While Facebook has created an addictive and destructive engagement machine, I'm really unimpressed with the contrarian response - as if manual follow/curation & reverse chrono is the only alternative.
While transparency and control of the "ranking algorithm" is important, I reject the implication that infiniscroll content feed is the best that social media can ever be.
Facebook (and others) have decided that discovery, chores, social upkeep, political activism, learning etc all belong in One Big Recommendation System. This is entirely new territory from a psychological perspective: Throughout history, humans have focused largely on one mental task at a time. You don't read Dostoevsky while having a drink with your friends, or answer emails while watching TV. Mental multitasking quickly converges on the low effort/instant gratification task. Add your favorite attention disorder to amplify this problem to the point of surrender.
Any meaningful alternative needs to account for these psychological biases. Although this is new territory, we've been through this before - with porn. Basically, if you mix porn with other content, then porn becomes predominant. Hence, any non-porn platform needs to ban porn. Reddit is an interesting counter-example, because their subreddit barriers work pretty damn well, so even though there is porn on the platform, it hasn't infected everything else.
Similar to the porn issue, we'll never extinguish celebrity clickbait, conspiracy theories and racist uncle posting memes. However, we might be able to partition it. How about designing tech which makes it POSSIBLE to avoid "crap", at least temporarily, without an outright boycott, careful curation or browser extensions?
While transparency and control of the "ranking algorithm" is important, I reject the implication that infiniscroll content feed is the best that social media can ever be.
Facebook (and others) have decided that discovery, chores, social upkeep, political activism, learning etc all belong in One Big Recommendation System. This is entirely new territory from a psychological perspective: Throughout history, humans have focused largely on one mental task at a time. You don't read Dostoevsky while having a drink with your friends, or answer emails while watching TV. Mental multitasking quickly converges on the low effort/instant gratification task. Add your favorite attention disorder to amplify this problem to the point of surrender.
Any meaningful alternative needs to account for these psychological biases. Although this is new territory, we've been through this before - with porn. Basically, if you mix porn with other content, then porn becomes predominant. Hence, any non-porn platform needs to ban porn. Reddit is an interesting counter-example, because their subreddit barriers work pretty damn well, so even though there is porn on the platform, it hasn't infected everything else.
Similar to the porn issue, we'll never extinguish celebrity clickbait, conspiracy theories and racist uncle posting memes. However, we might be able to partition it. How about designing tech which makes it POSSIBLE to avoid "crap", at least temporarily, without an outright boycott, careful curation or browser extensions?