- Users of social media platforms like Facebook are part of constant marketing experiments
- Because algorithms are driven by AI and machine learning, it’s impossible to know how social media companies are choosing what to show — and not show — different groups of people
- Because there is no “random assignment”, marketers can’t fully tell if one ad might work better than another one.
- In the process, groups of social media users can be excluded from important messages
- Algorithms are so precise, they can target people down to an individual level
I still don’t see a difference between choosing who to follow (Mastodon)/choosing what communities to follow (Lemmy)/blocking people-communities-intances you don’t like and “creating your own feed.” To me, all of those things are creating your own feed.
“Creating your own feed” implements algorithms that surfaces content for you, rather than you having to go searching for it. I’ve already explained how Lemmy is different and I don’t know how to be clearer about that.