Not that important.

lazy christmas genshin icons bc im bored pt 1

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Dude, aside from people just going “ugh, kids”, the whole point is that the assumption that sites have algorithms is a sign of how the entire internet has been ruined. It’s a major cultural shift and a terrible one.

AO3 is the opposite of obscure in fanfic fandom, and its entire existence is political and an act of resistance.

No shit people react to cluelessness about how it sorts content: how it sorts content is a conscious ethical statement.

And to answer this other person’s comment:

Wattpad, dude. No separate index by fandom, no see everything by date, just a massive fic section and tags that show the 1k most recent or 1k most popular.

Algorithms could be written to do whatever, but in practice, they’re there to make the site user profitable to the site. The types of content they push are tied to this. They’re designed to make sits addictive.

Particularly in a hobby space like fandom or in queer spaces, they’re not a great idea. They can sort mainstream things well, but the minute you have something more niche, it starts being hidden because it’s not profitable and/or because there are just that many more mainstream audience members.

They also induce learned helplessness instead of expecting a user to proactively decide what they want to see.

Yea, if you just leave Instagram open you'll just get posts about the most popular things, the latest fad and the celebrities with the most followers, but if you go out of your way to follow the right people (for example, some accounts centered around dungeon and dragons) you're telling the algorithm that you are here for dungeons and dragons, and you will stay for dungeons and dragons, therefore the algorithm will push you dungeons and dragons content to keep you around, both from your follow list, and from people related to your follow list, which introduces you to new ideas/people you wouldn't have found otherwise.

There are plenty of YouTubers i watch daily now because the algorithm thought 'hey, they'd probably like this' and pushed it to me that I likely never would've found if they weren't on my reccomended.

A little effort at the start, and you have to do less effort in the future.

I also think calling people who enjoy algorithms 'learned helplessness' is wrong. is it helpless to ask a waiter for their reccomendation on a menu, when you could always search the menu for what you specifically want instead? Because that's what algorithms do. While you can always use a searchbar on Twitter or YouTube or TikTok, the app is reccomending you what it thinks you'll enjoy. It isn't helpless, it's utilising a service provided to you to get the most enjoyment out of the least effort. You're just optimising your media intake so that you get the most positive experience and the least negative experience.

But the internet culture thing we’ve lost is the waiters!

In the 90s, when you really couldn’t find anything online, curated links lists—recs lists—were a huge thing. There used to be big name fan reccers of fanfic. The whole debacle with Delicious was because fandom used that bookmarking site so heavily for massive curated recs lists and manual organization according to individuals’ tastes.

Culturally, I think the human tastemaker or blog of tastemakers is far superior to the algorithm.

Rec lists are inherently not one size fits all, because it's a single (or i suppose it could a few) people creating a list of things they enjoy and perhaps you will also like it.

Algorithms give the mathematically best piece of content for you, given the information you have provided the algorithm.

I don't see an inherint problem with algorithms being profit driven. They have to be profit driven or the company will go bust, capitalism is what makes algorithms predatory, there's no inherint evil to an algorithm, it's just math and lines of code.

Were capitalism to be abolished, and profit motives made obselete, an algorithm would be the best for any media platform because all of the interruptions between your curated content of ads is gone now, and the website/app can give you exclusively the stuff you most want to see, and will keep you on the platform for longest. (Because naturally even without a profit motive, people want the apps and websites they create to be popular) which I don't think is inherintly bad. Why shouldn't an app try to keep you on it? An app not trying to keep you on it is self-destructive.

The thing about algorithms is that they’re mostly not optimized for what you’re imagining. They’re optimized to build corporate wealth. And to the extent they’re actually tailored to a user’s likes, they’re only as smart as the data we’ve already given them. They’re garbage for taste discovery. I’d think that was a big minus even if they weren’t being presented in a deeply misleading fashion as for the user instead of for the corporation that runs the site.

You’re quite right that the issue isn’t with the concept of an algorithm. One could write one to optimize for anything, including user entertainment.

We’re not talking about the abstract ideal of algorithms but their practical application here and now.

It’s interesting you’d say sites want you to stay on for longer. They don’t. Not unless they’re serving ads. AO3 absolutely does not encourage you to be on there one second more or less than you feel like. If they were primarily thinking in terms of money, they’d want you on less because users cost them money, but they aren’t thinking that way either.

It’s built to be a community resource the same way a reference library is. There’s neither a need nor a desire to artificially boost its popularity, but also, the kind of community that built AO3 does not measure popularity in time spent on the site.

The ideal site or app from many people’s perspective is one that lets you choose from a library-like accurate tagging system of everything that exists, find what you wanted right away, and then exit.

This idea that the algorithm is there to serve you what you want? 

It’s quite likely that the reason you even want what you’re served is that someone has paid the site money to make you want it. We’re all so indoctrinated by the algorithm that what its doing has become invisible to us.

Algorithms will never give you only what you want to see.  They train you to want more of what you just saw.  And even in a world without money, content creators will try to game the algorithms to get your eyes on their content rather than someone else's. Kudos, clicks and comments are the currency of fandom.  If alll books were given away, their authors would still want to know someone was reading. 

“If you liked this, read THIS!” transcends capitalism.  It will always channel you away from experimental content, away from original or groundbreaking content.  It will encourage content creators to wear the tracks of time-worn tropes ever and ever deeper.

ft my mom

Did I ever upload the redraw?

Today is Uni's birthday🎂🎊✨

He turned 2 today.

When Uni was little.⬇️ So cute!!!