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ymeskhout  11mo ago (text post)   2262 thread views

The Bailey Podcast E032: Information Goons

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In this episode, we discuss information addiction.

Participants: Yassine, Jason, Neophos, Shakesneer. Credit to Internaut for the inspiration.

Links:

None. Go outside.

Recorded 2023-05-08 | Uploaded 2023-06-03

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I listened to most of this so far. Good stuff, though I'd like to see more discussion of the types and evolution of news feeds. I see two basic types, though I guess you could also call it a spectrum - the "simple" type which contains only posts by people you have explicitly followed in strictly chronological order, and the "algorithm" type where an algorithm shows you an endless series of posts based on what it thinks you'd like, which may or may not have any connection to accounts you follow, posts you react to, etc. In the beginning, everything was simple feeds, which IMO are much less likely to lead to that kind of behavior. But nowadays it seems like pretty much everything is moving to algorithmic feeds.

I tackled that with the Facebook feed evolution which used to be plain vanilla chronology for a brief moment IIRC. But pretty much everyone (Twitter, FB, IG, Reddit, etc.) fully embraced algorithm feeds and it has been the de facto standard for a long time now. The only simple feeds that are still popular are podcasts, which are by far the most enduring RSS implementation. I guess email newsletters are another example of a successful simple feed (and somehow key to Substack's success) but I do not understand them and I'm horrified by the thought of cluttering my inbox with hot takes.

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