> Showing people what they like is the best way to get them to come back.
There are different usage scenarios of social media. You seem to imply that people use it for entertainment, and yes, the companies themselves sure make them optimized for that. But I want to use social media for staying up to date on my friends' lives and nothing else. Most existing platforms actively resist this use case because it doesn't grow metrics.
> I guess your only hope would be to make it illegal, worldwide, to provide algorithmic feeds.
Well, at least I'm working on two fediverse projects. There are no algorithms on the fediverse. You see posts from the people you follow, in the order in which they were posted, and nothing else.
> We've had influencers at least as long as we've had the written word.
That's different. Those "influencers" always became such organically, because people voluntarily spread their "content". This is vastly different from the platform itself stepping in and non-consensually shoving this content into millions of faces because its black-box algorithm said so.
There are different usage scenarios of social media. You seem to imply that people use it for entertainment, and yes, the companies themselves sure make them optimized for that. But I want to use social media for staying up to date on my friends' lives and nothing else. Most existing platforms actively resist this use case because it doesn't grow metrics.
> I guess your only hope would be to make it illegal, worldwide, to provide algorithmic feeds.
Well, at least I'm working on two fediverse projects. There are no algorithms on the fediverse. You see posts from the people you follow, in the order in which they were posted, and nothing else.
> We've had influencers at least as long as we've had the written word.
That's different. Those "influencers" always became such organically, because people voluntarily spread their "content". This is vastly different from the platform itself stepping in and non-consensually shoving this content into millions of faces because its black-box algorithm said so.