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[–] 27 points 1 month ago (8 children)

I'll share a short story of how the algorithm sucks. A friend's mom was dying of cancer. I knew it would be within a few days or week. He was texting me a lot - but in random bursts - trying to distract himself from the inevitable. I scrolled through IG, thought I saw it all, and having not heard from him in a while, I texted him something somewhat goofy.

He texted me back, "My mom just died". I had no idea. Sure enough, scroll another 5 minutes and buried at the end of my feed is his post from less than 2 hours ago.

Instagram made me look like a dick because they'd rather show me 26 hour old content, than 2 hour content.

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  • [+] -10 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    You used your feed for info, rather than looking at his profile or asking him politely. That's not on Meta - that's on you.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    That's the dumbest possible response, but I see you're just a troll.

    And FYI this was right as they swapped out the original the chrono feed. I was vaguely aware it was happening, I don't know if I knew it had rolled out to me yet. I had only had a sneaking suspicion he'd post it there. And as I mentioned, I knew she had days to maybe a week. It would've been one of the top posts in a chrono feed.

    Meta, decided, for their own gain, to change how their app worked, with essentially no warning, no choice and no transparency - wasn't like there was a big notification saying Your Feed Changed. The only thing different visually was the order of the timestamps.

    For anyone else, I'll leave another example: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-algorithmic-cruelty/

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    You chose an online social network over real human connection...

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Are you missing a chromosome?

    What do you actually think would happen here? That a friend would text me within, idk, 1 to 4 hours of his mom dying? I think he's got bigger problems - calling a funeral home, or just dealing with the grief.

    Was he supposed to text me before the body was cold?

    Or was I supposed to text him, either hourly or before I say anything else, "Hey, if your mom dead yet?".

    I didn't go to Instagram LOOKING for this information. But it was there. As this was when the algorithm was new, I had a decade of experience with IG to expect that if there was anything recent, a quick scroll would surface it, but I was also doing the same thing I'd do a couple times a day.

    But IG manipulated my feed, ruined the experience and caused an awkward moment.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    What do you actually think would happen here? That a friend would text me within, idk, 1 to 4 hours of his mom dying? I think he's got bigger problems - calling a funeral home, or just dealing with the grief.

    No, I expected you to text him with "hey mate, haven't heard from you in a bit, hope everything is as good as can be"

    And given what he is going through, don't send him "goofy" texts...

    You're still blaming a website for your lack of social intelligence. And insulting me for pointing it out to you.

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