Recommendation Algorithms Are a Necessary Evil (Sort Of)

But the catch was that this was never a sustainable long-term strategy, at least not for the purposes of promoting an open ecosystem. User-generated data is vulnerable to a family of sub optimizations such as Goodhart’s Law, in which using a “measure” as a “metric” devalues the measure itself. If you’re Google building PageRank on natural weblinks ... See more

Since a platform is in control of what content gets served to who and when, there’s no expectation that a creator’s social network is guaranteed to see their content. Therefore, platforms can also choose what not to program, and there’s little creators can do or say to counteract this. Long gone are the days where a creator can complain about being... See more

Algorithmic recommendations are the latest iteration of the Mechanical Turk: a series of human decisions that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed. Designed and maintained by the engineers of monopolistic tech companies, and running on data that we users continuously provide by logging in each day,

... See more

It’s been endlessly argued that algorithms influence too much of what we watch, listen to, read, and even think. Personal taste erodes while decision-making is outsourced to the platform.