forums, even though the Internet has grown massively. Discovery is really hard: it used to be that community websites were able to claw their way up Page Rank, but these days it's just hard to compete with major websites and SEO slop. Even if you manage to snag a few people, they are very likely to drop off quicker, and the "feel" is a lot different when they're all social-media-brained anyway. The proof is in the pudding: most forums are dead, and forums that are still alive are mostly ancient and very obviously less influential and smaller than they once were. People are too distracted by things that actively claw away attention, and people who are drawn in by social media tend to bring a bad kind of energy to traditional forums anyways.

It is true that you have bigger audiences nowadays with modern social media. Part of that is just the fact that the Internet is bigger (somewhere between 2x to 3x bigger) but another major part of that is the consolidation. Though, it's also worth noting that comparing YouTube subscribers to blog readers may not give the best representation. Entirely different concepts, for entirely different media.

It's really not that simple; the environment that allowed for the kind of appealing interactions blogs offered is much harder to come by.

Early days had a barrier to entry that made the public who would read and engage much more enjoyable to write for.

The universal internet is not the same thing as the one that naturally filtered it's participants.

I don't want any algorithms, AI or human, curating my default feed. I want my feed to be a chronologically-ordered listing of the content creators I choose to follow and like. If I want to explore the algorithm, that should still be possible, but it shouldn't be the default.

I think avoiding algorithms completely is tricky. Even things like podcast guests or suggestions from friends feel as manipulable but in a human way.

What works for me is checking if people I respect in a domain also blog or link elsewhere. That is how I found Peter Norvig's blog... or maybe it was on hacker news.

Some of it has to do with app defaults. When you load up YouTube it doesn’t go to the subscriptions, it goes to the Recommended page. It has enough of the new videos from subscribed channels people watch, plus enough of the new videos from channels they commonly watch without a subscription, that people have no reason to go to the Subscriptions page.

Launching from the Subscriptions is an intentional act by people who are actively trying to avoid the Recommendation page, or where the Recommendation page failed to surface what they wanted.

I would not be at all surprised if any using of the Subscriptions page triggered YouTube to adjust their algorithm for that user to see more of what they played on the Recommendation page. They probably see the use of the Subscriptions as a failure of the Recommendation engine.

For a short while my YouTube app on my AppleTV was showing Watch Later and Subscriptions when it launched. I loved it. I assume they were just A/B testing, because it stopped doing that after a while.

Yeah I don't understand why all YouTubers seem to despise "the algorithm", and some of the creators I follow even created their own rival, Nebula, that does not have "the algorithm". Without "the algorithm" I wouldn't find out about your channel in the first place!

Private group chats are the new social networks. It's apples and oranges but I think for people that really don't want to be "on social media" the alternative is to keep engagement with close friends on a group-by-group basis.

So whatever they share on there is how I get my social-media awareness. It's basically intentionally a very very narrow filter. It has to be.

Then, subscribe to paid publications, journalism, podcasts, newsletters.

Small-blog-aggregators like Kottke are a goldmine. The trick, of course, is to remember to follow the interesting people he surfaces.

And RSS. It never went away. Just use RSS.

I'd love to know more, do you have any that you'd recommend?

This is great to hear. Churches are often in the prime real estate areas, it'd be great, if the attendance / donations would fall to zero. And if these places would be redeveloped into open-for-all urban green islands. Rather than exclusive worship clubs.

Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative.

Those types of forums are great, but just as a counterpoint, I get a lot of that type of value from Facebook Groups as well. There are niche specialty interest groups with people of different skill depths conversing on probably just about anything.

It's mixed in with the rest of your Facebook feed most of the time so it is a categorically different experience/"community" than an independent forum but I don't think the "like" mechanics materially affect the discussion in those places.

Thanks for linking this! I've never heard of Gemini before now, and it definitely appeals to a lot of what I want in on the internet.

I am all about newsletters and RSS feeds now. The internet is so much nicer. F--k the algorithms.

Yeah, same here for the same reason. I installed FreshRSS in a Docker container on my home-server, found some blogs, and now that's what I'm subscribed to and reading.