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.
This video is sponsored and contains an ad.
The second half sounds a lot like an ad for Lemmy ^^
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
Not really. Recommendation algorithms are great for discovering related information and new stuff. They even beat search at its own game, as search is often limited to plain text, while the algorithms take the broader context into account. The problem is that you have no control over the recommendations, no transparency how they work, no way to switch or disable them and no way to explore the deeper knowledge hidden in them. It’s all just a magical black box for more engagement and more ads.
A recommendation algorithms that somehow manages to be open and transparent would be a very big step towards fixing the Web. Lemmy and Co. are too busy replicating failed technology from 30 years ago instead of actually fixing the underlying problems.