#Social Media Algorithms

[iwriteaboutfeminism]

I'm going to tell you something that will be very hard to believe, but I swear to god it's true.

I know someone who, on THE DAY OF Biden's inauguration learned for the first time that we were about to have our first female Vice President.

This was a full adult person who had not heard about Kamala Harris until THE DAY OF the inauguration.

Somehow, not one person on their Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok FYP had mentioned Kamala Harris.

Our algorithms are DIFFERENT. There are a lot of people in your life, probably more than you think, who do NOT know about the genocide in Palestine. They have NOT seen videos from journalists on the ground. They do NOT know how many people have been killed. They do NOT know about the starvation and famine. They do NOT know about the schools, hospitals, and refugee camps that have been bombed. They do NOT know about the mass graves.

I understand the frustration. I understand the bewilderment. I understand the anger.

Remember that the motivation that YOU feel is based on what YOU have seen, what YOU have read, what YOU have given the time and mental/emotional space to learn about.

Not everyone has done that. If that makes you angry, do something about it. BUT REMEMBER YOUR GOAL. Your goal is to increase the attention, money, and aid going to the people in Gaza. Punishing people for having an algorithm that's not exactly the same as yours does not achieve that goal. Start with education. Conversations. Providing resources. Sharing opportunities for aid.

It is not your job to punish. It is your job to provide. It is your job to funnel your frustrations productively, because your efforts are in service of the people of Palestine, not your own ego.

[lexosaurus]

idk if this is a contreversial take or not but i think that the ideal internet experience is being able to remove specific things (triggers, nsfw, gore) if you truly dont want to see them but overall being also shown things you aren’t interested in. i think one of my fave things about tumblr is seeing like 50% of my dash be about fandoms im not in, bands i dont like and quotes from books i dont want to read rather than this endless feedback loop of tiktok showing me ‘exactly what i want to see’ in a trap to keep me online as long as possible and blind to communities outside of my own. i want a mix of curating my own experience and a healthy dose of content i don’t already know i want to see, yknow?

No I think this is a pretty safe take here on Tumblr. I think stuff like this is why most of us are still here on Tumblr instead of moving to other sites like Twitter (rip) or Tiktok, you know? Because we like that this is the last social media with no algorithm, and we want to keep it that way.

To be clear, this site DOES have an "optional" algorithm that everyone is automatically opted in on, and you have to go to your settings and turn it off manually (recently found out, you have to opt out on your desktop and on your mobile. They're treated as separate settings). But the fact that you can opt out at all is HUGE.

Like, I can just go ahead and turn this thing off, and then that's it! It's off!

I was thinking yesterday about how before Instagram and Facebook had an algorithm, people genuinely just used them to stay in touch with all the happenings from their friends and family. Like, I remember going on Facebook every single day to see what my friends and family that didn't live nearby were up to. It was so fun! And then once the algorithm hit, suddenly I was bombarded with all this stupid bullshit that I didn't care about but Facebook/Instagram thought I cared about. And then only people who I "interacted" with most would be shown to me, aka people that didn't post as often or I didn't message as much wouldn't be shown to me, and it was such a sly, sinister change that I didn't even realize how many of my friends/people I followed weren't being shown to me till I slowly stopped using the app as much because wtf why am I only being shown the same 10 people? Why can't I join a fb group without it invading my entire feed? Where is everyone else? Why does this app feel So Empty?

There's a noticeable decrease of people on this site now compared to the 2010s, but weirdly enough, this is like the only social media for me that still feels like people are on it. That I can genuinely interact with mutuals without some robot deciding, "Oh, you interacted with this one person once? You browsed their blog for 5 minutes? NOW I WILL ONLY SHOW YOU THIS SINGLE PERSON'S CONTENT IN EVERY OTHER POST IN YOUR FEED FOR THE NEXT MONTH."

This has turned into a big long rant from me but like shit, dude, it's so sad how much of our online experience is controlled by algorithms now.

[seeanimation]

😱💥

When tomorrow is Monday bro

[stark-reading-mad]

I hate it but I can't stop

[shivering-isles-cryptid]

Why am I getting love spells on my feed? I’m aromantic?

It’s like using a magnet to draw in plastic, we don’t do that here

[alexanderwales]

I wish I could sit down and explain things to the algorithms.

