Because it’s a major cultural shift
Dude, aside from people just going “ugh, kids”, the whole point is that the assumption that sites have algorithms is a sign of how the entire internet has been ruined. It’s a major cultural shift and a terrible one.
AO3 is the opposite of obscure in fanfic fandom, and its entire existence is political and an act of resistance.
No shit people react to cluelessness about how it sorts content: how it sorts content is a conscious ethical statement.
And to answer this other person’s comment:
Wattpad, dude. No separate index by fandom, no see everything by date, just a massive fic section and tags that show the 1k most recent or 1k most popular.
Nearly every major fic site has worked something like AO3 until we get to the modern app hell that is Wattpad.
Algorithms ruined the internet is a take I’ve never heard before
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
And that is precisely the shift people don’t like because what we gain in time, we lose in other ways.
Algorithms could be written to do whatever, but in practice, they’re there to make the site user profitable to the site. The types of content they push are tied to this. They’re designed to make sits addictive.
Particularly in a hobby space like fandom or in queer spaces, they’re not a great idea. They can sort mainstream things well, but the minute you have something more niche, it starts being hidden because it’s not profitable and/or because there are just that many more mainstream audience members.
They also induce learned helplessness instead of expecting a user to proactively decide what they want to see.
These aren’t fringe arguments: they’re the cornerstone of what sites like AO3 and anybody concerned about privacy and the problems with the corporatization of the internet cares about.
Sure, I’ll admit that algorithms fall short when you’re only interested in niche communities somewhat, but, that is where a certain amount of proactiveness is brought in. Platforms want interactions and screen time, the longer you’re on a website and more things you click the more profitable you are which is the why for any algorithm to really work you have to do some amount of proactive searching in the beginning so the algorithm knows how to keep you on the platform by showing you the stuff you interact with.
Yea, if you just leave Instagram open you’ll just get posts about the most popular things, the latest fad and the celebrities with the most followers, but if you go out of your way to follow the right people (for example, some accounts centered around dungeon and dragons) you’re telling the algorithm that you are here for dungeons and dragons, and you will stay for dungeons and dragons, therefore the algorithm will push you dungeons and dragons content to keep you around, both from your follow list, and from people related to your follow list, which introduces you to new ideas/people you wouldn’t have found otherwise.
There are plenty of YouTubers i watch daily now because the algorithm thought ‘hey, they’d probably like this’ and pushed it to me that I likely never would’ve found if they weren’t on my reccomended.
A little effort at the start, and you have to do less effort in the future.
I also think calling people who enjoy algorithms ‘learned helplessness’ is wrong. is it helpless to ask a waiter for their reccomendation on a menu, when you could always search the menu for what you specifically want instead? Because that’s what algorithms do. While you can always use a searchbar on Twitter or YouTube or TikTok, the app is reccomending you what it thinks you’ll enjoy. It isn’t helpless, it’s utilising a service provided to you to get the most enjoyment out of the least effort. You’re just optimising your media intake so that you get the most positive experience and the least negative experience.
Because, if algorithms only pushed the mainstream, that would lead to a lot of negative experiences because while an individual community may be niche on the platform, the sheer amount of niche communities make it so that if they are truly that hard to find you’re gonna lose a lot of users fast.
Ah!
But the internet culture thing we’ve lost is the waiters!
In the 90s, when you really couldn’t find anything online, curated links lists—recs lists—were a huge thing. There used to be big name fan reccers of fanfic. The whole debacle with Delicious was because fandom used that bookmarking site so heavily for massive curated recs lists and manual organization according to individuals’ tastes.
Culturally, I think the human tastemaker or blog of tastemakers is far superior to the algorithm.
That’s the big change people are mourning.
Alright, I guess I’m just too young to know or care about what a rec list is but honestly, I’ll take the algorithm. It’s easier, it’s cleaner, there’s no debacles when an algorithm.
Rec lists are inherently not one size fits all, because it’s a single (or i suppose it could a few) people creating a list of things they enjoy and perhaps you will also like it.
Algorithms give the mathematically best piece of content for you, given the information you have provided the algorithm.
I don’t see an inherint problem with algorithms being profit driven. They have to be profit driven or the company will go bust, capitalism is what makes algorithms predatory, there’s no inherint evil to an algorithm, it’s just math and lines of code.
Were capitalism to be abolished, and profit motives made obselete, an algorithm would be the best for any media platform because all of the interruptions between your curated content of ads is gone now, and the website/app can give you exclusively the stuff you most want to see, and will keep you on the platform for longest. (Because naturally even without a profit motive, people want the apps and websites they create to be popular) which I don’t think is inherintly bad. Why shouldn’t an app try to keep you on it? An app not trying to keep you on it is self-destructive.
Curated content via an algorithm is a feature as much as Instagram reels and Tiktok lives are.
It is actually much, much easier for me to find content I like on AO3 than on websites that use algorithmic curation. And no, it’s not because I “didn’t feed the algorithm enough data.”
