How on earth do you come out with "Algorithmically curated news feed" in 2023 and think it's a good idea? We didn't know these things were doomsday devices back in 2012, what's their excuse today?
I agree. They’re not even acknowledging the total horror show that public social media has become. Instead they’re leaning into AI and basically telling us that the reason we’re not happy is because of inefficient recommendation systems – a misreading of the room at levels only Bay Area execs can achieve. People’s contempt for these platforms rose proportionally to the amount of agency that these opaque recommendation engines removed.
If you want to innovate in this space, you have to change the game entirely. Perhaps it means exposing the parameters for “discovery” to let the users be in control. Perhaps it’s finding alternative revenue sources, so that the users become customers. Perhaps it’s about changing fundamentally how moderation, visibility and trust works. Taking an idea from 2010 and putting a GPT sticker on it ain’t it.
I think they are hoping to moderate content more strictly and select a metric to optimize which (hopefully) better aligns with the individual.
> “One of the issues with technology recently has been a lot of these companies’ unwillingness to make subjective judgments in the name of quality and progress for humanity,” he says. “Right? Just make the hard decision.”
> Artifact will also remove individual posts that promote falsehoods, he says. And its machine-learning systems will be primarily optimized to measure how long you spend reading about various subjects — as opposed to, say, what generates the most clicks and comments — in an effort to reward more deeply engaging material.
But I guess we’ll see if they can pull it off. I think the funding model they settle on will inevitably play the biggest role though.
