• frezik@midwest.social
    150·
    10 months ago

    I also hate the way “algorithm” has taken over the public consciousness. You can find people unironically saying “I don’t want any algorithm in my social media feed”, which is a nonsensical statement.

    • kamen@lemmy.world
      68·
      10 months ago

      People are onto something though - there’s been a noticeable shift from social media just showing you your feed in a chronological manner to it showing you personally tailored content that shuffles on each refresh and aims to hook you into endless doomscrolling. I understand perfectly well what’s an algorithm, but good luck explaining to people that it’s not that specific thing.

      • andioop@programming.devEnglish
        21·
        10 months ago

        Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way. I’m not sure if they are immune to doomscrolling and actually have gotten it to work in a way that serves them and doesn’t involve doomscrolling, or if they are doomscrolling and okay with it. But for me, I really wish I could go back to the chronological feed era.

        • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
          27·
          10 months ago

          Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.

          Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.

          One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?

          It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.

          • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
            13·
            10 months ago

            Letting the user decide? If the user decided that they liked fly fishing 8 stars and mother-in-law 0 stars, then the algorithm would show mother-in-law once a week at best and fly fishing 8x out of 10 posts.

            • LeninOnAPrayer@lemm.eeEnglish
              4·
              10 months ago

              If we had one public social media platform that would be the best way. It would force people to filter and learn how to interact with technology. But in our world people are lazy and a platform that picks the best value of X automatically for the most people will win. Even if it’s not actually how people want to see things.

            • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
              3·
              10 months ago

              Yeah, you’re describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user’s previous likes. I’m saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.

      • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
        7·
        10 months ago

        Other day me and my mom was talking about how TV has all shifted to be nothing but reality TV… and then she said even youtube is becoming the same way… im like uh… thats because thats because you are watching it thus it is giving you more…

    • Fabian@lemmy.zip
      44·
      10 months ago

      I think it’s the same concept as when people say that they don’t want any chemicals in their food. You know what they mean, but in a technical sense the statement is nonsensical.

    • warbond@lemmy.world
      10·
      10 months ago

      So what should we call the thing that we don’t want in our social media feeds that controls what we see?

    • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      10 months ago

      Depends how broad your definition of algorithm is. Is sort by upvotes an algorithm? I say no but sort by hot is.

      So it is possible by this definition to have a feed without any algorithm.

  • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
    34·
    10 months ago

    What I hate even more, is that the morons who can’t read more than two syllables decided to shorten “application” to “app”, but now I only ever hear people reading that as “ay pee pee”! What was the fucking point?

    • piranhaconda@mander.xyz
      39·
      10 months ago

      I’ve literally never heard anyone call it A.P.P. (and I mean that literally literally, not figuratively literally)

      Is this a specific cultural thing? A generational thing? Geography based slang? Why would anyone do this.

    • Capsicones
      11·
      10 months ago

      Chinese phonology doesn’t allow for the pronunciation of “app”, for example. I see a lot of Chinese people spelling it as “APP”, and pronouncing it accordingly. It’s kinda funny to me, since the Mandarin word “yingyong” is only two syllables. “APP” just seems more cumbersome by all account, yet it has become inexplicably popular.

    • adminofoz@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      7·
      10 months ago

      I mean, I’m pretty sure this is extremely widespread in China, so I’d say it’s more cultural than anything else. In fact, since there are so many Chinese, that probably means more people call it A.P.P. than app. But I honestly have no clue, and it doesn’t matter to me either way. Words change. It’s nothing to get bent out of shape about.

    • houseofleft@slrpnk.netEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      This, 100% It’s like how people started saying “PC” because personal computer was too long for them, but now I exclusively hear people taking up to a minute on each letter! (peeeeeeee-seeeeeeee)

  • bier@feddit.nl
    33·
    10 months ago

    In the Netherlands basically everyone uses whatsapp. In the beginning people would say send me a whatsapp or something like that. But pretty quickly people started to shorten it to just app. So people will say stuff like I just got an app (instead of message), it drives me nuts. Like my family chat group is called “app group”.

  • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
    30·
    10 months ago

    A long time ago I joined a new remote-first company and in my first month they made an event where they brought in all employees from all over the world for a week at a farm hotel for a mix or meetings and leisure activities.

    In one specific meeting the CEO was talking app this app that and I was very confused. The product was a server side program that had a web client, an electron app and two native mobile apps. But the CEO was talking about things that didn’t make sense for those apps.

    At some point I interrupted the meeting and asked for clarification: what are you talking about when you say app? It’s not the mobile apps?

    The CEO made a funny face and mentioned an engineer. I looked at him and he had a smug face and said something along the lines of “well, go on, explain it”. CEO then explained he was talking about the new big project, which was basically an extension system for the server product - and the extensions would be called apps.

    That night I found that engineer at the hotel bar and asked more details about it. Turns out he was the team lead on this project and he hated the term “apps” for it and had been very vocal about it before, saying among other things that it would cause confusion with the client apps we have. Most of the company agreed with him at the time but the CEO demanded it be named apps anyway.

    These days everyone there thinks that naming it apps was the right call, but I always hated having to refer to them as “server extension app” to avoid any confusion, specially because I often worked on integrations with third party tools and those tools also had their own stuff called apps so instead of just saying something like “the Kabum extension” I had to say “the ChaChin server Kabum app” (as in this example’s context there would also be multiple Kabum clients and ChaChin clients that would all be known as apps too)

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I would have recommended an extension to interface with a mobile browser extension.

      The Mobile Extension App Extension App.

      • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
        3·
        10 months ago

        I simply translated literally a term that exists in my language and didn’t realize it wasn’t really a thing in English.

        A farm hotel is a hotel that is focused on leisure activities, usually connected to nature and often established in what would otherwise have been a farm. They tend to have ponds and lots of trees, flowers and sometimes animals too. They tend to also have areas for private events so that companies can bring their folks to stay there for a few days for meetings and presentations.

        The one we were at had access to some pristine rivers where we could practice snorkeling, had some beautiful grottos we could enter, some trails for walking through the woods and also access to other rivers for several water sports. Some of those were provided by the hotel itself and others were general touristic attractions from that region.

  • notarobot@lemm.ee
    29·
    10 months ago

    The other day I realized they did that because its APPle. I have no evidence but I’m sticking with it

  • someacnt@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    18·
    10 months ago

    The script is compiled to a program which is then executed by the OS.

    ->

    The app is appified to an app which is then apped by the app.

    Damnit.

  • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
    13·
    10 months ago

    Web browser? “app”. Web page? “app”. Dialog box? “app”. Phone app that’s just a thin shell for the web site? “appapp”.

  • tisktisk@piefed.socialEnglish
    12·
    10 months ago

    I hate that this meme never explains what application meant ‘back then’
    I get that it’s a problem now, but if it had a clear enough definition back then, maybe this couldn’t have occurred the way it did?

    • oni ᓚᘏᗢ@lemmy.world
      11·
      10 months ago

      I always understood “application” like a gadget in the software world that just resolved one specific problem, and had that own definition till got distorted

  • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago

    I felt like I was alone in being frustrated at this trend. However I found a bit of relief to discover, through messing around in a Win98 virtual machine, that they were occasionally using the term “app” back then as well. Of course it wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now, but whatever.

    Also I thought I’d never see the Xbox kid meme again. What an unexpected throwback!