It’s because most algorithms have hardwired priorities that are fundamentally opposed to my personal tastes.
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Algorithms designed to maximize “engagement” rarely differentiate between positive and negative engagement. A lot of content is popular not because it makes people happy, but because it makes people angry, and goads them into an argument.
This is the reason the term “doomscrolling” exists. The algorithm is not delivering “good” content. It is delivering manipulative content that enables people’s worst impulses.
Another issue I have with algorithmic feeds is they always prioritize newer content over older content.
I love old shit!
I love reblogging 6 year old memes. I love rickrolling. I love reading 10 year old fanfic and watching 15 year old tv shows and reading 20 year old books. I follow a blog called @yesterdaysprint that posts old newspaper clippings.
For the past couple days, I’ve been getting a bunch of notes on a funny gifset I made in 2020. I love that something I made two years ago is making dozens of people laugh today. That would never happen on twitter, where memes die within a week.
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Beyond having the wrong priorities, algorithms also have a lot of limitations.
I can tell an algorithm what things I like, but I can’t really explain to the algorithm *why* I like them, and this leads to a lot of BAD recommendations.
Take the Netflix algorithm for example.
I started watching a lot of Chinese television on Netflix, specifically because I am trying to learn the Mandarin Chinese language.
The Netflix algorithm doesn’t know the reason I’m watching those shows.
I’m pretty sure the Netflix algorithm just assumes I have an Asian fetish, because 90% of the shows it recommends me are Korean. No matter how any times I type “Chinese” into the search bar, Netflix keeps pushing Korean media recommendations at me.
If I dislike a show, the Netflix algorithm doesn’t know whether it was the cinematography I didn’t like, or a particular actor, or the fact that my favorite character was killed off, or all of the above.
The algorithm can only guess my reasons, and its guess is often wrong.
So even though I probably use Netflix a great deal more than the average Netflix user, the Netflix algorithm still does a pretty shitty job of recommending me content I actually want to see.
That’s why I still trust the media recommendations of my friends and the tumblr mutuals I follow more than the media recommendations of any algorithm.
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I’m getting the sense, from your comments, that you have a uniquely difficult time finding content you like on AO3.
Most of my friends are my age, and none of us have ever have any problem finding content we like on AO3, and this is largely due to our technological upbringing.
Understanding how databases work, and how to get what you want from them, is a skill that takes practice.
Everyone in fandom who used the internet in the late 90s has spent a lot of time developing this skill. We had no choice! There were no algorithm-curated content feeds back then. If you wanted fandom content, you found a web archive that hosted content for that fandom, and you learned how to input search queries into that web archive’s database.
So we were all forced to learn basic database literacy.
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If you haven’t spent any time developing this skillset, an algorithm will seem like an easier way to reliably find content you enjoy.
However, if you spend a long enough time building this skillset, your ability to find what content you like eventually SURPASSES an algorithm’s ability to deliver content you like.
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So understand that when you say, “It’s impossible to find fic I like on AO3” what we hear is, “I never learned how to use a database.”
When you say, “Algorithms are way more efficient and reliable than looking stuff up on my own,” what we hear is, “Nobody ever taught me how to look stuff up on my own.”
hmm… I think this is a really interesting discussion and uh. As someone who usually doesn’t go with whatever the algorithm says and just follows a few specific creators, the final post got me wondering…
isn’t it good to make these kinds of skillsets not required, in general?
Like, maybe people today don’t know how to properly wash their own clothes but isn’t it good that we don’t need to learn that skill and can use a machine that does it for us? Isn’t it kind of shitty to require people to need to learn skillsets before entering a community?
I like only following the creators I know and follow, and I appreciate the lack of algorithm on Tumblr and I enjoy the ability to only view sub feeds on Youtube, but… on some level, isn’t an algorithm more accessible for a larger audience who doesn’t need to learn to grapple with databases?
Isn’t it a general rule of accesibility that the fewer skills that are required to obtain your desired results, the better?
I’m genuinely conflicted on this, tbh.
Communities thrive with some barriers to entry. Extreme accessibility is almost always a negative, as we can see from youtube comments and the like.
Relying on algorithms is less like relying on a washing machine and more like relying on your mom.
I mean, the problem with relying on your mom is that she won’t be around to do it for you forever.
but regardless of that, I don’t think that setting up unnecessary barriers to entry is a good thing. Communities will definitely self-sort by skill level, sure, fans of a game but that doesn’t imply a barrier to entry to the entire community, just to the parts that thrive on a certain skill. A skill can be good to have without being necessary.
That being said, I do think that the fact that algorithms optimize for “engagement” instead of for things actually beneficial to humans leads to overall shittiness
yeah, i don’t think the accessibility is the problem with algorithms. i mean, if you want people to foster these skills, there’s frankly better ways to do it than ao3′s model, which basically just throws you into the deep end with no instruction, resulting in tons of people that have no idea about a lot of features that aren’t surface level. If the problem is really wanting people to learn and exercise these skills, than it’d be ideal to have some entry-level functionality while they learn the ropes.
anyway i think the more obvious problem with algorithms is less “it’s too easy to use” and more “who is controlling it and what is their goal.” because the answer is never “they want you to have a nice pleasant experience out of the goodness of their heart.”
