you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 25 points 1 day ago (5 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [+] -8 points 1 day ago (2 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    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/

  • source
  • parent