There’s No Algorithms

https://photomatt.tumblr.com/post/701509650060886017/dear-mr-gaiman-i-am-but-a-humble-refugee-from

by twapi • 4 years ago

50 48 4 years ago

photomatt.tumblr.com

So, Tumblr has no algorithms? How do they present the webpage to the user? How do their webservers, load balancers, databases, etc. work? Cranks?

beebeepka• 4 years ago

Krangs. An army

scottmsul• 4 years ago

I'm guessing he means there's no algorithms that decide what you see and what you don't, you just see everything from everyone you follow. But I don't use Tumblr so I'm not 100% sure.

cassianoleal2• 4 years ago

They still do. There are algorithms to fetch whatever will be shown on your feed. They may be as straightforward as fetching a user's follow list and displaying their posts chronologically in reverse. That's still an algorithm.

I'm sure Gaiman means specifically the kind of "smart" feed algorithm like FB etc employ. That said, I really dislike this trend of equating "algorithms" to something wicked. I write them for a living, and I'd rather we kept writing and employing them.

sbdaman• 4 years ago

"Algorithm" is used in everyday language to mean "system of determining which content you get shown and the order it gets shown in." The "absence" of an "algorithm" in this context just means "you are shown the content generated by people you follow in the order that it is published."

I have a hard time believing you didn't understand the original post. Obviously the above does not mean there are no algorithms in a literal sense.

mechanical_bear2• 4 years ago

Gnomes.

falcolas• 4 years ago

"There's no algorithms [...] Read what comes across your dashboard"

I love Neil Gaiman's works, but he's no technology wizard - he's an author trying to surf this insanity we call social media.

And that's OK. There are algorithms, yet his advice is still sound.

booleandilemma• 4 years ago

I've noticed that among the non-programmer crowd "algorithm" has come to mean any sort of auto-suggest feature.

I suppose we can blame a combination of ignorance and marketing.

tacker2000• 4 years ago

I think he specifically means “timeline algorithms”.

In any case, it doesnt really seem like he knows anything about this sort of stuff.

dragontamer6• 4 years ago

I'm amused that Tumblr is becoming a frontrunner as Twitter replacement.

I'm not 100% convinced by it, but it _seems_ like a better proper replacement than Mastodon (sorry FOSS people, but... centralized logins is a big deal compared to federated spaces).

At least, its the closest thing I've seen discussed that seems to do a similar job to Twitter. Sharing comments / images / short form video with a large community of communities with a somewhat trusted login / identity

Mastodon doesn't fix that, because Alice@instance1.com doesn't necessarily mean you're talking to Alice. It could be a malicious Alice. Maybe the "real" Alice is Alice@instanceAlpha.com. Twitter used to have blue-checkmarks for this, but that identify management seems to be getting destroyed by the current chaos, and people are rightfully wondering how to get a trusted identity for their discussions.

yjftsjthsd-h• 4 years ago

Mastodon doesn't fix that, because Alice@instance1.com doesn't necessarily mean you're talking to Alice. It could be a malicious Alice. Maybe the "real" Alice is Alice@instanceAlpha.com.

Okay, I'll bite; how do you know that the Tumblr user actualice12345 is the real Alice?

dragontamer6• 4 years ago

EDIT: I probably should note that I don't use Tumblr and I don't know the full context of this image

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DXC71NFX4AAUPX3?format=jpg&name=...

I'm not a Tumblr or Twitter user. But it seems like Tumblr has a degree of identity verification going on with its users.

-----

Even Reddit has these kinds of simple checks to make "Ask me Anything" a more legitimate-feeling experience. When a famous reporter posts a picture of Reddit-account name + face for people to see and do on an AMA, it helps verify the identity.

(And if that's too much for the AMA user, having a trusted moderator do that kind of check can serve as a good substitute)

idlewords4• 4 years ago

The way it's always worked; she can publicly post the link to her Tumblr on her Alice.com homepage, or you confirm with her in private outside of Tumblr.

isodev• 4 years ago

And if you enjoy reading and interacting with content from Alice@instance1.com, does it matter if their name is really Alice irl?

IceWreck• 4 years ago

Tumblr is adding activitypub integration which means you will be able to follow and interact with Tumblr users from Mastodon and vice-versa.

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

Mastodon doesn't fix that, because Alice@instance1.com doesn't necessarily mean you're talking to Alice. It could be a malicious Alice.

Interestingly, email seems to not have that problem at all.

dragontamer6• 4 years ago

People don't do large-scale public chats with celebrities over email.

Think Reddit AMAs, or media interviews and the like. When someone says "This is reporter X talking with Alice (picture of Alice + voice + etc. etc.)", it establishes identity that people trust. I guess people could fake this these days, but building up these networks of trust for worthwhile interaction has grown more and more important recently.

Twitter's blue checkmark kinda-sorta served this purpose, at least before it died last week.

-----

If there was a widespread "Ask me anything" email discussion organized over emails, this identity verification problem would also need to be solved. Since Twitter is an "always ongoing" discussion with various celebrities, the blue checkmark was kinda-sorta the verification you needed.

tsimionescu• 4 years ago

Of course it does, email from stuff lime suppport@google.com is often used for phishing. Not to mention, email is mostly 1:1, so it has completely different discovery/identity validation properties than a social network that's normally n:n.