Two things I personally want to raise.
1) This thread keeps speaking about algorithms in terms of them being optional. They are not optional, however. You cannot opt out of these algorithms. If you use major internet spaces today, you don’t get to “read the rest of the menu.” You get fed what your digital waiter says you will get fed. Everyone around you gets fed what their waiter says they will eat, too. There is no genuine freedom of choice. There are only artificial choices selected for you by a complex mathematical formula that you do not get to see, know, or understand.
The reason AO3 (and to a lesser extent tumblr’s chronological timeline) sticks out as an oddity because of this omnipresence of algorithmic sorting.
2) These algorithms’ goals are not your goals. You don’t even know what the algorithms goals are. No one actually does at this point, because we cannot see or understand the metrics these algorithms use. We do know they were initially designed to maximize interaction and profit.
Lies are more profitable than the truth.
Rage is more interactive than stability.
THAT is what makes these specific algorithms so dangerous and predatory. They are omnipresent, and they make people tired, angry, and misinformed, because those traits are more engaging and profitable.
Yes, conceptually, a truly personalized algorithm that you control in its entirety with goals you set and manage would be an AMAZING time saver!
But that is NOT the algorithms we have today. It’s not. Because a company’s profit is not about you. It’s about separating you from your money in the quickest way possible.
The algorithms we have today are not “accessibility tools.” THat is something algorithms CAN be used to make, and for some people an algorithmic system is more accessible, but for others it is more alienating and dangerous.
Lest we forget, the antivaxxer movement was hugely fed by early versions of algorithmic rabbit holing.
Since then so many other movements have sprung up as a result of these algorithmically driven isolation and misinformation systems. It’s at every level, from the Q-anon conspiracy that helped lead to the US coup on Jan 6 2021 to little baby shit like whatever the latest micro-level artist to be called a child rapist because they watched Sailor Moon is this month.
Algorithms as they exist today are not neutral. They are exceedingly dangerous.
If rec lists were “washing your clothes by hand,” AO3 already is the washing machine.
Rather than having to find unlisted communities, join them, learn where to go to access rec lists, learn where to go from the rec list to access each fic individually, accept that half the websites will be dead….
AO3 lets you pick a fandom, no need to hunt or join anything. Lets you sort content for that fandom in any conceivable way, from the broad “F/F” to the microscopic “Wingstuck AU.” Check and uncheck boxes to combine filters any way you want. A straightforward search bar right at the top of the page.
Using the algorithm is much more like hiring a complete stranger you’ve never met and never will to break into your house looking for dirty clothes, sneak away with them, and bring back clean clothes that are probably the same ones you owned last week but might just been the same color in whatever material and style was available at the Mysterious Stranger’s Laundry Event Horizon.
And you don’t get to tell the stranger to stop taking your goddamn clothes and bringing you knockoffs, or request the stranger focus on at least bringing clothes the same size and letting them be a different color instead because that would be more useful to you. No, you get what the Laundry Ghost says you get, and if that means sometimes you have frostbite or sunburns, go fuck yourself, at least you don’t have to run the washing machine.
I an genuinely concerned that no one bothered to explain to the new generation that consuming content via algorithm has the ultimate goal of turning YOU into the product.
Instagram is free because you are the product. Tiktok seems to thrive on engagement because you are the product.
Want to know why in spite of all the scandals, Facebook and Twitter are sill doing the bare minimum to protect users instead of being proactive? Because the cows don’t get to make demands from McDonalds.
In any site or app that uses an algorithm THE PRODUCT THEY’RE PEDDLING IS YOU.
Algorithms are sold as having a ‘curated experience’ but it’s actually a data harvesting mechanism. That is all an algorithm is: a slot machine in which you put in your personal information for the company to bundle and sell to their actual customers.
It’s all part of a concept called Big Data and it’s taught in business school. That’s right, this isn’t even considered a tech thing, this is considered a business concept. I sat through a lecture in which the professor gleefully stated that all the data harvested through apps on the average social media user can predict when they’ll get a cold before they have symptoms. “In theory we can start prepping cold medicine advertisements by predicting when someone’s going to get sick!”
Learned helplessness is not a purity whistle or a lapse of moral character. Learned helplessness is the result of Facebook et al. spending years conditioning their users to be spoon-fed by the algorithm instead of learning to search and curate your own experience.
That frustration due to lack of instant gratification, that’s the algorithm conditioning. I mean these guys literally made these programs to be as addictive as possible to the point where they won’t let their own kids use social media.
So please forgive the older generation because when someone comes in complaining about the lack of algorithm all we hear are “why aren’t there slot machines in this library?”.
