The Silence Of The Algorithm | MORNING, COMPUTER
Warren Ellis is such a good writer/commentator:
Dinner last night with a friend whoâs left Twitter but fondly remembers it as a place where he met people, people introduced themselves to him, struck up actual conversation, had social value. Â Heâs been off Twitter a while… This morning, I see my acquaintance Boris Anthony argue that Twitter should âgo algoâ like Facebook and let the system determine what you see.
While I doubt that my own Twitter and Facebook experiences were/are general, I have periods of fascination with the way social media systems eventually failed me… I wonder if attempts at inclusion by algorithm arenât just locking people in soundproofed boxes.
These are all part-formed thoughts Iâm working through, but it strikes me this morning that Twitter going algo would break a (perhaps unspoken) promise made in an earlier age of the internet: that, like FB, it would become a heavily managed means of communication, with arcane rules of entry, that would have its own opinions on whether you get to speak or listen.
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