Even for things like newsletters, you subscribe to a newsletter. It's true that mailing lists exist, but they don't scale and require curation precisely to establish the identity of each participant.

apozem• 4 years ago

Email has this problem all the time! [1] Real estate companies have to give customers cybersecurity advice [2] because phishers pretend to be the agent and send incorrect addresses for wire transfers.

[1] https://www.proofpoint.com/us/threat-reference/email-spoofin...

[2] https://www.rate.com/resources/how-to-avoid-phishing-scams-a...

simonw2• 4 years ago

Mastodon has a really clever approach to verification, based around the rel=me standard.

It lets you add verified links to your profile - which could be another rel=me supporting site (such as GitHub) or your own personal domain.

I wrote some notes about that here: https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/verifying-github-on-m...

marius_k• 4 years ago

We should not call it verification IMHO. The malicious user can create random website and add the rel=me. The "green" link makes impression that the user is "verified".

(I would prefer to have some chain of trust like pgp but with a better UX.)

paganel3• 4 years ago

It could be a malicious Alice.

I don't care if I talk with Alice or with Bob, I'm only interested in what "Alice" or "Bob" have to say, i.e. what they actually write down/share, I'm not at all interested in their identities.

Because of that the coming apart of the whole blue-checkmark thing is really great, as it changes us all back to "Alice" and "Bob" and, hopefully, in so doing it will put the impetus back on what we are actually saying and not on our Alice-ness or Bob-ness.

dragontamer6• 4 years ago

You ever talk on 4chan?

Fully anonymous just leads to people building tons of fake accounts. You could be talking to 20x people, but they're all Bob who is just obsessed with proving his point and making it look like his point is popular.

A degree of identify verification, to mitigate bots, spammers, mass posters, and other such issues is at minimum for discussion on today's internet.

mrkramer• 4 years ago

I'm amused that Tumblr is becoming a frontrunner as Twitter replacement.

Is replacement needed for Twitter? Will Elon really destroy it? If that's the case Twitter's replacement needs to go to the Twitter roots of status updates and not repeat the same mistakes.

dools• 4 years ago

Fixing the authenticity problem for institutions is as simple as running a mastodon server on your own domain, which would cost less per user than a blue check.

seydor2• 4 years ago

I m using twitter in time order anyway which is not different. But props to Matt for reviving Tumblr. But twitters wont be a good match there

jaywee• 4 years ago

Here's a thought from a former Twitter dev on timeline-vs-top: https://social.lot23.com/@jon/109372257422277945

seydor2• 4 years ago

I stopped reading a little after

normal people

What a bunch of manipulative bastards. Instead of giving people the freedom to curate their timelines, and educating them how to do so, they prefer to give them spoonfed feeds because "users are lazy". Everyone is lazy, it's basic energy conservation principle, but if people stopped motivating each other to learn we d still be living in caves. Calling people "Normal people" just shows how entitled these devs are

amadeuspagel2• 4 years ago

I saw a bunch of posts on the tumblr frontpage without being logged in. How are these determined, if not by some kind of algorithm? I made a new account and I saw a bunch of posts on my feed, apparently personalized based on my past surfing, without having followed anyone. Again, same question.

I have nothing against "algorithms", but why is the CEO of the company that owns tumblr reblogging someone making claims about tumblr that are just not true?

luckylion• 4 years ago

They literally have a "trending" page [1], yeah, that claim is strange.

[1] https://www.tumblr.com/explore/trending

antifa• 4 years ago

When you're logged in and looking at your dashboard, you see things in reverse chronological.

mechanical_bear2• 4 years ago

I really haven’t seen much difference, other than much hand wringing, with my Twitter experience.

dilap• 4 years ago

Surprisingly little known, but Twitter also has a strict-timeline mode. It's great! Tap the pair of stars in the upper-right to bring up a menu to turn it on.

fleddr• 4 years ago

The supposed post-Twitter situation is entirely imaginary and typical of Twitter culture: hysterical, performative, not really rooted in any fact whatsoever.

But for the sake of argument, let's go along with the idea that a major shift is happening. The thing is, everything people found great about Twitter, they will not find in alternatives like Mastodon or Tumblr.

Those networks are organic, more personal and bubble-like, and relatively peaceful. Which is healthy, but entirely the opposite of Twitter which is algorithmic amplification of hot takes, outrage, division and the many engagement farming tactics that come along with it.

On an organic reach platform, that behavior doesn't work. Which is a steep change. To a Twitter user, such a platform will feel broken. It's quiet, peaceful, and they're not ranking up followers or influence with low effort hot takes.

Not only that, the hot takes may get them banned. Twitter users have been using toxicity as a tool for so many years that they've normalized behavior and language that is widely unacceptable outside Twitter.

Twitter users escaping Twitter do not want something completely different. They want Twitter but without Elon Musk. Which is largely performative. But you can't replicate the Twitter experience outside of Twitter.

Note how none of the big accounts are leaving. A true departure means deleting your account. Nobody does it. They keep rambling on about Mastodon yet fail to get even 5% of their followers there. They keep coming back to say how great Mastodon is, but never actually leave Twitter. Some may deactivate their account but never delete it. They know very well that a big following on Twitter cannot be recreated anywhere else.

The other thing the alternatives cannot replace is Twitter's news factor. Whether it is sports, coverage of war, whatever is happening in the world, it's happening in real time on Twitter. Absolutely never on Mastodon.

Imnimo• 4 years ago

Meanwhile, we're all here reading this post on a site with "an algorithm"...

There’s No Algorithms

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