Doubt. Techbros will come up with a workaround.
I have a feeling that these companies will intentionally try to push low quality content to users who have turned it off, to motivate them to turn it back on.
Cause that’s just the way these fuckers are.
“No algorithm. Every post. Unfiltered. In chronological order.”
This. You can already have it on LinkedIn in the EU at least, “sort by recent” instead of “sort by relevant”. Imho its very effective, turns me off within 20 seconds instead of 5 min. If the effect works similarly on less cringe platforms, i can see this as a huge win for consumers.
It needs to be the default state or else it is useless, most people will stay with what they already have out of familiarity and laziness.
But it opens up whole new interventions! Now we can have social media health campaigns that start with “right now, you can make this healthier. PUSH THE BUTTON!”
I didn’t see from the article if they have a definition of “the algorithm” that means anything?
Like, I know this is preaching to the choir here of all places, but you literally can’t have a social media without “an algorithm”, but I think we all know that’s not what they mean. But what actually do they mean? Do they mean “showing things from people you haven’t followed or subscribed to”, do they mean “showing posts or videos with stats that make them think you’ll like it”? Do they mean any selection algorithm that’s personalized to your account rather than site wide? So you could still have “top of the last 12 hours”, but everyone would have the same top?
Because every platform has more content on it per day than any human could consume that day. Something somewhere must choose what to show you and what order it’s in, because it can’t show everything. So I’m curious how they’ll define what “the algorithm” is…
The algorithm here means showing content to one that wasn’t directly chosen, e.g. SEO on Google.
Sense 4 (Wiktionary)
Chosen as in “subscriptions” / “followed” / “friends”?
So if it picks from among accounts you’ve opted-in to then it’s not the bad algorithm? That’s not meant as a gotcha, it’s a choice one could make to draw the line, but I don’t know if it’s the one they had in mind. There’s still room there to pick which order it shows your selected things in, but maybe that still mitigates the harm.
Does TikTok have the concept of following or subscribing? I don’t even know…
Things like Lemmy are a little trickier because our model is different. I can subscribe to a community, but then the content in that community is posted by strangers, and then those posts have comments by strangers, all of which require some kind of algorithm to curate. So in this definition showing me strangers shitposts is “no algorithm” if I’m subscribed to the shitpost community, but it isn’t allowed to suggest a shitpost if I’m not in that community?
It’s a line that could be drawn, but it remains to be seen if that’s the line they have in their minds.
Thank you for sving me the trouble of typing basically that. heh.
It’s like when they talk about how to define porn and the best definition is basically “you know it when you see it”. But you can’t write law like that (except they can and do and it causes problems).
So would a vpn do the trick for everyone else!?
This would be a hilarious outcome - people VPN’ing into Australia for usable social media.
Australian here, don’t be fooled by our governments tokenistic press releases. This legislation sounds good but it’ll be another insufficient measure that doesn’t actually address the problem. Like the under 16s “ban” this will allow the government and media to talk about social algorithms like it’s solved and they were succesful.
100% this - Don’t get excited, whenever it sounds like Australia is about to do something good, it’s immediately watered down to a tiny announceable to appease the lobby groups. Most recently example is the 100% renewable energy requirement for datacenters decree that lasted about a week.
They’re token gestures to look like they’ve done something this term other than pass liberal party tax cuts.
Remember when Albo was spruiking that he grew up in trust housing? Contrast that with the big fat load of less than nothing Labor has done on housing. Passing the buck at every opportunity, “it’s a state issue” followed by “it’s a federal issue” followed by “it’s a… errr… skills shortage!”
Vote for a real change, Vote Greens.
Every time I point this out on Technology, “liberals” get big mad.
https://lemmy.world/comment/25738404
The average talking chimp is probably never going to accept that capitalism is incompatible with democracy. Not before the fascist killbot genocide or ecological collapse anyway.
