Clickbait title: Algorithms are hostile.

If you estimate my age or read other articles of mine, you are aware that I have grown up during the awkward transition period between chronological feeds and algorithmic recommendation systems. I know why people bump a thread, but only learned about RSS as a thing old people use.

As my free time has decreased and my standards increased, I have come to appreciate chronological feeds for a variety of reasons. They allow me to easily stop and leave when I have reached posts I already know, defeating the slot machine effect seen from algorithmic feeds you can refresh.

Well I use RSS now, because the old people were in many ways right. On most social media (or as I like to call them “media feed”) sites I use the chronological feed, but notably on YouTube I subscribed myself completely to the algorithm. I think I have a good setup going. But that was not always the case.

The middle

The elephant in the room to mention here is Reddit. Which I quit out of a desire to be on the correct side of a consumer boycott, but really also as an experiment. It was like redecorating my room.

I do not know what Reddit is doing nowadays, but half a century ago, Reddit was driven by visiting different subreddits one after the other and seeing which posts were in the “Hot” section each day. The ranking was determined through a mix of post age (older posts getting minus points) and upvotes (likes). To survive longer at the top, you needed to keep on getting more people to like your post, with the audience slowly shifting from people who spend 8 hours on the website to people who visit the website once a week.

The main benefit of this system, as I see it, is that users could stay in the bubble of a single subreddit and within that bubble establish a system of what is “good” or “bad”. Spilling from one space to another was rampant but not ever-present. Secondarily, from the perspective of someone posting content to the forum, it was relatively easy to gain traction even if you were new, as long as you followed the ideas of quality of the community. (On the downside it was exceedingly hard to create a following)

As a conclusion of this section, Reddit has (or had) great discoverability within a niche community, but poor personalisation and poor discoverability of new communities (I think the latter is being solved by a more algorithmic approach on their side nowadays).

The ugly

Now let’s look at the best example I’ve seen for the conflict between algorithms and chronological feeds: Bluesky. It has a lot of flaws and is trying a lot of new things. It also has a userbase which is defined by leaving from other platforms. I just share other people’s birds there.

By default, Bluesky gives you two feeds “Discover” and “Following” (it has many other ways to get feeds, but looking at user numbers of those feeds, very few seem to care sadly). “Discover” is your normal algo-feed by a company which does not have a staff of 20 machine learning researchers. Clumsy, focused on numbers more than user-behavior and not instantly responsive (no I havent read their source code, I dont care that much). “Following” is the barebones chronological feed of everyone you follow.

I’ve seen countless complaints of people about how trash the Discover feed is and interestingly that they do not want their posts shown in other’s the discover feed (!). Why? From what I can gather, it tends to bring in a bunch of people who don’t know what the author is about and don’t care to learn before not harassing them in the comments. (What is the gender-neutral term for reply-guy?)

I don’t doubt that many people use the following feed, but these complaints highlight that there also seems to be a crowd of easily angered people who do use the Discover feed. And you know, they are kinda ruining it for the rest of us.

The giant

YouTube of course once a time had a way to subscribe to people. Some claim it still exists. But the function of going to your subscriptions and seeing what new videos have been uploaded today seems to be not acknowledged anymore. Subscribing to a channel has become mainly an algorithmic signal. This is why YouTubers are begging for it.

Now, there are indeed people who still use the subscription box. I tend to look in mine as well when I can see the algorithm overwhelming me. For people who swear by the subscription box, I do have a question: How do you cope with this?

I would say about every third YouTuber I choose to stay subscribed to because I do actually want to be informed of new videos uploads a bunch of extra trash. Here’s an extended cut, here’s bloopers, here’s a livestream VOD. Worse even when you have a channel which has several shows and segments. Do these creators not know that they are ruining my subscription feed? They might know, but they don’t care.

Conclusion

Chronological feeds only survive if they are the dominant way that everyone agreed on. Algorithms may not even be strictly better than chronological feeds, but they are essentially hostile towards them.

Algorithms disturb insular communities with a wave of newcomers who have been selected to be angered by the contents instead of being interested in it. Even worse, the new users assume that everyone lives under the reign of the algorithm, so they will make you responsible for showing them content they did not want to see.

Algorithms encourage authors to play the algorithm game, which tends towards throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Content becomes de-facto unfiltered, because the assumption is that the algorithm does the heavy lifting of finding the right audience for it.

Bonus

Okay, now consider those videos by tech streamers reacting to techie blog posts and what kind of crazy algorithm infestation this is towards one of the last chronological spheres.