cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607
This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.
We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.
But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.
Algorithm created curation isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just not great when it’s designed to increase engagement, rather than have the most liked, most interesting or best written content rise to the top. When engagement is the most important metric, instead we get lies, click bait and emotive content rising to the top.
Enragement is hard to distinguish from engagement and most creators of algorithms don’t seem to particularly care about the difference. Some creators DO know the difference and still choose the dark side. It’s shitheads all the way down.
I’d say it’s more the problem that if you have any system, someone will try to game the system and succeed eventually. There’s no metric for objectively good objective quality that we can measure. Most liked? Use bots or use the number of likes as a goal where you’ll do a silly thing. Most interesting? That’s completely subjective and varied, the only real way to use that would be to track the individuals and serve “things that interest them.” Best written? I don’t know enough about writing to appreciate what’s good and isn’t and most people don’t either as long as it’s good enough and appeals to them.
See also SEO. Or marketing in general I guess.
In theory, you have a better widget so you want to get it to the top of the relevant search results. In practice… 10,000 people trying to make money off a lemon pie recipe create a hellscape of mostly indistinguishable garbage that technically fits the description.