Human recommendations rather than algorithmic curation

Digital social media is hard. There is so much information, creative output, advertisement, and attention-seeking. The «algorithm» is there to help us figure it all out, by sorting, filtering, and prioritising the content in the feed of your chosen social media.

Algorithmic curation gets a lot of critique, and most of it is well-deserved. It’s a tool which on the surface tries to help you find what you’re really looking for in all the noise, but in reality it’s being used to maximise time spent browsing on any given platform, hoping you will not only watch ads, but also click on them. However, this type of curation is not without merit, because the flood of digital information is so large on most platforms that they would be unusable without any sort of filtering.

The "algorithm" is not the only way of solving this problem though. With decentralised social media protocols such as the Fediverse, where Mastodon is a popular platform, you can to a much larger degree control what you get. No additional content will be injected in your feed. No ads, no «suggested for you», no «you may also like». That makes it easy to stifle the noise by simply following fewer people.

For me, the solution to the issue is to simply avoid social media as much as possible, and rely on direct personal recommendations and tips. Those around me have gotten used to sending me links to news articles, podcasts, events, blog posts etc, because they know I don’t discover things through Facebook and Instagram.

I also get a lot of good recommendations through other personal websites. I would like to highlight Tim Hårek and Baldur Bjarnason for regularly sharing links that I usually find worth a read. Tim shares interesting reads in his monthly write-ups, and Baldur has separate posts with collection of links. I also publish «link posts» from time to time with some of the interesting things I’ve found around the web, like this one.

This post ends with an encouragement to make sharing stuff more human and organic. We need to help each other find out what’s worth spending time reading, and not let an automated algorithm decide it for us.