Algorithmic Complacency

A few years ago, my girlfriend was a Twitter user. Try as I might, I couldn't convince her to leave it for so long. That is, until that Misery Hole got bought out. She, like many people, wanted to get out of Dodge. The Atmosphere wasn't really a thing yet, but Fedi was. I was a regular on a Mastodon instance back then, and convinced her to try one of the flagship ones. One of her complaints, that she gave when she kept going back to Twitter, though, was that she felt it was impossible to find stuff due to a lack of a recommendation algorithm.

Earlier today, the personality Technology Connections uploaded a video about what he called "algorithmic complacency," which is a preference against searching for things yourself and instead for having algorithms pick everything for you. This isn't a new observation, that the issue exists and is an issue, like he said; I like the term, though. I noticed this algorithmic complacency in her and a lot of the other people who tried Fedi then.

More recently, she's gotten more comfortable with curating her own experience on social media. This was a slow process, we're talking months. As she's done this, I've noticed her get less reactionary, become calmer and happier, and use her brain like she hadn't before. She's not alone. Friends I've had, as they've gone through the same, have come out generally better and more rounded people.

I'm a nontraditional college student, by which I mean I'm a fair bit older than a lot of my classmates. A couple of weeks ago, I asked a classmate who was in the medical program what the term was for a definition because I couldn't quite remember it.