"Hey, look, you noticed that I was searching for stuff related to Final Fantasy 7, and I appreciate that. I was talking about it, tagging it, reading some discussions, and at the time, yeah, I was interested. But I'm done with the remake now. I'm not permanently in need of more Final Fantasy 7 stuff. I've moved on to other things. The fanart and fanfic is sort of falling on deaf ears here. You showed me that picture of Aerith fingerbanging Tifa and I won't lie, it definitely activated some neurons, but what I'm interested in now are some critiques of the last season of Umbrella Academy. Or give me some game design thoughts on Factorio. We're done with the Final Fantasy 7 stuff now."

But no, the algorithms just pick up on what you're currently talking about, searching about, etc. You watch one Youtube video on some of the worldbuilding of Midgar and suddenly there are just dozens of suggestions for five hour long video essays and OSTs and a bunch of stuff that I do not care about.

If the algorithms are here to stay, I just want them to be better, or to have better ways of talking to them.

"Please only play me Everclear's 'Father of Mine' when I'm in the mood to be sad/angry about my relationship with my father."

"I care far more about entertaining storytelling than subject matter, I will watch a five hour video on anything if the writing and production is good."

"I sometimes engage with people who are wrong on the internet, but I do not endorse this, and do not want more discourse that I've only dipped my toe in because someone said something that was incorrect, and all that searching and reading I did on the topic was to see how wrong they were."

If I had any faith in AI as a tool, I might hope that the algorithms get good enough to sand away some of these issues. But of course I don't have faith in AI, and of course the algorithms are designed for maximizing advertising dollars by way of increasing engagement, and I'm left grumbling at my computer every time the algorithm has clearly gotten the wrong impression.

[kittycommitte]

I'm looking to connect with people who are:

*sick of being sick

*faking being well

*hiding pain behind a fake smile

*feeling alone

*have an invisible disability

*don't look sick

*looking for support

*faking being well

[existennialmemes]

[rattling the bars of my algorithmic cage] SHOW! MY! GARBAGE! TO! EVERYONE!!!!!

[abigailspinach]

[v-67]

The Instagram algorithm keeps throwing wholesome JJK reels/comics/everything at me

And I've come to the conclusion that the JJK fandom collectively agrees that we don't claim this trauma

We will watch the end, we will stick to the storyline, but in our made up canon, all our characters are alive and happy and things work out.

Nanami doesn't die. Geto doesn't go away. Inumaki doesn't lose his arm. And you know, so on. All the bad things just don't happen, our cuties just live together and it's just warmth

So yeah

Wholesome animations and comics made by the fandom is what we claim.

....

It was actually so funny that after I completed watching the S2, I was so sad about all of this and I kept thinking about it at night and then all these animations show up (which is scary because FU Instagram) but it really cheered me up and i was like, Nanami's here🥹, and all the content of random ships is also SO cute.

I really love Nanami okay, the way that what happened to him was not okay, it was not. Nope. No no no. Just no.

[a-tohmic]

Social Media Is Not Self-Expression

by Rob Horning, 2014

1. Subjectivation is not a flowering of autonomy and freedom; it's the end product of procedures that train an individual in compliance and docility. One accepts structuring codes in exchange for an internal psychic coherence. Becoming yourself is not a growth process but a surrender of possibilities that we learn to regard as egregious, unbecoming. "Being yourself" is inherently limiting. It is liberatory only in the sense of freeing one temporarily from existential doubts. (Not a small thing!) So the social order is protected not by preventing "self-expression" and identity formation but encouraging it as a way of forcing people to limit and discipline themselves — to take responsibility for building and cleaning their own cage. Thus, the dissemination of social-media platforms becomes a flexible tool for social control. The more that individuals express through these codified, networked, formatted means to construct a "personal brand" identity, the more they self-assimilate, adopting the incentive structures of capitalist social order as their own. (The machinations of Big Data make this more obvious. The more data you supply, the more the algorithms can determine your reality.) Expunge the seriality built into these platforms, embrace a more radical form of difference.

2. In an essay about PJ Harvey's 4-Track Demos, Michael Barthel writes:

While she was able to hole up in a seaside restaurant and produce a masterpiece, I need constant feedback and encouragement in order not to end up curled in some dark corner of my house, eating potato chips and refreshing my Tumblr feed in the hope that someone will have “liked” my Photoshopped picture of Kanye West in a balloon chair.

