Algorithms – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

I’m looking for someone to tell me I’m wrong here. Then we’ll laugh together. At the moment I’m laughing alone at what I believe is a masquerade that’s hiding the ball while promising social media users new capabilities.

According to reports, Threads, Instagram, and TikTok are offering ways for users to tune their own algorithms, providing better control over what they see in their feeds.

That’s the masquerade. I’m sure users will have a ball jumping at the chance to fine tune their feeds. That may indeed prove beneficial, but the way I see it this is just a way for Meta (Threads and Instagram) and TikTok to fine tune user preferences for better and more specific data collection and targeting.

I love this quote from the TechCrunch article:

The shift reflects an evolution in how recommendation systems work. Social media feeds are moving away from a one-size-fits-all TV channel and toward something more like a streaming service, where users can tune recommendations to their interests and have more control over what they see.

Like that works so well on streaming media services.

The “Dear Algo” posts, which I’ve seen on Threads for a while now, may send a signal saying none of, or more of this or that, but a signal is a signal that throngs of users will think they control, but it’s serving the companies more than it ever will the users. It’s the same game as before. The house always wins.

Go ahead, call me crazy. But bad things get masked behind supposedly good things all the time. Oldest trick in a very thick book of tricks.

Looking at the big picture and speculating further one could argue that this is a tacit admission that these tech companies have discovered better, perhaps or perhaps not more efficient ways to capture data than their algorithms ever provided. I’m guessing AI has something to do with it.

Actually, I’m not guessing.

(Image from the author)

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