[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]
Now that I’m spending most of my reading and almost all of my writing time on a site (Cohost, of course) that doesn’t have an algorithmic-driven recommendation system, I tend to forget how omnipresent they are. I’ve been doing some reading up lately on LLM-generated content and social network amplification, and came across this essay on “Understanding Social Media Recommendation Algorithms.” I think it wimps out a bit in its “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” conclusion, but overall it’s one of the more useful explanations I’ve seen regarding how recommendation algorithms work—or don’t work as the case may be. (It also has a good discussion of the sheer randomness in what “goes viral”, and how “shadowbanning” and related practices can inhibit virality.)
Spunney (@Spunney) - 2023-03-22 12:05
I always found it weird when people were talking about the Twitter algorithm in particular as if there isn’t a clearly labeled button at the top of the timeline that disables it. For the longest time I had literally no idea what anyone was talking about when they mentioned the “Twitter algorithm”. I guess what shows up on the trending tab and whatever is algorithm driven but, unless you’re trying to go viral, I don’t see how this effects anyone on a personal level.
But I don’t really know what other social media sites are like, I’ve never used them…
Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-03-23 17:47
Thanks for the comment! My apologies for the delay in acknowledging it.
There have apparently been attempts by Twitter to make the “For You” timeline the default, or to switch back to it every time you came back to Twitter, which pissed off a lot of people. I think now if you set the timeline to “Following” then it will stay that way (at least on the iOS app).
I recently had a Twitter thread go semi-viral (just over 500 retweets), but I don’t know if it was promoted by the algorithm(s) into peoples’ “For you” feeds, or if people found it by searching for the (commonly-used) tags I included. (I don’t subscribe to Twitter Blue, so I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any artificial boosting of the thread.)