this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Jerboa

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Jerboa is a native-android client for Lemmy, built using the native android framework, Jetpack Compose.

Warning: You can submit issues, but between Lemmy and lemmy-ui, I probably won't have too much time to work on them. Learn jetpack compose like I did if you want to help make this app better.

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Jerboa is made by Lemmy's developers, and is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.

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Dismissing already seen content ? A proposal (put user back in control of algorithmic content discovery and more) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hi,

If you're like me, your probably seeing a lot of stuff you've already seen in jerboa

On Reddit this didn't happen because the site takes into account how many times a post was printed and the more you've seen it, the quicker it would disappear from your version of the front page.

Now of course jerboa could and should do this, But I think there's two opportunities to make this better than Reddit. On one part, putting the squarely in control of the content discovery algorithm, next, solicit user input and ask him to lend a hand in the social sorting algorithm that is voting.

So, a user voting sounds be a way to tell jerboa that "I've seen this" and it shouldn't show it anymore on my feed. To prevent bias, the neutral vote should be added.

Next is giving the user more explicit control of the algorithm. When you vote up or down, you're sorting for the community but also for yourself. Jerboa should take into account user's voting pattern and recommend current based on what the user likes.

These voting patterns should be publicly exchanged in "out of band" communication. Jerboa could then use these voting patterns to further help with content discovery in the following way.

"My user likes X,Y,Z, after consulting public voting patterns, we can see that most users who like X,Y,Z often also like A,B,C and dislike I,J,K"

This is how Netflix, YouTube and other algorithms find stuff you like.

The difference is now, this runs on your computer. You can see your algorithm weights and edit them. Place extra filters on them and most important, swap , export, import algorithm sorting weights and exchange them with others users, craft them for specific usage and etc.

Plus of course, basic function like chronological view that doesn't cheat or insert ads.

Algorithmic content discovery under user control is going to be the biggest user benefit of switching to Lemmy versus a private commercial centralized platform. Our data will finally serve us !

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't love the idea of a neutral vote, because it would necessitate you voting on each and every post for them to stop showing up on your feed, which is actually how the "hide read posts" seems to work right now, but without the neutral vote.

And fuck it, it may be a hot take here, but I don't dislike the idea of suggested posts showing up on your feed. It's a great way to find new communities you wouldn't have found otherwise, even if Reddit was a bit... heavy-handed in its approach

But yeah other than that your idea for showing the user the actual weights used for their suggestions algorithm does sound interesting, but I'm not sure how plausible it is (assuming many of these algorithms use machine learning and the weights are basically meaningless to humans)

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, neutral vote is functionally the same as "hide this" but as an explicit vote that means "I have no feeling about this one way or the other". I think a neutral vote gives useful information for content discovery. Imagine a content with 500 positive vote 25 negative vote and 25000 neutral vote.

The most important aspect of content discovery is the relation of your vote relative to all your other vote. This is how the algorithm can find things you might like based on what other things you like.

The current algorithms which lack a neutral vote, have no concept of mediocrity. It's good or bad, they don't understand "this is ok but meh"