A teenager was excluded from a 2022 TikTok algorithm update designed to reduce rabbit holes of harmful content -- along with 10% of all users -- and then committed suicide after being served depressing videos. This raises many complicated ethical questions... 🧵 www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

TikTok Withheld a Safety Feature From Millions. One Died by Suicide

A confidential document says an algorithm adjustment was kept from many users “by design,” as part of an experiment to measure engagement.

bloomberg.com

Would you like to try the first ever algorithmic feed with CONTROLS? GreenEarth is built to serve you, not the platform or anybody else. Now in beta. www.greenearth.social/p/welcome-to...

Welcome to the GreenEarth Feeds

Social media algorithms built for people who hate social media algorithms

greenearth.social

Have you ever felt like Spotify's personalization is putting you into a musical rut? Do you wish the top playlists for any search were human not algorithmic? Well, Spotify is experimenting with prompt-based control, and one of their examples is "Make it non-personalized."

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, soundgarden, pearl jam, or alice in chains.

John Scalzi@scalzi.com · last wk.

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, soundgarden, pearl jam, or alice in chains.

This may be the first widely deployed AI conflict mediation system. It's used by Chinese citizens in Hangzhou to resolve disputes with businesses. We're going to be seeing a lot more of this. www.sohu.com/a/932941980_...

One of the goals of the GreenEarth project is to build models that let feed designers quickly estimate the effects of their algorithms on addiction, polarization, depression etc. With your permission, of course. www.greenearth.social/p/measuring-...

Measuring the Effects of Social Media Without Expensive Surveys

GreenEarth is building models that turn survey experiments into cheap A/B tests

greenearth.social

Star Trek dreamed up communicators and we got smartphones. Miyazaki dreamed up magical creatures and we get...

Chris Paxton@cpaxton.bsky.social · 2w ago

I love this

I love this

I've seen it before but every time I do I'm kind of staggered by just how bananas this chart is. Starting in mid-2021 or so, something began making people unhappier with the economy than you'd expect, and continued to get worse and worse nonstop until the present day, spanning all income brackets.

Keegs@littlekeegs.bsky.social · 2w ago

Not at all-there is still a vibecession among the rich and poor!

The AI models of today are the worst they will ever be. And yet, pretty much every "AI will never..." claim has now been shattered. I don't understand people who still bet against AI. How much more evidence do you need that these machines are going to be smarter than us in every way?

There's a long list of content-based signals we might want to rank on. We are limited by the classifiers we actually have. BUT we are working on LLM scoring with arbitrary prompts! The challenge is performance, but we have a cunning plan docs.google.com/document/d/1...

How does GreenEarth determine "constructiveness"? We use the Google Perspective API but not the classic "toxicity" score. Instead we combine many of their "bridging" attributes. The weights are from our previous experiment. github.com/greenearth-s... rankingchallenge.substack.com/p/its-possib...

Fusion power is gonna go a lot like AI. Empty promises for decades, then suddenly here faster than anyone can adjust to.

GreenEarth (@greenearth-social.bsky.social) will be the first feed to explain the algorithm, tell you why you got each post, and let you adjust all the parameters. Here's an early version running on our staging server. We're ~2 weeks away from public beta.

I love love love Lee's essay on "Cultural Pessimism Technology Criticism." As a technology designer, I understand the fundamental importance of criticism -- I just want better critics. (Yes, this is a subtweet about AI commentary on this platform. But also, the essay is great, you should read it.)

Lee Vinsel @leev.bsky.social · last mo.

Some months ago, I began typing an email to my friend historian Richard John and quickly realized I was writing an essay I had wanted to do for years. I published it this morning and call it, "Two Forms of 'Technology' Criticism: Cultural Pessimism Versus Materialism." Link below.

Quantized model

We've added a new design to the library, rated likely: 👍 Adding Balanced News In a 6-month experiment from @jonathanstray.bsky.social et al. inserting news from credible, ideologically balanced outlets into feeds reduced partisan animosity. www.prosocialdesign.org/library/addi...

Adding Balanced News – Prosocial Design Network

Reduce partisan animosity.

prosocialdesign.org

I'm not gonna say he did this because of us, but I know for a fact that his boss read my essay, "Making Social Media Algorithms Social" Competition is good, actually! www.greenearth.social/p/making-soc...

Cough cough something something knowledge workers AI

bendwalsh.bsky.social@bendwalsh.bsky.social · 3w ago

so the demand from carriage drivers is not just that the city help them find new jobs in their current salary range, but that they find new jobs in their current salary range *working with horses*?! what are we even doing here gothamist.com/news/nyc-car...

OH at CHAI: "This week I'm working on an essay on free will." "What made you choose that?" I love my lab.

The app team has been giving me a hard time that not enough atproto knowers have signed up for this community research project. Fill out the form, tell the team what you want from communities.

alex benzer@alexbenzer.com · 2mo ago

the Bluesky design research team wants to talk with people who are interested in building communities. if that's you, submit this form! your voice will help shape what we build. docs.google.com/forms/d/1ej6...

I sometimes hear people express concern that bridging-based ranking will homogenize discussions, flattening minority perspectives. Many answers to this, but the first one is: not all minority perspectives are worth preserving. I'm sure you can think of a few. We need a criterion besides "minority."

This clever map shows us what time it is across the world, which regions are awake, working or sleeping, all rotating in sync with the Earth. Go to the source where the image only rotates by 3.75 degrees every 15 minutes to remain up to date. Source: buff.ly/tyQ2Z3g

Honestly my main use for Claude Cowork is that it can drive my browser to fetch things that are blocked from robot fetching 🤷‍♂️

The funniest thing about the Random feed is that you definitely get furries. www.greenearth.social/p/welcome-to...

Welcome to the GreenEarth Feeds

Social media algorithms built for people who hate social media algorithms

greenearth.social

The best discussions about how feed transparency should work, starting with this diagram, are happening over on X. C'mon folks we can do better here.

Jonathan Stray@jonathanstray.bsky.social · 3w ago

GreenEarth will be the first fully transparent, controllable, open-source feed. Does this diagram help you understand how the core algorithm works? Try the pre-release version now! survey.qualtrics.com/jfe6/form/SV...

GreenEarth will be the first fully transparent, controllable, open-source feed. Does this diagram help you understand how the core algorithm works? Try the pre-release version now! survey.qualtrics.com/jfe6/form/SV...

You cannot convince me that a technology where I can type this into a text box and expect to get an interesting, appropriate, and working output is not absolutely astonishing.

I've discovered my "Following" tab is not a great experience for me on BSky, probably because I populated it by porting over my Twitter network. But the overlap ends up being mostly people who are mad about politics... which is ok... but... GreenEarth feed is a much more balanced experience for me.