zlacker

Quite true, but let's not pretend that Twittr, Tumbler and Fakebook aren't also "incenting" all sorts of distorted behaviors of their own! These sites are "algorithms" all the same, even if the workings of these algorithms are in some ways more transparent. We need open and widespread federation via technologies like Mastodon, Matrix and ActivityPub, so that if you don't like one "algorithm" you can easily switch to another that's more appropriate to your use case.

>>0815te+(OP)
> We need open and widespread federation via technologies like Mastodon, Matrix and ActivityPub, so that if you don't like one "algorithm" you can easily switch to another that's more appropriate to your use case.

This always sounds good, but decentralized is nearly impossible to commoditize or make appealing to the general public. Outside of evangelism and word-of-mouth, how are people going to escape the Youtube advertising budget and instead choose - en masse - the product that is better for their privacy?

There's just so much money and inertia to fight.

>>nkozyr+G
YouTube removing harmless content over copyright etc is one way.

>>0815te+(OP)
If the ranking algorithm is open for all to see, won't that encourage even worse gaming of the system? I am trying to think of comparable situations in existing open systems, but none come to mind.

>>0815te+(OP)
I think the author's issue is not that her recommendations are bad, but that other people are getting recommendations for things she disagrees with (ie conspiracy theory videos, child-unsafe content, etc). So I don't think she would view decentralization as a win.

>>0815te+(OP)
> We need open and widespread federation via technologies like Mastodon, Matrix and ActivityPub, so that if you don't like one "algorithm" you can easily switch to another

We already have them, yet FB, IG, Twitter, YT are the social media behemoths.

Are you making a plea for the average internet person to care about the values of the platforms they use over the platform content? You are likely preaching to the choir here on HN, but I would guess that the audience here is only 1% of 1% of the audience you need to message.

Corps make good use of psychological experiments to optimize their utility function. "Evil is efficient." The problem is that companies optimize for money without taking into account any other factor in any significant way.

> In 1970, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman published an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” [1]

Arguably this quote incentivized the destruction of "good corporate citizenship" (although I admit it's possible that concept never existed in a broad sense).

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/2017/04/14/harvard-business-school-...