The Algorithm is not your friend.

This newsletter is not about situations when the algorithm is actively working against your interests, it’s just about it being a lousy friend.

I'm not talking about anything really insidious, like when the algorithm shows you gradually more extreme stuff until you’re cooked. Like the cliched frog in a pot of water gradually increasing in temperature, until you end up going camping outside parliament with similarly baked camping companions.

Of course the algorithm does do plenty of evil stuff. But this article focuses on it helping friends share stuff with each other - surely the goal of social media platforms.

So, I'm not writing about the propaganda the algorithm can lead people to. The stuff that has made good folks, people who didn't even realise they were that racist, vote for Brexit or Trump. The same stuff that will probably get Christopher Luxon and David Seymour elected here.

But enough about the evil algorithm controlling the world, let’s leave that to another day - I just want to see pictures of my second cousin’s three legged cat and to share memes with my nearest and dearest.

So what is this algorithm, and what do I want from it?

So the algorithm of which I speak is the search that determines what you see on the Internet. Be it the entertainment options presented to you by YouTube, the tweets on your home screen in Twitter, or the one I’ll mainly talk about - what you see in your news feed on Facebook.

The Facebook algorithm is a set of rules that decides what posts people see in their feeds. Essentially, it decides which content is most relevant to show to each user based on several factors. Each user's feed will look very different since it's personalised just for them.

Goodness, it sounds like they went all out to give each of us just what we want. But I’m not sure it’s quite living up to the blurb. Perhaps we can keep it simple by asking - what do we actually want from this algorithm? Well, not much really:

• Don’t be evil.

• Let me share things with my friends and family.

• Show me some stuff that is interesting to me.

The news feed can become quite frustrating, to the point where some might question whether the algorithm is trying very hard to show us the things we actually want to see at all. The feed can end up with a bunch of content we don’t want to see, like the following example.