From Hacker News to TikTok - How Algorithms Learned to Hook Us

Hi. This is Co Recursive. I'm not in Gordon Bell. And today, I have, Liam with me here. Hello, Liam. Hello. Good to be here. So, Liam, I got this message from Corey, a developer I used to work with, and he ran to this weird problem on Instagram, and he wanted me to look into it. We're cat people. So finding, you know, funny cats on Instagram reels feels like a supernatural thing. But once was it Sora? When it that showed up, There are there were so many AI generated cat videos. Cat videos were already cracked on, you know, these social media algorithms. And my feed just turned into nothing but AI slop cats. So the thing that happens, Liam, he thought they were hilarious. He started sending them to his wife. And then, eventually, his wife told him to stop. Right? But he couldn't stop them because now the algorithm had learned he liked AI cats. Yeah. It knows. Now he can't get away from them. That's the problem. He just not watch them or stop going on that social media platform. What's he trying to solve here? Yeah. I asked him that myself. It does affect me sometimes in daily life where, you know, it's time to put the kids to bed and you can't do much when you're putting your kids to bed. Right. You gotta keep them on track, but you can't also, like, do it for them. So you're just kind of standing there in this awkward, traffic control situation. And sometimes that goes for like an hour and you've been scrolling the whole time and you've spent an hour just on five second videos watching who knows how many of them. And you come out of that and you don't you don't feel great. So he's a developer and he can't beat the algorithm. And if he can't beat the algorithm, then who's gonna be able to beat the algorithm? And what are you trying to solve here? What are you trying to figure out for him? Yeah. So that's a good question. We both have a developer background, and I was kind of interested just in how these social media algorithms work. So this was a great prompting. But I thought this would be very quick and that it was anything but. So I started Googling around. Right? Like, how does the Instagram algorithm work? But that's not really the type of answer I was looking for. That's, like, influencer tips on how to make your various posts spread. So I had to go further back. Before any of these platforms existed, you mostly chose yourself what you saw online. There was blogs you subscribed to. You bookmarked things. But then came Slashdot and then Digg, and then sites like Reddit and Hacker News changed the model from editors deciding what mattered to crowds voting. People post links, and you get upvotes or downvotes, and popular stuff rises to the …