whenever i see someone go "but how do i know who to follow?" i feel like i need to sit down for a minute, because i have never in my life let a computer tell me who to follow. i still remember twitter adding that as a new thing, which was mostly annoying
the context i hear this in is usually "how do i find the people i was already following elsewhere?" which is, imo, a legitimate concern. but i can't think of a design solution to this problem that comes without a dealbreaking tradeoff.
easily my favourite feature of Instagram, a site I barely go on, is that I am constantly getting notifications that some person that is friends with people I don't ever interact with is on Instagram so I could follow them
i so fundamentally can’t relate to the experience of depending on algorithms to “discover content” that i don’t even know where to start with helping someone who has whatever this problem is. i don’t even know what exactly it is that they want
and you know i'm not sure i want to be Discovered in a context where i am essentially a jingling keychain to keep someone using the website
i am a cool bug to be found under a rock overturned by a curious explorer, not a gem displayed to entice engagement
yes!! exactly. i want there to be a distinct Path you took to stumble upon me. any sort of actual connection between us
i mean i think i followed your Twitter initially because you kept having popular posts go around (probably because i followed people who were friendly with you), and i at at least thought “i can give all her other posts a shot too, why not.” but that’s still a distinct path i took at least. i mean sure, an algorithm could’ve assumed, based on the fact that i follow people who follow you, that i would want to follow you. but it could also miss that connection, and also get other connections wrong. like, what if i follow people who follow Dumb Billionaire to laugh at his dumbness, and so the “algorithm” is then like oh i bet you also want to follow them. totally wrong! and also there are privacy implications of exposing connections between people you follow and people they follow. and the computer trying to approximate social experiences for you doesn’t work because computers can’t socialize!! they are worthless at this. the computer would never have known how i would keep following user eevee because oh hey she’s also into Doom mods and is making a fun puzzly platformer and stuff, what’s not to like
no that's how i followed a bunch of people! and i think that's totally natural, developing an impression of someone you keep hearing about and then going to check them out. it's not a computer guessing based on stats, it's you having a feeling, developing some kind of investment.
and yeah there's plenty of stuff that i like to observe but that wouldn't fit into a clear Subject Category, and that's obscure enough that maybe i just haven't seen much of it around before
I regularly zapped all the recommendation boxes on Twitter with uBlock Origin and just happened to find you under enough forest bushes to decide you were cool. I wouldn't have it any other way.
When I found out there were people who deliberately chose to use the "For You" timeline on Twitter, it genuinely shook my faith in humanity.
Then I learned how TikTok works.
in the voice of the DDR announcer This is a website in which you use your skills!
It's a kinda hard concept to convey, "you find who to follow by looking around and seeing what's interesting, the website is not going to spoonfeed it to you". Because a LOT of times the response you get is "That's too much effort, I wanna be spoonfed!" which really takes the wind outta my sails personally.
Honestly a good starting point is: find which staff member looks the most interesting, go into their feed and look for cool shares (follow the person that made the post) or find a post with a ton of comments (look at anyone with a cool profile pic). Or use tags I guess.
putting a "show me this less often" (but not a "show me this NEVER") button on suggest features is the exact moment twitter and I became enemies
I am so tired of this being used as a cudgel against RSS/IndieWeb stuff in particular.
Like, you know who to follow because you see something that someone linked to and you decide that you want to see more of it.
And like, you do your part by sharing things that you want people to see, so that other people can see them!
(I know you know this, I'm just ranting.)
i don't disagree but ime there's a bit of a bootstrap problem
like, "follow links shared by people you know" presumes you know anyone in the first place
well someone had to direct you to cohost in the first place. it's not like you saw the new eggbug tv spot
But a very large number of people hardly post on social media. Lots of people primarily just browse. I've been trying to get people on here, but my rare posts and shares are not enough to keep them here. I agree with your main point about surprise at people who won't do any work to figure out this site. I'm just saying "start with the person who got you here and see who they interact with" also doesn't really work for a lot of people.
i'm not sure how you do that anywhere honestly, besides hoping your friends' handles are unique enough that they snagged them in the new place too
i guess this is why twitter loves to heckle me about "import your contacts!" but i am so far away from whatever world they live in, where they think i have all my friends' email addresses in my gmail address book
but fwiw i did write this because i saw someone say what sounded an awful lot like wanting follow suggestions, and i've seen the sentiment before, more explicitly
on most social media sites i could see who my friends are following to find my friends-in-common. on cohost that information is deliberately hidden. that's the change i've seen my friends say they wanted, and it's also the one i had in mind when i mentioned dealbreaking tradeoffs.
oh that's true. i guess my acquaintance-groups have been so disparate for so long that i haven't thought to do that for a while, because i don't expect any of them to follow each other haha
yeah that's tough
