Evils of "THE ALGORITHM"

I feel like a lot of people have an inherent problem with this vague concept of “THE ALGORITHM” (which henceforth will receive the all caps & scary quote treatment) and their nostr feed that is entirely misplaced from the real problem of centralized social media, so I thought it would be good to address it directly.

First, “THE ALGORITHM” is just a set of rules that determines how you see your feed. There is no necromancy or joining of the dark side involved, and it has nothing to do with whether "THE ALGORITHM" is “good” or “bad.” The very idea of “not having an algorithm,” just means you want the algorithm to list the posts of who you follow in chronological order. It in no way means you are “algorithm free,” it just means that the rules of your feed are "take only the posts from the people I follow and order them chronologically," and that’s basically it.

Everything about the concept of a social network and the incredible potential and beauty of #nostr as a protocol is in controlling your experience, what content you see, and how you see it. This is literally the entire point of having follows, followers, and reposts in the first place. It's at the core of the very notion of what social media is. This is literally “an algorithm” in the same way as prioritizing new posts over old would be, or limiting those who post more, or amplifying those who post less in your feed. They are exactly the same kind of rules, they are different only in specificity.

So what’s the problem with “THE ALGORITHM” then? It’s nothing to do with some vague notion of an “unnatural” feed or whatever it might seem like since we seem to have developed this distaste for the very concept. The problem is purely that someone else has been specifically manipulating your feed against your best interests.

It’s the same issue as censorship. My blocking a dickhead who won’t shut up about their shitcoin or who squeals at me under every single post with demands to read some communist propaganda on my podcast, isn’t censorship, it’s me choosing who I interact with. Censorship is when an external participant, someone not involved in the conversation at all, decides that I should not see some idea or should not communicate with some person despite my explicit desire to do so, and is able to remove my access from it without my permission.

The same goes for “THE ALGORITHM.” It’s not a problem if I’m controlling it for my own feed, this is a basic and fundamental tool of digital filtering that absolutely must be embraced, not feared or run away from, because it’ll make a huge difference in the user experience. It’s simply that someone else shouldn’t be controlling it to be at odds with the content and experience that the user specifically wants and is trying to create. Only THEN it is a very bad "algorithm" and a dangerous relationship.

The problem with all of these things has nothing to do with what they actually are, its about who has control.

The user is always supposed to be in control of who they follow, the content and ideas they want to see, and the people they want to associate with. Only then is it truly a free market and open space guided and created by its users. The problem has always been about central points of control forcing information asymmetries that aren't real, censoring ideas that are beneficial to you and inconvenient to them, etc.

I always like to try to analogize these sorts of things to the IRL world to understand what makes them bad and why a good one is actually incredible important. In the real world, if you go to a party and decide to converse with your friend, while ignoring all others you are weighing their interaction higher than the others at the party. If you decide to play a game of beer pong with your friend, you are creating a very specific set of rules by which your interaction will fall into. Not because you enjoy the evils of "THE ALGORITHM," but because you want to get drunk and have a lot of fun. Censorship would be if some external govt or other party was able to mute your conversation from thousands of miles away, while you were standing in front of your friend talking to them. THEY interrupted your conversation and shut off your communication channel despite both of you explicitly agreeing to the interaction. Or you were having a conversation with your friend and the second they began telling you about how your mutual acquaintence in in the hospital with myocarditis, they vanish from the party and a person you don't even know immediately walks up to explain to you how safe and effective the Pfizer products are.

An IRL "evil algorithm" would be this external institution or person making a particular group at the party invisible to you without your knowledge, it would be forcing a beer pong table in front of you no matter where you went or what else you wanted to do. Constantly enticing you to get drunk and play a game you were doing everything to avoid. Even adding arbitrary obstacles to all other activities and dropping NLP messaging of "drink up" and "solo cup" into all of your conversations without your knowledge. As crazy as it sounds, this is essentially the norm. This is how our online environment has evolved. So it makes sense that when we broke free of that, we would have a horrible taste in our mouths for the very idea of "THE ALGORITHM." It certainly isn't irrational, despite being misplaced.

Being part of the digital world is a weird thing when comparing it to real life. There is never a situation in meatspace where one has to filter how they will talk to a million people all at once. The very notion is comically absurd. But this IS a consideration in the digital world. Its like being dropped into a seemingly unlimited ocean of content and people, which is to the individual, genuinely infinite, as more content and interactions are being added to it by the minute so fast that it would take a lifetime to even manually sort through it all. Blocking, filtering, information rules, value weights and yes, "THE ALGORITHM" aren't things that are nice to have, these things are critical, inescapable tools for navigating the endless ocean of the digital world. These are not things to be afraid of or label broadly as "evil" and avoided at all costs. To the contrary, they are basic pieces of the puzzle that I think we need to understand. We need to put them in the hands of the user, so we can do incredible things with them.

The one core concern, is quite simple: How do we enable the user to set the rules, and not a third party? In my opinion, this is all that distinguishes the ultimately good from the bad.

We must remember not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Creating "THE ALGORITHM" is not accepting an invitation from Darth Vader to join the dark side. It's just a means of curating your feed so you get the best experience you can, and you find the content, ideas, and community that you came to #nostr looking for.

When we realize the importance of custom controls and modes of interaction, then we realize what all of these clients really are. Every one of them is really just a different "algorithm" that the user can select from. One that shows only images, one that filters everything but a certain community or topic, one that organizes based on most zapped, or by the number of likes specifically from those in your network, and on and on. The potential of #nostr isn't an algorithm-free experience, it's in an ecosystem with an unlimited number of experiences to choose from so that each person can either choose or build the community that they want, in a global square with no rulers.

An important step to getting to the future we want is to understand, with specificity and nuance, the exact sources of the problems we are trying to fix, rather than painting broad strokes and just carrying around a bunch of baggage about a tool we should be using for ourselves. The promise of nostr, and Bitcoin, and so many other tools we are building on and embracing is to create at the communication layer, a foundation of freedom that can be accessed by every single user no matter where they are in the world.

So in short, there is no such thing as "THE ALGORITHM." The problem has always been about who has control over your digital world? Is it you, or is it someone else? In the fight to prevent that control from finding its way back into the hands of someone else, it would be foolish to let our PTSD over the past have us avoid the very tools that would let us build a future specifically tuned to give us the very value and and autonomy that we all seek.