So the user opens the app - what is the first video you show them? How does 'the user decide' from the millions upon millions of videos there are?

If the user can search like in Youtube then how do you rank the results? That's also an algorithm.

It isn't pretty easy to solve at all.

In the case of Instagram: You show the videos from the people you follow on instagram, then no more short videos at all. Possibly a search box.

If you search on youtube then it can rank any way it wants, just not use e.g. anything from the viewing history. No "related videos" column. That's what YouTube used to be. But YouTube (unlike TikTok) worked well before it had rabbit holes.

For TikTok the situation is worse. Their whole app just doesn't exist unless you have the custom feeds. This would make YouTube be 2010 youtube, Instagram be 2010 Instagram (great!) but it would effectively be a ban of TikTok's whole functionality (again, great!).

Do it like a library. When a person walks into a library, they're presented with a short curated list of books suggested from the librarian. All visitors to the library see the same books. From there, the visitor can go about their business searching for what they want.

If they don't know what they want, perhaps a good use case for the newfangled LLM-search we have now would be "What's an interesting or popular topic I haven't searched for before?" to which the AI will respond with a list of newly searchable terms.

The first unwatched video from the user's followed/subscribed channels. Chronological, reverse chronological, sorted alphabetically, by the user's channel prioritisation, by likes, by views... whatever the user chooses. And then an end of feed.

For new users? A search bar and a set of (human? AI?) curated seed recommendations that the platform is comfortable with being held liable for.

> what is the first video you show them

Whatever is latest posted across their followings/subscriptions?

I made a new YouTube account recently and my homepage was blank.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817

> If the user can search like in Youtube then how do you rank the results? That's also an algorithm.

Any ordering is an algorithm technically, so yes just "banning algorithm" doesn't work.

A better alternative could be "the algorithm must be public and reproducible by the user".

"Sort the posts of the people I follow in chronological order" you're good

"Sort the posts by the output of a blackbox trained on user data" too bad you're a publisher and are responsible for what people post.

Don't show any video. Make the user search for what they want to see.

Rank them by best keyword match from their search query, if match is equal, order them newest posted to oldest posted.

Done.

You know old reddit, Flickr, etc., had ways of presenting content based on different things besides impulsive engagement.

The internet solved the problem of millions of millions in it's implementation details, you share a URL. You follow people, they share URLs, it grows organically, same way every website worked pre... Instagram? I'm not sure who moved to the algorithmic feed first.

It's very easy.

"So the user opens the app - what is the first video you show them?"

You don't. How about that?

I would say, no *personalised* algorithms other than those based on deliberate user choices would solve the problem. So, what user chooses to follow, or the same for everyone in the country.

Enumerate by creation time in descending order the unwatched videos posted from the accounts the user follows.

Like social media 1.0.

This seems to be consciously dishonest. Show them "most recent" or "most upvoted" or "A to Z." Pretending like this is hard is bizarre. People have always selected sort and filter algorithms, until companies started taking them away.

These are multi-billion dollar companies.

Its okay if they have some hard problems to solve.

Of course it's easy: such decisions were taken _before_ the feeds where algorithmically built.

You rely on unambigous, "physical" properties of the videos.

There is a physical property of all the videos: the time of publication.

There is a physical property of all the channels: did you subscribe to it, or not ?

So, you show, in (reverse) chronological order of publication, the list of videos published by the channels you subscribed to.

Now, of course, a brand new user would have no subscription - you show them a search box.

But then, now, your search algorithm has to weight the various channels that match - but your algo can be relatively transparent, relatively auditable, and the same for all users (unless given explicit preferences, and of course national laws, etc, etc...)

I'm sorry, but, I have a "subscriptions" page in youtube or substack, and they're chronological, and they show me what I want to watch. You keep that.

There is a "home" page in both service that is algoritmically built, and they show me crap that the algo want me to watch. You get rid of that.

Do this, and I can consider you a "neutral" actor, and accept that you shift the blame to content producer.

Or, keep the algo feed, but don't take money from advertiser when I watch yet another flat earther video because YOU decided it was trending.

If you want to decide what I watch, and make money from that decision - congrats, you are an editor. You get the earnings, and the responsibility.

Please don't tell me, with a straight face, that the people who build the algo don't "decide" what I watch. If they want to tweak the algo to downgrade the flamewars and outrage and conspiracy theories and violence and abuse, they can. They do not want to, for business reasons. [1]

That's fair, up to a point - we need publications with editors that agree on having "edgy" content. I'm not advocating for blanket censorship.

I did not like social network preventing me from _sharing_ articles about Biden's son laptop (this was actually beyond the law, but somehow they managed to find the resources and programmers to implement _that_, because, at the time, the execs where cozying with a different administration.)

I'm advocating for "accepting your responsibility as an editor".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Haugen#October_5,_2021...