As much potential as I think Cohost could have, it really does feel like I’m screaming into the void, here. More so than on Tumblr. Tumblr struck this balance between anonymous online and building an identity you can use to build social circles. In sites like Twitter or Mastodon there’s this unspoken pressure to be your irl self, and to be this perfect version of it, or else you won’t be able to build a social circle. Meanwhile, here, there’s no pressure to do that, but the extreme anti-algorithm stance of this site makes it hard to build social circles by making everything too anonymous. Discovering new people and content to follow is hard on these websites that pride themselves on not having algorithms. Algorithms add this chaos card, a true randomness to discovery that keeps your experience diverse without having to try. The same just can’t be said for places like this and Mastodon, so it’s no wonder people are running to Threads and BlueSky.
G O O D N I G H T
- Don’t Care; Accustomed to He/Him
- netscapenavigator-official.tumblr.com/
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in reply to @hellscape's post:
Discovering new people and content to follow is hard on these websites that pride themselves on not having algorithms. Algorithms add this chaos card, a true randomness to discovery that keeps your experience diverse without having to try.
remember the internet before algorithms?
the more genuine, the more limited
On the internet before algorithms we mostly joined communities by interest. You didn't usually join a gigantic general purpose website then hope it had someone interested in the same things as you, you'd find the forum for the thing you were into and automatically had that connection with the other people there. And search engines actually worked (and we had online directories by subject matter, and webrings, etc.) so you had way more ways to find those people. Our new approach to centralizing everything on the internet and trying to make websites one stop shops for your online social life is what necessitated recommendation algorithms in the first place.
to be fair though, recommendation algorithms- in concept- are able to connect you to people who share multiple interests with you. speaking as someone who rarely holds interest on one topic for long, i kinda just hop around and dont get to know people long enough to see just how much we share in common, which really only happened for me in sites like Reddit, Pillowfort, and well, Cohost. i suppose thats more of a me issue though.
I suppose with forums and cohost, i could search for more umbrella topics like Sci-fi, but being surrounded by people with a passion for the genre when im only looking for people interested in specific works that fall under it, doesn't sound very practical either.
to be fair though, recommendation algorithms- in concept- are able to connect you to people who share multiple interests with you.
A built-in site feature to connect you with people who share interests with you wouldn't have to take the form of a recommendation algorithm. Cohost could really benefit from adding community features.
i see, maybe i need to learn more about algorithms then. I thought they were just sets of rules that influence what things get shown to you, even something as simple as "You and this person follow the same 5 tags!"
For my part, I think having the fact I've interacted with a Tumblr post be forever on public record with the ability to trawl through interactions to, for example, find people who disagree with you, is terrifying and terrible. Apparently a lot of people used to use the shit out of this to expand their circles but I think there has to be better ways. Cohost will continue to grow and improve. Also remember that Tumblr traditionally had no algorithm, other than suggesting users to follow which I'm sure was also an innovation. A webring type concept could meet both of these.