> I don't get this mentality of "I like X, but I don't want to use X, so imma go turn Y into X"
You really don't understand why someone would prefer Mastodon because of its decentralized and open source nature, but would like to take some of the things they like about Twitter and include it in their Mastodon experience?
> Playing into people's FOMO
This implies that the only form of "algorithmic feed" is one where clickbait and inflammatory content is maximized.
An algorithmic feed can also mean something like a "for you" feed that tries to find you posts you'd find interesting based solely on your current follows, but from other accounts you're not following.
It can also mean a "what you missed" feed like the one Twitter used to have, that shows you the top posts from your follows since the last time you logged in. If someone doesn't open mastodon for a week because they were on vacation, it's not feasible for them to scroll through an entire weeks worth of posts to "catch up".
Understand that people have a wide variety of experiences they'd like to get out of social media, and that this whole mentality of "my idea of a social network is the most enlightened and correct one, and everyone else is stupid" just feeds into the stereotype of the socially inept engineer.
Totally get what you're saying and agree to an extent, but can you supply examples where algo-driven feeds did not eventually devolve into clickbait/inflammatory/etc recommendations?
I am not saying algos are bad, so I should clarify that. What I should have directed my ire at is the people that implement them since, historically speaking, they can not be trusted to do so without bias or other motives. Chronological feeds cannot be abused in this way, to my knowledge, and represent a state of purity in my mind.
Appreciate you taking the time to make salient points, though.
The alignment problem is an extremely difficult one, and one that we've basically punted on for all AI research. Making an algorithm is easy, scoring content by external factors like engagement or time on screen are also easy. Designing a scoring algorithm that is aligned to a person's preferences, desires, opinions, etc are extremely hard. At best we attempt to find proxies and correlations, the algorithm tracks engagement and we assume that means they want to see more similar content.
IMO this is the fundamental reason for chronological feeds. Aligning the algorithm is an unsolved problem, I'd rather just not use it at all.
You really don't understand why someone would prefer Mastodon because of its decentralized and open source nature, but would like to take some of the things they like about Twitter and include it in their Mastodon experience?
> Playing into people's FOMO
This implies that the only form of "algorithmic feed" is one where clickbait and inflammatory content is maximized.
An algorithmic feed can also mean something like a "for you" feed that tries to find you posts you'd find interesting based solely on your current follows, but from other accounts you're not following.
It can also mean a "what you missed" feed like the one Twitter used to have, that shows you the top posts from your follows since the last time you logged in. If someone doesn't open mastodon for a week because they were on vacation, it's not feasible for them to scroll through an entire weeks worth of posts to "catch up".
Understand that people have a wide variety of experiences they'd like to get out of social media, and that this whole mentality of "my idea of a social network is the most enlightened and correct one, and everyone else is stupid" just feeds into the stereotype of the socially inept engineer.