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There’s a major section of mastodon users who like mastodon because it doesn’t have any recommendation algorithms. Both from the side of “I don’t want to be told what to click on” and the “I don’t want an algorithm surfacing my posts in a way I’m not in complete control of”
This might curse it to forever be the platform with the smaller number of users, but the nice thing about activitypub is that there may be other services/clients that will be willing to take up that mantle for those that want it.
Couldn’t there be an implementation thay leaves everyone satisfied?
Sort of like implementating a new optional tab for discovery and allowing users to choose whether their posts appear on it. The implementation should of course be fully honest without dark patterns, though due to the lack of profit incentive it shouldn’t be difficult to achieve a satisfying implementation.
I don’t think it would last long as a clean implementation.
The problem with having a completely open algorithm for discovery, you give spammers an instruction manual for how to consistently get to the top of the rankings.
Eventually these systems would always get abused and become completely filled with useless nonsense.
An alternative is to have the discovery completely exist on the client side, but I’m not sure how that would even work given the way activitypub works.
Personally I think any social media recommendation/discovery system is a dark pattern.
