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0 pointsanonacct377y ago0 comments

I strongly believe stuff like this doesn't happen by accident. It's easy to write pieces about how a soulless algorithm is determining stuff and we can all be sad about it, but in my experience, that's rarely true.

There's almost always at least a software developer (or technical person of some sort) calling out "Hey, are you sure we should rank by $X? It will have this edge case in situations $Y and $X?". Usually they get steamrolled by a "product" person who's invented some new terminology for whatever shady shit they are pushing now. "It's just growth hacking" "complimentary contextually relevant ads will improve the user experience".

People know. They always know. They just choose to feign ignorance when they get busted.

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darpa_escapee7y ago

Even if we grant them the benefit of doubt, it certainly isn't an accident to keep using the same algorithm once you know its consequences.

There's been hand-wringing about Youtube funnelling users to extremist content, and it always comes to down to "the algorithm" as if there's nothing that can be done about it.

Someone had to choose to implement the algorithm. Someone had to choose the metrics it was optimized to meet. Someone had to go, "Children are being drawn to extremist videos after watching PewDiePie and that's okay."

scoggs7y ago

I view facebook's newsfeed and youtube's list of suggestions like entering into a popular reddit thread about something dividing the community that has lots of posts.

You enter into the comment section and it's automatically sorted by Controversial. At least that's how I see it.

perl4ever7y ago

People don't necessarily know. I can, or there was a time when I could, code a Mandelbrot set generator from memory. Yet that doesn't mean I can draw it myself in its infinite detail. Algorithms have unintended results, in general or in detail.

srtjstjsj7y ago

Why would people intentionally use an ad-hoc solution that is less effective than the one determined by machine learning?

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