Honestly this isn't really about Cohost per se but it's relevant here, because there's been discourse about the perceived lack of mechanisms for "discoverability" on Cohost, as compared to other social media, where various algorithmic means have been employed with the same general idea of informing naïve users about where the good conversations can be found, and who's worth following.
And that right there is the problem: on what possible basis can an algorithm, ANY algorithm, decide who's newsworthy? "You should follow this person because they post the Good Stuff™"—how can anyone or anything make such a decision? If it's people making the decision, you're inviting mere favoritism and nepotism; if it's an algorithm doing it, then you've created a scheme that's vulnerable to anyone clever enough to "game" the algorithm. And while I can't prove it, I feel as though any algorithm can be "gamed".
I would hazard to guess that algorithmic methods for "discoverability" on social media almost invariably prioritize the number of interactions. It's assumed that whoever incites the most persistent and longest-running conversations about themselves must be posting Good Stuff™, because the Bad Stuff™ wouldn't get talked about so much—right? And yet I think it's pretty plain that the easiest way to get lots of interactions in this way is to be an utter shite. It's assholes who rouse up the most "interactions". And there's a positive feedback mechanism of course: creating an algorithm that tends to prioritize assholes, i.e. people who start the most fights and therefore rile up the greatest number of interactions, will tend to inflame such assholes towards even greater heights of assholery. (Assholism?) We've all seen it.
And yet it seems perverse to do things the other way. If you're an obscure user of Cohost or any other social media, don't you want to know where the fights are happening? Well, perhaps not, but at least some newbie users of Cohost must surely feel as though they're missing the action. There's excitement going on somewhere, vigorous discussion and Debate™, and they don't know about it because of that lack of "discoverability". We users tend to feel instinctively, as well, that there's a difference between valid Debate™ and mere shit-stirring. We'd love to know where the first of these things is happening, while avoiding the second—but maybe it's not actually possible to tell the difference by any facile means, whether it's the personal judgment of human beings or the purportedly objective decision of an algorithm.
I solve this problem in my own way: to me, this place is a palimpsest, and I do not expect any of my words here to be taken seriously, or remembered, or preserved. I am passing through, scrawling my words on a sandy beach, hoping that maybe one or two other persons see them before the tide washes them away.
~Χαρά
