Well being in times of algorithms

https://www.ssp.sh/blog/well-being-algorithms/

by articsputnik • 7 months ago

73 66 7 months ago

With the AI slop being promoted on the major social media platform’s algorithm, I believe we will go back to following real humans. Back to followers, where we decide who we want to see.

This is a nice thought but I think it's wrong. If TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts have proven anything, it's that people don't want to decide they want to consume. It's cynical but it's what the data has shown time and again works for these platforms. Passive consumption is easier for the user and companies know it keeps us online longer.

When you ask people, they will say they want to see who they follow but their behaviour, incentivised by companies, says otherwise.

raincole2• 7 months ago

It is funny that people on Hackernews are (acting as if they were) against algorithmic feeds. This very site is one of the trailblazers that found out how much people prefer algorithmic feeds to chronological ones.

intothemild2• 7 months ago

I think you'll find that people who are against algo-feeds are against that being the only choice.

tayo42• 7 months ago

On its own an algorithmic feed is fine. Automatically give people what they want to see. Like TV without flipping channels.

It just turned into something out of control with unintended side effects and immoral goals.

andrepd2• 7 months ago

In what sense is HN an algorithmic feed? It is neither personalised nor does it have a significant discretionary boost beyond "age" and "upvotes". It's qualitatively a different thing.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v23• 7 months ago

<< It's cynical but

But is it cynical if it is accurate.

nicbou• 7 months ago

Perhaps it's a bit like people preferring snacking to a home-cooked meal. At the end of a long day it's nice to be effortlessly entertained, but you can't have just bite-sized experiences. At some point you need to go deeper, to be creative, to chip in.

dkdcio2• 7 months ago

this feels incomplete without mentioning why everything is trying to keep our attention: paid digital advertisement. remove the incentive for the slopfest and “the algorithm” becomes far less of a problem (see HackerNews)

netdevphoenix2• 7 months ago

Just saying paid digital advertisement feels incomplete without mentioning why digital advertisement exists: most of the public would refuse to pay for services they take for granted such as email services, social media, etc at a level enough that companies would not feel compelled to sell out to third party advertisers. The struggles of Medium exemplify this very well. Ads are like the processed meat of our internet diet.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v23• 7 months ago

No. It has been proven by now that even if the public DOES pay, the advertising offers another channel of revenue, which executives loathe to ignore.

adrianN2• 7 months ago

The Internet was fine in the time where passionate people paid a few dollars for webspace to host their made with notepad best viewed at 640x480 site and didn’t expect „passive income“ from it.

ivanjermakov• 7 months ago

HN (i.e. crowd sourced ranking) is different from algorithm feeds. It doesn't try to show you things to match your interests, feed is the same for all users. This makes a big difference.

dkdcio2• 7 months ago

the HN feed is an algorithm. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. also all include “crowd sourced ranking” in their algorithms

the difference is the incentive (what the algorithm is optimized for). in most of these feeds it’s for ad revenue, hence the results

jayd16• 7 months ago

The real difference is the quality of the moderation. A global feed is terrible if it can be gamed.

ursAxZA2• 7 months ago

I prefer “rare” to “well-done” — in steak, and in life.

Algorithms tend to optimize us toward well-being as “well-done”: predictable, consistent, uniformly cooked. Safe, measurable, repeatable.

But human experience is closer to “rare”: uneven, risky, asymmetric, and still alive. The parts that matter most are often the ones that don’t fit cleanly into metrics.

If everything becomes optimized, nothing remains interesting. And more importantly, we risk replacing well-being with the monitoring of well-being.

When a life is constantly optimized, scored, nudged, and corrected, it gradually stops being a life that is actually experienced.

purple_basilisk• 7 months ago

Thank you for this deeply revealing take. I think this is the dynamic at the core of what matters here. Reminds me of Dostoevsky's take on what people really want - here's an interesting short piece that direction.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/freedom/these-are-barbarous...

ursAxZA2• 7 months ago

Thanks for sharing this.

It made me wonder where a future goes when it keeps trying to define both barbarism and normalcy.

