Back when I was on reddit, I subscribed to about 120 subreddits. Starting a couple years ago though, I noticed that my front page really only showed content for 15-20 subreddits at a time and it was heavily weighted towards recent visits and interactions.

For example, if I hadn’t visited r/3DPrinting in a couple weeks, it slowly faded from my front page until it disappeared all together. It was so bad that I ended up writing a browser automation script to visit all 120 of my subreddits at night and click the top link. This ended up giving me a more balanced front page that mixed in all of my subreddits and interests.

My point is these algorithms are fucking toxic. They’re focused 100% on increasing time on page and interaction with zero consideration for side effects. I would love to see social media algorithms required by law to be open source. We have a public interest in knowing how we’re being manipulated.

I just would like to show something about Reddit. Below is a post I made about how Reddit was literally harassing and specifically targeting me, after I let slip in a comment one day that I was sober - I had previously never made such a comment because my sobriety journey was personal, and I never wanted to define myself or pigeonhole myself as a “recovering person”.

I reported the recommended subs and ads to Reddit Admins multiple times and was told there was nothing they could do about it.

I posted a screenshot to DangerousDesign and it flew up to like 5K+ votes in like 30 minutes before admins removed it. I later reposted it to AssholeDesign where it nestled into 2K+ votes before shadow-vanishing.

Yes, Reddit and similar are definitely responsible for a lot of suffering and pain at the expense of humans in the pursuit of profit. After it blew up and front-paged, “magically” my home page didn’t have booze related ads/subs/recs any more! What a totally mystery how that happened /s

The post in question, and a perfect “outing” of how Reddit continually tracks and tailors the User Experience specifically to exploit human frailty for their own gains.

Edit: Oh and the hilarious part that many people won’t let go (when shown this) is that it says it’s based on my activity in the Drunk reddit which I had never once been to, commented in, posted in, or was even aware of. So that just makes it worse.

Fuck Reddit, can’t wait to see the IPO burn

media: Video games cause violence

media: Weird music causes violence.

media: Social media could never cause violence this is censorship (also we don’t want to pay moderators)

I gave up reporting on major sites where I saw abuse. Stuff that if you said that in public, also witnessed by others, you’ve be investigated. Twitter was also bad for responding to reports with “this doesnt break our rules” when a) it clearly did and b) probably a few laws.

How does Lemmy pick which articles are at the top of my feed? Does anyone know how All is sorted?

Right in the IPO price!

Honestly, good, they should be held accountable and I hope they will be. They shouldn’t be offering extremist content recommendations in the first place.

Love Reddit’s lies about them taking down hateful content when they’re 100% behind Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and will ban you if you say anything remotely negative about Israel’s govenment. And the amount of transphobia on the site is disgusting. Let alone the misogyny.

I don’t understand how a social media company can face liability in this circumstance but a weapons manufacturer doesn’t.

So, I can see a lot of problems with this. Specifically the same problems that the public and regulating bodies face when deciding to keep or overturn section 230. Free speech isn’t necessarily what I’m worried about here. Mostly because it is already agreed that free speech is a construct that only the government is actually beholden to. Message boards have and will continue to censor content as they see fit.

Section 230 basically stipulates that companies that provide online forums (Meta, Alphabet, 4Chan etc) are not liable for the content that their users post. And part of the reason it works is because these companies adhere to strict guidelines in regards to content and most importantly moderation.

Section 230©(2) further provides “Good Samaritan” protection from civil liability for operators of interactive computer services in the good faith removal or moderation of third-party material they deem “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

Reddit, Facebook, 4Chan et all do have rules and regulations they require their users to follow in order to post. And for the most part the communities on these platforms are self policing. There just aren’t enough paid moderators to make it work otherwise.

That being said, the real problem is that this really kind of indirectly challenges section 230. Mostly because it very barely skirts around whether the relevant platforms can themselves be considered publishers, or at all responsible for the content the users post and very much attacks how users are presented with content to keep them engaged via algorithms (which is directly how they make their money).

Even if the lawsuits fail, this will still be problematic. It could lead to draconian moderation of what can be posted and by whom. So now all race related topics regardless of whether they include hate speech could be censored for example. Politics? Censored. The discussion of potential new laws? Censored.

But I think it will be worse than that. The algorithm is what makes the ad space these companies sell so valuable. And this is a direct attack on that. We lack the consumer privacy protections to protect the public from this eventuality. If the ad space isn’t valuable the data will be. And there’s nothing stopping these companies from selling user data. Some of them already do. What these apps do in the background is already pretty invasive. This could lead to a furthering of that invasive scraping of data. I don’t like that.

That being said there is a point I agree with. These companies literally do make their algorithm addictive and it absolutely will push content at users. If that content is of an objectionable nature, so long as it isn’t outright illegal, these companies do not care. Because they do gain from it monetarily.

What we actually need is data privacy protections. Holding these companies accountable for their algorithms is a good idea. But I don’t agree that this is the way to do that constructively. It would be better to flesh out 230 as a living document that can change with the times. Because when it was written the Internet landscape was just different.

What I would like to see is for platforms to moderate content posted and representing itself as fact. We don’t see that nearly enough on places like reddit. Users can post anything as fact and the echo chambers will rally around it if they believe it. It’s not really incredibly difficult to radicalise a person. But the platforms aren’t doing that on purpose. The other users are, and the algorithms are helping them.

As much as I believe it is a breeding ground for right wing extremism, it’s a little strange that 4chan is being lumped in with these other sites for a suit like this. As far as I know, 4chan just promotes topics based on the number of people posting to it, and otherwise doesn’t employ an algorithm at all. Kind of a different beast to the others, who have active algorithms trying to drive engagement at any cost.

Tonight we investigate the hacker known as 4chan. More at 9.

The trifecta of evil. Especially Reddit, fuck Reddit… Facebook too.

Removed by mod