this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Prefer is weasel language. The utility function they are using is if a User stays on the platform, while the user utility function may be simply - Did I get updates on everything I care about?
Giving users agency over their feed is empowering, sure some people may want to be stuck in a never-ending loop of content - and thats fine for them, but the option for someone to see the most relevant posts from their subscribed communities/friends in a quick fashion is important.
I'm excited to see more user configurable agency in the fediverse. Imagine you have 100 friends, a few rarely post, a few post every 5 minutes, and everyone else in between. If my goal is to stay updated with all 100 friends, but in 10 minute a day increments then I want a agent that shows me the top content uniformly distributed across all 100 of my contacts, such that I see the one post from the introvert rather then the 95 shit posts from the extrovert drowning out that content (the influencer/engagement enshitification cycle).
The same applies to lemmy communities, and while our feed algorithms are not there yet, I'm excite to see development continue.
Yep, exactly. With a chronological feed, I can scroll until I know I'm caught up. The algorithmic feed keeps throwing stuff at you and you're never 'caught up'. So yeah, great for engagement, but they didn't actually ask the users how they felt about it.
Agreed. Chronological is a good first step. Lemmy devs - Don't stop there! Chronological isn't the be all end all of feeds. For most people I think they would want Chronological feeds, but sampled across all their subscriptions/friends.
I wouldn't be opposed to some sort of recommendation algorithm, but it should be in a separate section. Especially for new users it's hard to find people/lemmits to follow, so it would be useful for that.