As a small tribute in return, three films came to mind:

Bicentennial Man,

Gattaca,

Fight Club.

I’ve always preferred Ivan the Fool — choosing to live, rather than living inside a definition.

aeonfox2• 7 months ago

To get away from algorithms, away from being locked in and dependent on the platform, away from big tech chasing our attention, back to real connections as opposed to losing our followers with the Death of the Follower. We need open platforms such as Open Social Media and an open web

Nah. We need move back to the real world being the destination instead of the screen. If the technology is not augmenting your life in meatspace, it's slowly robbing you of your somatic experience and turning you into something more machine-like. Doesn't matter whether the technology is open web or proprietary, the effect is the same.

davnicwil3• 7 months ago

I think I disagree, if I understand you correctly.

Technology is augmenting real world experiences all the time, and not always in positive ways.

Whenever anyone does anything with the real world as the destination, the phone comes too, and all that comes with the phone intersects with whatever it is you're doing. Again not always in positive ways.

I completely agree that the nature of the technology / platform doesn't matter or affect this.

sokka_h2otribe• 7 months ago

How are you disagreeing? I think your point is separate?

Poster above is making a claim about what brings us into our body-experiences, or what takes us out. Technically mostly noting that technology takes us out of the somatic experience.

Accessibility? Meditation apps? There are things with technology that allow us to be more connected with each other and ourselves in some ways. But not really to the somatic experience of their body, the world around them.

Generally if I understand OP correctly, I strongly agree. As a techie it took me a long time to understand the somatic experience as the missing part to my world view and thinking.

aeonfox2• 7 months ago

Technology is augmenting real world experiences all the time

As the sibling comment says, I never made a claim that technology writ large wasn't augmenting real world experiences. I did make reference to 'the technology', which if it helps to clarify could be read as 'a specific X technology'. A technology could be as broad as 'software', but it could mean a software innovation like 'infinite scroll with status updates'. How a technology is used can also factor in. iNaturalist, MeetUp, and hospitality club style websites are all social networks that encourage people to go out into the world and experience things. Even Facebook groups and marketplace can facilitate this to some degree, though real-world human connection is counter to its revenue strategy.

and not always in positive ways.

Augmenting means to add to something, not take away. The word for that is detract.

FergusArgyll• 7 months ago

I know this is unrelated but the title reminded me of the great book.

  Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
  Book by Brian Christian, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Tom Griffiths

mrweasel• 7 months ago

I feel that people are fed up with the internet for the first time since its creation.

At least for a great number of people, I believe this to be true. The things that initially made me interrested in the internet, computers and and software are gone from the mainstream. The web has developed in to a perverted Minitel, it's a place I go to order something, if I can't find it in local stored, I read a little news, I look up documentation, and then I check out again. Much the same for TV really, there's no real reason for me to watch the news, movies and shows. The news is poorly covered and just rehashes of the same reporting. Movies and TV shows are commercialized to the point where I'm not even going to try, on the off chance that I hit something good. The stuff I buy is also often highly selective, as the chance of buying juke is at an al time high, better to buy nothing.

I feel like we're close to a major reset, at least for a portion of the population. Many simply can't stand sad state of algorithms, shareholder interests, subscriptions and just pure greed at the expense of everything else. If the reset isn't going to be society wide (which it probably isn't because a large part of the population also seem to not give a shit or they are actively profiting of the current state of affairs), then we're going to see one group quietly distancing themselves from media, technology and modernity. We'll use technology only to the extend where it helps us to our jobs and function in society, taking care to not compromise our humanity, then log right back off.

The original author escapes me, but the quote: "The future has lost it's appeal to me" seem increasingly true with every passing day.

reactordev2• 7 months ago

I feel this way. I used to spend so much time online, learning, coding, playing. Through the dot com boom and bust. Through the financial crisis after financial crisis. Web 2.0. Social media.

I’ve checked out on pretty much everything except for OSS.

I’m looking for land and an RV to start homesteading because I feel like that’s the only thing that will distract me from doom scrolling news.

Aurornis6• 7 months ago

I’m looking for land and an RV to start homesteading because I feel like that’s the only thing that will distract me from doom scrolling news.