He's being a bit facetious, but this is basically what I'm trying to get at above: the difference between an inner-directed process of discovery and a kind of outer-directed pseudo-creativity that in its pursuit of attention gets overwhelmed by desperation. I'm trading in a very dubious kind of dichotomizing here, I know — artists make a lot of great work for no greater purpose than attention-seeking, and the idea that anything is truly "inner-directed" may be a ideological illusion, given how we all develop interiority in relation to a social world that precedes us and enables us to survive. But what I am trying to emphasize here is how production in social media is often sold to users of these platforms as self-expressive creativity, as self-discovery, as an elaboration of the self even, but it is really a narrowing of the self to the reductive, defensive aim of getting recognition, reassurance of one's own existence, that one belongs. That kind of "creativity" may crowd out the more antisocial kind that may entail reclusion, social disappearance, indifference to reputation and social capital, to being someone in particular in a network. Self-invention in social media that is perpetually in search of "feedback" is really just the production of communication, which gives value not to the self but to the network that gets to carry more data (and store it, and sell it).

Actual "self-invention" — if we are measuring it in range of expressivity — appears more like self-dissolution. We're born into social life and shaped by it; self-discovery may thus entail a destruction of social bonds, not a sounding of them.

Barthel lauds the "demos, experiments, collaborative public works, jokes, notes, reading lists, sketches, appreciations, outbursts of pique" that are "absolutely vital to continuing the business of creation." But the degree that these are all affixed to a personal brand when serially broadcast on social media depletes their vitality. If PJ Harvey released the demos as she made them to a Myspace page, would there ever have been a finished Rid of Me? Would the end product merely have been PJ Harvey, as the fecund musician?

Social media structure creative effort (e.g., Barthel's list above) ideologically as "self-creating," but they often end up as anxiety-inducing, exposing the self's ad hoc incompleteness while structuring the demand for a fawning audience to complete us, validate every effort, as a natural expectation. Validation is nice, but as a goal for creative effort, it is somewhat limited. The quest for validation must inevitably restrict itself to the tools of attracting attention: the blunt instruments of novelty and prurience  ("Kanye West in a balloon chair"). The self one tries to express tends to be new, exciting, confessional, sexy, etc., because it plays as an advertisement. Identity is a series of ads for a product that doesn't exist.

The process can't quell anxiety; this kind of self-expression can only intensify it, focus it onto a few social-media posts that await judgment, narrow it to the latest instances of sharing. Social media's quantifying metrics aggravate the problem, making expression into a series of discrete items to be counted, ranked. It serves as the infrastructure for a feedback loop that orients expression toward the anxiety of what the numbers will be and accelerates it, as we try to better those numbers, and thereby demonstrate that the self-monitoring is teaching us something about how to become more "relevant."

The alternative would seem to be a sort of deep focus in isolation, in which one accepts the incompleteness that comes from being apart from an audience, that comes from not seeking final judgment on what one is doing and letting it remain ambiguous, open-ended, of the present moment and not assimilated to an archive of identity. To put that tritely: The best way to be yourself is to not be anybody in particular but to just be.

3. So is the solution to get off the Internet? If social media structure social behavior this way, just don't use them, right? Problem solved. Paul Miller's 2013 account at the Verge of his year without Internet use suggests it's not so simple. Miller went searching for "meaning" offline, fearing that Internet use was reducing his attention span and preoccupying him with trivia. It turns out that, after a momentary shock of having his habits disrupted, Miller fell back into the same feelings of ambient discontent, only spiked with a more intense feeling of loneliness. It's hard to escape the idea of a "connected world" all around you, and there is no denying that being online metes out "connectedness" in measured, addictive doses. But those doses contain real sociality, and they are reshaping society collectively. Whether or not you use social media personally, your social being is affected by that reshaping. You don't get to leave all of society's preoccupations behind.

Facebook is possibly more in the foreground for those who don't use it than for those who have accepted it as social infrastructure. You have to expend more effort not knowing a meme than letting it pass through you. Social relations are not one-way; you can't dictate how they are on the basis of personal preference. As Miller puts it, describing his too-broad, too pointed defiance of the social norms around him, "I fell out of sync with the flow of life." Pretending you can avoid these social aspects of life because they are supposedly external, artificial, inauthentic, and unreal, is to have a very impoverished idea of reality, of authenticity, of unique selfhood.

