Algorithmic Feeds Serve Their Platforms
If you spend any time on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram, you've been presented with an algorithmic feed.
At a high level, these feeds are programmed with signals collected from your past behavior -- for example, what content you've watched to completion and what you've skipped past -- and then select what you will see next.
One might think that this means that “great, the platform will show me more stuff that I like to see”. Well, that might be the case, but it isn't necessarily the case.
Who sets the optimization goal is the platform. There are plenty of other goals that serve their interests better than the one stated above. Here's two optimization goals which are far more likely to be adopted for revenue reasons:
- Optimize for each user spending more time on the platform.
- Optimize for content the user is likely to engage with.
The first one is a clear goal from YouTube, in my opinion. They keep showing potentially interesting content, tailored to your personalized interests, so that you spend more time looking at videos instead of going anywhere else.
This better serves the goals of the platform, since getting each user to spend more time watching content means that more ads can be served, driving more revenue.
The second one, I think, is a clear goal from Facebook. Getting people to engage with content -- regardless of its emotional impact or factual correctness -- is their way to have users feel invested in their usage of the platform and for them to keep coming back day after day.
Users which then come back daily, can continue to be served ads -- through the same algorithmic feed --, which in turn drives revenue.
Perceiving this to be a problem for me individually -- I'd rather not be sucked into watching an infinite supply of interesting-to-me-but-of-no-useful-consequence videos --, I've elected to disable YouTube's watch history and I only let myself follow the “dumb” subscription feed: the latest videos from the channels I subscribed to explicitly.
It's likely that I will miss out things that would interest me -- actually, it's guaranteed -- but that's the point. I only care about a handful of channels and if they didn't put out anything, that's fine, I can go on to something else. This does not serve the platform's goals, but serves my own goals.