One anecdote: An old acquaintance from college did something like this, more or less. Instead of making her more offline, it made her more bored and more removed from in-person social interactions. It only increased desire to scroll online content.

If you really want to be less online, go out into the world with other people and do things. Or even just join an initiative or company where people are working on something together.

energy1234• 7 months ago

I'm surprised there isn't a politician who makes this their brand. I would vote for them even if they didn't want to do anything else.

The politicians only talk about regulating content, instead of regulating the algorithm. An error across all dimensions - politically, pragmatically, legally.

I would do these 2 things:

(1) ban all recommendation engines in social media, no boosting by likes, no retweets, no "for you", no "suggested". you get a chronological feed of people you follow, or you search for it directly.

(2) ban all likes/upvotes showing up on public posts, to reduce the incentive for people to engage in combat on politically charged topics

No impact on free speech, everyone still has a voice. No political favoritism. No privacy violations.

I would bet only these tweaks will significantly reduce extremism and unhappiness in society.

mynameisash• 7 months ago

Given the makeup of the courts is the US, I can't help but imagine these hypothetical laws would be thrown out on first amendment grounds. Viz. "Our algorithm is our free speech"

throwaway94275• 7 months ago

Both 1 and 2 will simply incentivize people to make fake accounts or pay existing account holders to post for them.

charlesabarnes2• 7 months ago

This is something I've personally explored and lightly researched. I think the general population generally prefers recommendation algorithms (they espouse how great _their_ for-you page is on tik-tok or how spotify suggests the best music).

You would also be combating against ad and social media companies with extremely deep pockets. You have to keep in mind that algorithmic sorting also would impact search engines like Google and a ton of shopping websites.

I personally think the way this has to be done is something more fundamental and "grassroots-like". Similar to how a significant chunk of the internet are against "AI content" I think that same group of people need to be shown that this algorithmic recommendation brainrot is impacting society considerably.

edit: To take this point further, as an American, I have been wondering why people would disagree on basic principals or what feels like facts. The problem is that their online experience is completely different than mine. No two people share an exact same home page for any service. How are you supposed to get on the same page as someone when they live in a practically different world than you?

Aurornis6• 7 months ago

(1) ban all recommendation engines in social media, no boosting by likes, no retweets, no "for you", no "suggested". you get a chronological feed of people you follow, or you search for it directly.

I always find these comments interesting on Hacker News. The Hacker News front page is a socially sourced recommendation engine which presents stories in an algorithmic feed, as boosted by likes (upvotes) from other users. The comment section where we're talking is also social at it's core, with comments boosted or driven down by upvotes and downvotes.

In your proposed regulation, are you really expecting that the Hacker News front page would go away, replaced only by the "new" feed? Or that we'd have to manually sign up to follow different posters?

If we have to sign up to follow specific posters, how do you propose we discover them to begin with?

Usually when I ask these questions the follow ups involve some definition of social media that excludes Hacker News and other forums that people enjoy.

everdrive• 7 months ago

This is very well said and I've found myself on the same page. I've said this before, but when I was younger the internet was an island of sanity in an otherwise pretty crazy world. Now, the internet broadly is much crazier than the real world and much of the time it's best avoided. This is still a lot of great content on the internet, but always right next to it is something addictive, outrageous, manipulative, etc. attempting to steal your attention and waste your time. People with better impulse control might be able to avoid this in an effortless way, but that's not me.

Abstaining is really the only thing that's been working for me, and all I'm going to try to do is abstain more. It's clear that my old refuge has been destroyed by greed and misanthropy, and the only path for me is to abandon the refuge as much as possible.

argentier• 7 months ago

"The future has lost it's appeal to me"

culture is stuck in endless remakes of optimistic 70s futurism

it's an important point: we don't have a future, a telos, that doesn't fill us with foreboding

musicale• 7 months ago

The web has developed in to a perverted Minitel, it's a place I go to order something, if I can't find it in local stored, I read a little news, I look up documentation, and then I check out again

Minitel sounds interesting though:

Minitel was thus hardly the rigid, static system imagined by many Internet advocates of the 1990s. The hybrid architecture—bridging public and private, open and closed—provided a rich platform for innovation and entrepreneurship at a time when online services elsewhere in the world were floundering.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/minitel-the-online-world-france-bu...

blenderob• 7 months ago

I want to vent about the way the word "algorithm" is increasingly used as shorthand for AI-driven, attention-sucking systems.

