We live in a funny world where who you "follow" on social media, which posts you "like", etc are weaponized against you in multiple ways.
Its not just the "follow" and the "like" which were the most amazing innovations to come out of silly valley, but also the entire notion of voluntarily sharing vast amounts of personal data with the networks - starting from important dates in one's life, to important occasions, personal status (married, employed, in relationship oops out again), movies liked and books liked and songs liked and groups liked and on and on. You remember this, don't you?
Wow, how did the world not see what was coming? For sure I didn't, but at least I've smartened up in the last decade - what about you gentle reader?
So here's a part of what's going on:
- At a benign (haha) content level, everything that you do on these networks are signals that algorithms use to decide what to show you more of - the insidious "you may like" or "suggested for you" kind of prompts that slowly lead you down the rabbit hole and create the aptly named echo chambers.
- At a commercial level, these are signals that are used for turning you into a product that can be auctioned in real time to the highest bidder who pays for a slice of your attention and time - the most valuable thing in the universe. No guessing who profits off this vast advertising engine.
- Now we come to the fun stuff. Once again, all your signals generated by you are used by various government and non government agencies to profile you, especially when you have political views or take part in protests, activism, advocacy - when you are but being a human with various viewpoints and worldviews that others may not be in agreement with.
- Wait there's more - now all the algorithmic profiling has given rise to a new breed of unethical(?) services all of which promise to use your metadata to pass judgement on whether you are a fine upstanding citizen, whether you should be given a loan, a job, whether you should get better insurance rates, whether you are trustworthy and so on. Completely missing the point that hoomans are idiosyncratic by some universal grand design, and its such a disservice to reduce humanity to binary decisions.
- And finally there's a special award I have to give out to annoying journalists and publications whose only news is no news - who is following whom, who liked which post and other such trivial stuff that has been elevated to the level of absurdity.
The universe is determined to give me an example for each
Edit 21/01/21 - right after I wrote this post, along comes this news about a YouTuber who has been vilified and penalized for "liking" some comments. Bwahahha.
Edit 29/01/21 - Tim Cook Apple CEO says algorithms are evil, harming society
Edit 30/01/21 - Today my news aggregator threw up the gem below.
So why am I talking about this?
Because we decided to do none of these things.
Because we think that we can be commercially viable, without pissing on everyone's parade.
Because we don't show advertisement. Say whaaaat?
So here's various bits and pieces of information:
- On any MainCross network site, members don't "follow" other members, instead you subscribe to one or more TOP channels, and get updates from that channel in your home feed and via optional notifications.
- Your important interactions are kept private by design - upvotes, downvotes, channel subscriptions, poll votes, ratings given, content analytics, etc are not discoverable by anyone.
- We encourage human conversations, not obnoxious character counted online feuds. Every post can be upvoted or downvoted - upvoting is meant to recognize quality arguments and points of views whether one agrees with it or not, while downvote is meant to flag off irrelevant, off topic, strawmanning, sealioning, trolling, junk, etc.
- Upvoting is NOT a like and doesn't signal anything about YOU. Its a signal about that individual post. The same is true for channels you subscribe to - none of these signals are going to be used to force feed you anything.
- We don't even show aggregate stats - nobody gets to see how many times a post has been viewed or upvoted etc. These are also signals that can bias the viewer - how many times have you clicked on a piece of content, merely because your attention has been caught by how many times it has been viewed, or shared, or some such metric?
- Even the very basic element of interaction, the feed, has been deconstructed down to its bare elements, and you have complete control of what you see, and HOW you see it - select from chronological, popular or curated. No funny algorithms here.
There's a lot of innovation and experimentation here - all to provide network owners, members and users with a respectful experience.
