He should have called you with the phone
Comment on Instagram boss says users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in algorithm-free world
alpha1beta@piefed.social 1 week agoI’ll share a short story of how the algorithm sucks. A friend’s mom was dying of cancer. I knew it would be within a few days or week. He was texting me a lot - but in random bursts - trying to distract himself from the inevitable. I scrolled through IG, thought I saw it all, and having not heard from him in a while, I texted him something somewhat goofy.
He texted me back, “My mom just died”. I had no idea. Sure enough, scroll another 5 minutes and buried at the end of my feed is his post from less than 2 hours ago.
Instagram made me look like a dick because they’d rather show me 26 hour old content, than 2 hour content.
hiphopheaven@programming.dev 1 week ago
alpha1beta@piefed.social 1 week ago
He had a few more urgent things to handle. I’m sure I would’ve gotten a call or text hours or a day or so later. But the algorithm decided that it didn’t want to show me sad news and would rather send me engagement bait.
jsnfwlr@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
You used your feed for info, rather than looking at his profile or asking him politely. That’s not on Meta - that’s on you.
alpha1beta@piefed.social 1 week ago
That’s the dumbest possible response. And FYI this was right as they swapped out the original the chrono feed. I was vaguely aware it was happening, I don’t know if I knew it had rolled out to me yet. I had only had a sneaking suspicion he’d post it there. And as I mentioned, I knew she had days to maybe a week. It would’ve been one of the top posts in a chrono feed.
Meta, decided, for their own gain, to change how their app worked, with essentially no warning, no choice and no transparency - wasn’t like there was a big notification saying Your Feed Changed. The only thing different visually was the order of the timestamps.
For anyone else, I’ll leave another example: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-algorithmic-cruelty/
jsnfwlr@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
You chose an online social network over real human connection…
alpha1beta@piefed.social 1 week ago
Are you missing a chromosome?
What do you actually think would happen here? That a friend would text me within, idk, 1 to 4 hours of his mom dying? I think he’s got bigger problems - calling a funeral home, or just dealing with the grief.
Was he supposed to text me before the body was cold?
Or was I supposed to text him, either hourly or before I say anything else, “Hey, if your mom dead yet?”.
I didn’t go to Instagram LOOKING for this information. But it was there. As this was when the algorithm was new, I had a decade of experience with IG to expect that if there was anything recent, a quick scroll would surface it, but I was also doing the same thing I’d do a couple times a day.
But IG manipulated my feed, ruined the experience and caused an awkward moment.