"Algorithm" is a beautiful and very old word. Long before recommender systems and engagement metrics, it meant precise problem-solving methods. Quicksort is an algorithm. Binary search is an algorithm. GCD is an algorithm. Most of modern technology exists because of algorithms in this broader, richer sense. It is one of the foundations of CS.

Yes, machine-learning systems are also algorithms. But collapsing the term to mean only opaque, attention-maximizing mechanisms strips it of its meaning and history. It taints a neutral technical concept as something manipulative by default.

It's more so disappointing when this comes from people in tech. We should be more careful with our vocabulary. Maybe we should call these systems what they are. Maybe "engagement engines", "recommender systems", or "attention-suckers" instead of letting one narrow and disturbing use redefine the word altogether.

zetanor• 7 months ago

The Algo™ does solve the problem of turning man-hours into 3 dollars per hour of shareholder value.

ViktorRay• 7 months ago

It’s frustrating to me to see this article promote Bluesky. Both Bluesky and Mastadon can lead to the same negativity, mental health issues, and addiction and misery and so on as all of the other social media platforms.

Maybe the Bluesky and Mastadon algorithms are or are not as addiction producing as Twitter or Facebook. I don’t know. But the harms are still there.

Aurornis6• 7 months ago

I agree. I was optimistic that one of Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads would emerge as a better version of Twitter without the problems, but that hasn't been the case for me. In fact, a lot of the people I followed who migrated to those platforms have seemingly spiraled deeper into negativity and doom on those platforms.

One person I followed described Bluesky as the place to go if you want to be viciously attacked and torn apart by people who 98% agree with what you're saying.

enether• 7 months ago

+1.

Bluesky is a left-leaning political mess - I strictly follow tech-only accounts yet get posts on the timeline about what this week's monstrous White House act was. This is not a judgement against the left, but rather against Bluesky.

As another example - the Bitcoin/cypherpunk community went to Nostr. Nostr today is the same slop as Bitcoin Twitter was before. It has a tiny bit more of an organic feel to it - but it basically spiralled to the same cookie-cutter attention-grabbing content. Things like mindless cat videos.

X as we know is already problematic.

Basically the current state is that all platforms suck

artemonster3• 7 months ago

On the topic of ads on the web: can someone confirm they provide any positive ROI at all? Not once an ad was ever relevant, and I have clicked one maybe once or twice in my life.

digitalsushi• 7 months ago

i'm probably using an informal fallacy but if online advertisers earn hundreds of billions of dollars, someone must be finding some return on their investment.

i might be wrong, it might just be a huge grift, but i dont know how to come to that conclusion

artemonster3• 7 months ago

My suspicion that is a huge grift ? This is what I want to find out. I know very little people in my social circle that used internet ads successfully for their business and very little that found them useful at all

charcircuit• 7 months ago

It helped me find mobile games that were fun.

add-sub-mul-div• 7 months ago

Before the current shiny thing replaced it, a whole generation of tech labor was wasted on ad tech. 20 years in, if it wasn't worth the investment I'd hope all the data engineering and data science would have surfaced that.

wmeredith• 7 months ago

Google made $35,000,000,000 on ads in Q1 2025. Do you think that's 35 billions accidents? Doubtful. The far more likely answer is that your propensity to click ads is not in line with most.

fedeb95• 7 months ago

block google tracking and search history (minor downside for a major gain). Disable the youtube homepage. Use services that keep out as much trackers as possible: duckduckgo (you can still use google with !g), an email that's not google, a browser that's not chrome. All this reduces the algorithms power over your choices.

Use social networks in a healthy way: avoid scrolling on the home/main page. Search for the information you want yourself and don't rely on what's handed to you. This works in general, TV, papers, ...

Well being in times of algorithms

Related Stories