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DeeDee D's avatar

This is excellent and a good way to open a political conversation about this very thing.

The only part I'm unclear about is if social media puts up a solid paywall, won't that exacerbate an already imbalanced equity between haves and nots?

I have zero solution to offer re social media. but I have long strongly advocated for clear laws regarding use of cable and broadcast "news", opinion, and out and out deliberate lying, to incite social unrest.

For example, nothing good has ever come from Rupert Murdoch. Yet he is legally permitted to spout dangerous BS to destroy democracies on both sides of both main oceans. Clearly, we need better, more sophisticated laws for our contemporary world.

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BrianMadigan's avatar

The 'algorithms' Facebook etc run are just adaptive neural networks. They're trained on a set of user data points across millions of users to increase screen time, leading to more advertising impressions and revenue. There's nothing new or novel about neural networks. The first computational model of neural nets was created in 1943 by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. Frank Rosenblatt's Perceptron was a trainable neural network built in 1957. The number of layers and size/width of the data sets have increased with computing power, but the 'algorithm' is the same.

This is why most of our algorithmically-provided "feeds" are getting really lame and tiresome. The feeds home in on your interests until you get sick of seeing the same SAMEness over and over.

What I'm saying is there's nothing to see "under the hood". You can't look at the internals of a neural network and make any sense of them. They're not algorithms with clearly defined logic.

On the outside they're simple revenue-optimizing machines. The inputs are your/our data, the output is slightly higher revenue than a human-designed heuristic model could provide.

We can see behind the curtain, and we're not impressed with the wizard. I think the great opting-out of social media is due. It has to provide some meaningful benefit to society, not just move billions of dollars from public to private hands. No one has ever said that of a business, not in the USA anyway. The measure has always been growth of shareholder value.

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