The inescapable reciprocity of social relations comes into much sharper relief when you stop using social media, which thrive on the basis of the control over reciprocity they try to provide. They give a crypto-dashboard to social life, making it seem like a personal consumption experience, but that is always an illusion, always scattered by the anxiety of waiting, watching for responses, and by the whiplash alternation between omnipotence and vulnerability.

Miller's fable ends up offering the lesson that the digital and the physical are actually interpenetrated, and all the personal problems he recognizes in himself aren't a matter of technologically mediated social reality but are basically his fault. This seems too neat of a moral to this story. Nothing is better for protecting the status quo than convincing people that their problems are their own and are entirely their personal responsibility. This is basically how neoliberalism works: "personal responsibility" is elevated over the possibility of collective action, a reiteration of requirement to "express oneself" as an isolated self, free of social determination, free for "whatever."

What is odd is that the connectivity of the internet exacerbates that sort of neoliberal ideology rather than mitigating it. Connectivity atomizes rather than collectivizes. But that is because most people's experience of the internet is mediated by capitalist entities, or rather, for the sake of simplicity, by capitalism itself. You can go offline, but that doesn't remove you from the alienating properties of life in capitalist society. So the same "personal problems" the Internet supposedly made you experience still exist for you if you go offline, because you are still in a capitalist society. Capitalist imperatives are still shaping your subjectivity, structuring your time and your experience of curiosity, leisure, work, life. The internet is not the problem; capitalism is the problem.

Social media offer a single profile for our singular identity, but our consciousness comprises multiple forms of identity simultaneously: We are at once a unique bundle of sense impressions and memories, and a social individual imbued with a collectively constructed sense of value and possibility. Things like Facebook give the impression that these different, contestable and often contradictory identities (and their different contexts) can be conveniently flattened out, with users suddenly having more control and autonomy in their piloting through everyday life. That is not only what for-profit companies like Facebook want, but it is also what will feel natural to subjects already accustomed to capitalist values of convenience, capitalist imperatives for efficiency, and so on.

So Miller is right to note that "the internet isn't an individual pursuit, it's something we do with each other. The internet is where people are." That's part of why simply abandoning it won't enhance our sense of freedom or selfhood. But because we "do" the internet with each other as capitalist subjects, we use it to intensify the social relations familiar from capitalism, with all the asymmetries and exploitation that comes with it. We "do" it as isolated nodes, letting social-media services further suppress our sense of collectivity and possibility. The work of being online doesn't simply fatten profits for Facebook; it also reproduces the condition that make Facebook necessary. As Lazzarato puts it, immaterial "labour produces not only commodities, but first and foremost the capital relationship."

4. Exodus won't yield freedom. The problem is not that the online self is “inauthentic” and the offline self is real; it’s that the self derived from the data processing of our digital traces doesn’t correspond with our active efforts to shape an offline/online hybrid identity for our genuine social ties. What seems necessary instead is a way to augment our sense of "transindividuality," in which social being doesn't come at the expense of individuality. This might be a way out of the trap of capitalist subjectivity, and the compulsive need to keep serially producing in a condition of anxiety to seem to manifest and discover the self as some transcendent thing at once unfettered by and validated through social mediation. Instead of using social media to master the social component of our own identity, we must use them to better balance the multitudes within.

[beauty-in-the-brkdwn]

I have 919 followers on here and I’m not sure how many mutuals. You all should be seeing my posts. No one ever sees my posts. Interact with this post if you can actually see my content.

[seeanimation]

😱💥

😱💥

[omega-devart]

I don't understand why that ariral joke about Denmark border is peak in my accounts. It means I should draw more arirals, or I must joke more about Denmark or how the f algorithm works? This comic isn't that funny or professionally done, it's make me angry and hopeless at the same time. What I should to do? Should I draw more Arirals or I need draw more comics like that?

[causereyna-artie]

"But in canon-"

If you're concerned about canon, the algorithm obviously messed up.

[autistic-pebbles-au]

Funny thing I don't check on my Tumblr statistics via PC. Only phone

So basically my knowledge is based on:

THIS ❤️

THAT ♻️

AND THOSE 👥 (followers)

and I'm happy when the first thing reaches more than 30 skdnsnd.

The rest is optional XD