Anthony

@[email protected] @[email protected] I didn’t fully follow the connection between the social media post and multi-armed bandit problems. Is the idea that a user has k options about what to view, chooses one, and experiences some kind of payoff from the choice? If so I’m not sure the situation is well-modeled by bandits, since the typical social media user is presented with a smallish set of options chosen for them by an algorithm, with each user choice resulting in an algorithm presenting them with another smallish set of options that might be of different size and comprise different options. That kind of situation might be better modeled as an extensive form game of user against “the algorithm” with a finite but variable set of choices for the player at each ply. It’s common in a turn-taking game for both player’s and opponent’s choice to affect the choices available to player next ply, which is why this feels like a better model to me than k-armed-bandits or the POMDP type setups usually explored in RL.

If what the algorithm does can be approximated that way (as a reward-maximizing player in a multi-ply game that chooses what category of content to show a user at each turn), then you can get partway towards understanding how it works functionally by understanding how the tradeoffs between monetization, data gathering, and maximizing surprisal (learning) in its reward function are struck. I suspect that splitting the bins/categories more and more finely sometimes makes the tradeoffs look better, which might explain why social media companies tend to do this (if you have one bin of stuff with red and blue objects, and people choose randomly from it, they’ll be less happy on average than if you have a bin of red objects and a bin of blue objects and are able to direct red-preferring and blue-preferring users to the appropriate bin better than a coin flip would).

People are not static utility maximizers, but these types of algorithms assume we are. So I think they tend to get stuck in corners both because of how they strike tradeoffs (you get manosphere content because that’s what’s most monetizable) and because people’s preferences aren’t expressed consistently in their actions and change through time (you keep getting shown scifi content because you looked at a few scifi videos in a row awhile ago when you were feeling nostalgic but you don’t usually prefer it).

That’s what I have for now. Sorry for length.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I have a lot to say on this subject but unfortunately do not have the time right now to write out anything worth reading! I will return perhaps tomorrow.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] This one generated a mention in my fediverse server, for what it’s worth.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Though I’m probably a bit older than you both, occupy was also the moment where I first engaged in a protest for a sustained period of time and then continued to do so after. There was a lot of incoherence around occupy that took me years to get my head around. But I’ve come to believe a totally horizontal, leaderless movement organized through social media platforms is dead on arrival. I thought I’d throw a few observations into the mix if that’s OK.

It was pointed out above that such a thing is like shouting “NO!” at the government; I fully agree with that. Bevins argues (at least in interviews; haven’t had a chance to read his book yet) that these spontaneous NOs can be dangerous: if they go far enough they can create a power vacuum that the most prepared (read: organized and ruthless) forces quickly move to fill. This is the real story of what happened in several countries during the Arab Spring, by Bevins’s read (I take it). So while folks are excitedly believing they’re participating in the birth of a new form of democracy, what they’re really doing is inflicting a dark Shock Doctrine on themselves. I have to confess that I, too, did not see this at the time.

There must be some kind of theory of change, pre-organizing to build power, and a clear-eyed recognition of the situation to avoid these DOA movements and have some hope of bringing lasting, meaningful change for a lot of people. Much of the US left (such as it is) seems allergic to looking reality squarely in the face. I’d almost go so far as saying there should not be attempts at lefty mass protest until such power is built, such theory is developed, and widespread recognition of our situation, grounded in reality, exists, exactly because of the danger that actors with very different goals from ours are better positioned to take advantage of the chaos mass protests generate.

Personally I’d refer to (what used to be) social media as “surveillance media”. The form the modern US state takes is public-private partnership, with many state functions dispatched by private corporations and actors. Though Musk clearly has his own aims, he is almost surely playing a state role with Twitter not too different from the one he plays through SpaceX. So, though social media’s always been corporate mediated, I’d add that recognizing the role of public-private partnerships in the modern US context leads to the probability that Twitter has become something else. In that view, the finances are almost irrelevant, and LOLing about this or that number going down or this or that many advertisers leaving the platform amounts to copium. If Twitter really is performing useful functions for the state then it will continue to exist no matter how much money it “loses”; failing to perform those functions is what would put it in jeopardy, not revenue figures.