> (1) ban all recommendation engines in social media, no boosting by likes, no retweets, no "for you", no "suggested". you get a chronological feed of people you follow, or you search for it directly.

I always find these comments interesting on Hacker News. The Hacker News front page is a socially sourced recommendation engine which presents stories in an algorithmic feed, as boosted by likes (upvotes) from other users. The comment section where we're talking is also social at it's core, with comments boosted or driven down by upvotes and downvotes.

In your proposed regulation, are you really expecting that the Hacker News front page would go away, replaced only by the "new" feed? Or that we'd have to manually sign up to follow different posters?

If we have to sign up to follow specific posters, how do you propose we discover them to begin with?

Usually when I ask these questions the follow ups involve some definition of social media that excludes Hacker News and other forums that people enjoy.

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mackeye 3 hours ago | parent [-]

the hn front page is the same for all users --- on ig, im happy to see my friends' posts, but i really dont need the slurry of palantir-chosen brainrot/racist reels interspersed in there, lol (and that applies to most social media).

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> the hn front page is the same for all users

Yes, it's an algorithmic feed that treats all active users as your friends. Stories are still boosted by votes, sorted algorithmically, and ordered by an opaque algorithm. It would fall under the ban described above.

> on ig, im happy to see my friends' posts, but

Yes, but how would that work on HN? You see no stories until you start friending people? How would you discover people if recommendation engines weren't allowed?

	▲	mackeye 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		i'd say it's less predatory for all users to have the same algorithm. maybe on HN, the userbase is small enough, and the articles generally focused enough, that it'd be less impactful were the algorithm somewhat divergent per user. but on other platforms, rabbitholes appear very quickly, and very inorganically. to be plain, i've liked a number of pro-palestine posts on instagram, and started getting very anti-semitic reels until i hit "not interested" a certain number of times. the algorithm is opaque, but also stupid, and motivated to aggravate me into commenting, scrolling more, etc., to view ads. i don't know if i have a way to categorize HN into "good" and ig/X/... into "bad", to be honest. for what it's worth, discord doesn't really have a user algorithm to get people into certain servers, and yet people are readily radicalized on discord (especially to the far-right, in my experience), but obviously the way people interact on discord is different to social media.