I cannot parse the second word in "for you page" as anything other than a mangled possessive and that's why I don't use tiktok
much rather go to cohost, where you're always greeted with an implicit "for you, page:" and then a list of posts from other pages you've asked to see
It curdles my brain to think that the experience of social media for the vast majority of people, which is to say the experience of the internet for the vast majority of people who use it regularly, involves just having whatever nonsense they didn't ask to see thrown at their faces based on some statistical model of impression metrics and whatever personal data can be crammed into it.
I just have zero interest whatsoever in seeing any stream of so-called "content" that's not curated by people I know, or at least whose taste I trust. If you're looking for art specifically and you're starting from absolute zero context I guess I can understand the value of a tool to help seed your follows list, but beyond that trusting a machine to do curatorial work—a task that intrinsically demands taste and discernment—seems to be perverse beyond measure.
I was young and naïve when I first heard about Netflix's vaunted recommendation algorithm, and I'll admit to starry-eyed imaginings of the films it could discover for me. But it became clear the moment I actually began to scroll sideways through the "movies you might like" that it hadn't the foggiest idea of my tastes. No matter how much data I poured down its hungry gullet, it never machine-learned even a loose approximation of what I enjoyed. A simple list of films I hadn't seen directed by the same people as films I had would have been dozens of times more useful to me.
Do people not realize this? Do people not have friends of good taste who share their curations online? Have we forgotten how to collate art direct from the artists themselves, that we must be beholden to the torrent of horseshit that is "for you page"?
