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Australia to force social media platforms to allow users to opt out of algorithms
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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Technology
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I absolutely cannot stand algorithmic feeds. Unless I can.
Here's the thing: I left Facebook when I stopped seeing anything my friends posted. At the same time, YouTube wouldn't be all that useful without suggestions. My subscriptions is my home page, so I'm getting videos in chronological order from users I've decided to follow, and then the algorithm occasionally serves up a suggestion that leads to a new subscription.
So just saying "social media must provide an opt-out method" is something of a sledgehammer. Moreover, companies will bury that method behind a bunch of dark patterns so no one ever ever gets to it, even if it technically exists.
There are other places to get recommendations of channels to follow
Technically sorting your Lemmy feed by Hot or Active is an algorithm.
I've always wanted to have a way to give users their own options to use open source algorithms or create their own, but I don't know how doable that is, since part of it is also how content gets tagged, etc.
i mean theoretically you could just find the sorting algorithms in the lemmy source code, add your own, and ask the instance admin to pwetty pwease apply that patch.
Yeah, but then the admin would just need to keep adding new ones. It would be nice if it could be done client side or whatever.
Why would I do that on a low-volume instance? I still sort by New on Reddit.
Sorting by new? That's also an algorithm.
Sending the HTTP request and receiving and processing the response is a sequence of countless algorithms.
It seems the common meaning for "algorithmic feed" is actually "personalized feed" or "targeted feed". They adapt based on the user, not necessarily the community as a whole.
Youtube has served me weird out of place political content before, I don't know. Like in an ideal world they would have a recommendations tab, that's separate from the chronological feed from my subscriptions.
huh? are you getting recommendations in your subscriptions feed???