Post #1490090

2026-04-11 15:57 UTC

The observation that I can get trapped by almost any site with an algorithmic feed (YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, hell even Facebook), no matter how asinine the content it gives me, is very humbling to any pretensions of taste that I have... To escape these, the solution has never been to block the relevant domain in ublock, because I inevitably end up wanting to look at some link that someone has sent, and then I unblock it, and then it&#39;s off to the races. The solution is also not self control. Maybe that works for some people. The solution is to figure out how to make the site dumber. For Twitter, it was locking my account. For YouTube it was disabling having a YouTube history, so that my home page was blank of recommendations. Facebook is dumb enough that I mostly manage to stay off it organically, thankfully. And for Reddit, I switched to Old Reddit and unsubscribed to all subreddits so my homepage is blank. I still have the muscle memory for all of these things, even though I&#39;ve been off Twitter for over a year, my fingers will still sometimes type twitter.com into a freshly opened tab. I really think the algorithmic feed is one of the worst intentions of the 21st century. I don&#39;t think it&#39;s a good idea to ban it, but I think that there should always be a way (like I&#39;ve found with YouTube and Reddit) of disabling the feed while keeping access to other material on the site.

Replies (2)

@pamorim@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-11 22:03

@olynch Recently I have given a lot of thought on social media design decisions. When I was a teenager in Brazil in the late 2000s, Brazil didn't really do facebook, we mainly hung out on orkut, a defunct google-bought social media platform. It had some features that I think were accidentally really good: (i) It had a limit on the number of friends you could have on a single account (ii) There was no algorithmic/infinite feed (iii) Most content was softly gated behind "communities". Think facebook groups, but slightly different. In a way your "making the site dumber" was baked into the platform. Point (i) shines light on the poor scalability of most of the benefits of social media. It is definitely awesome to be able to easily catch up with childhood friends who now live thousands of kilometers away from me. But, I don't think any single person should have unfettered access to the "freely broadcast my every thought to 100s of thousands/millions of people" button. By capping how many connections you can have, it keeps things at a human-scale. As for (ii), I agree that algorithmic feed is horrible in basically every aspect, especially when we take into account what it's doing to kids who grow up on this stuff. Contrary to you, however, I do think that it would be a good idea to ban it, though I don't think that it's currently feasible.

Open ##1692974
@theorems@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-12 16:38

@olynch are these all conferences/workshops? I never have this tight schedule...

Open ##1692979