Feeding the algorithm
Algorithms, or at least the ones used by social media platforms, were supposed to be about discovery. But now they’re operating more like those daytime HGTV home decorating shows. “Oh, you like horses? We turned your house into a fake stable. Your dinner table is now bales of hay.”
We're all fed up with the algorithm
Since social media platforms provide easily accessible performance data, creators and brands are incentivized to only post algorithm-tested images. Knowing what “works” means fewer people are interested in taking visual risks, resulting in long-term visual homogenisation.
Photos Still Matter on Brand Social
For the best part of a decade, people have been making content for an algorithm, not the audience. Worse, they haven’t been creating things for themselves. So if the feeds can no longer be relied upon to put content in front of new eyeballs then people are free to make the things that they want to make. Rather than making things that float well at ... See more
We have a chance to do work we’re proud of, and to do it for people who care. And maybe we can do it in a way that will lead them to tell the others. Traffic from an algorithm isn’t the point, it’s a random bonus.
No sense being a puppet, especially if you can’t be sure who is pulling the strings or why.
Seth Godin • You Can’t Beat the Algorithm
A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people.
Henrik Karlsson • A Blog Post Is a Very Long and Complex Search Query to Find Fascinating People and Make Them Route Interesting Stuff to Your Inbox
The flip side of that trade, of course, is algorithms. In giving up the act of organizing, we’ve ceded much of our control to whatever the machine thinks would be best for us. Alexandra Samuel had a good piece on tagging for JSTOR Daily in 2019. It included this bit on what could have been with tagging:
When we fret about the perils of an algo... See more
Colin Nagy • The Folksonomy Edition
Algorithm-friendly design (see TikTok vs twitter). A shift from making the pixel perfect experience to how we help the algorithm understand better and faster who we are and give us the content that we want.
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/9/18/seeing-like-an-algorithm