Like bro, I'll take some ads in my Instagram feed if it shows me post I'll want to see first and ones I don't care about last, it ain't that deep
This is just wild to me, because my sense of the generational cohort the OP is from is that they are far more adamant about the importance of individual expression above all than were preceding ones. And an algorithm essentially determining what you like (by shaping what you get to encounter in the first place) would seem to be the opposite of that? Maybe it's that this cohort considers being shown a ton of content tailored to the specifics of one's unique identity affirming, but man, the only way I at least figured out what my identity was in the first place was by encountering a ton of stuff. I would not be the same person now if I'd only encountered the things that interested me in 8th grade over the many years since...
I also wonder if the misapprehension about AO3 having an algorithm in the first place might have something to do with the shift away from commenting towards kudosing or no interaction with authors at all that people are discussing in the posts you've linked and elsewhere recently. That is, if you are (and assume others are) deleting and reposting fics regularly, what's the point of leaving a comment?
That podcast discussion was really insightful. It meshes really well with Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which was one of the most thought-provoking things I've read in recent years. One of the things she says is: For all of the elaborate ways in which [big tech companies] labor to render reality as behavior for surplus, the simplest and most profound is their ability to know exactly where you are all the time. Your body is reimagined as a behaving object to be tracked and calculated for indexing and search. Most smartphone apps demand access to your location even when it's not necessary for the service they provide, simply because the answer to this question is so lucrative, which I think is exactly what Hamid is pointing to in his observation about algorithms being designed to encourage predictability in human behavior.
no subject
This is just wild to me, because my sense of the generational cohort the OP is from is that they are far more adamant about the importance of individual expression above all than were preceding ones. And an algorithm essentially determining what you like (by shaping what you get to encounter in the first place) would seem to be the opposite of that? Maybe it's that this cohort considers being shown a ton of content tailored to the specifics of one's unique identity affirming, but man, the only way I at least figured out what my identity was in the first place was by encountering a ton of stuff. I would not be the same person now if I'd only encountered the things that interested me in 8th grade over the many years since...
I also wonder if the misapprehension about AO3 having an algorithm in the first place might have something to do with the shift away from commenting towards kudosing or no interaction with authors at all that people are discussing in the posts you've linked and elsewhere recently. That is, if you are (and assume others are) deleting and reposting fics regularly, what's the point of leaving a comment?
That podcast discussion was really insightful. It meshes really well with Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which was one of the most thought-provoking things I've read in recent years. One of the things she says is: For all of the elaborate ways in which [big tech companies] labor to render reality as behavior for surplus, the simplest and most profound is their ability to know exactly where you are all the time. Your body is reimagined as a behaving object to be tracked and calculated for indexing and search. Most smartphone apps demand access to your location even when it's not necessary for the service they provide, simply because the answer to this question is so lucrative, which I think is exactly what Hamid is pointing to in his observation about algorithms being designed to encourage predictability in human behavior.