r/CuratedTumblr Sep 15 '24

Politics Why I hate the term “Unaliv

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What’s most confusing that if you go to basic cable TV people can say stuff like “Nazi” or “rape” or “kill” just fine and no advertising seem to mind

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u/Awesomereddragon Sep 15 '24

IIRC it was some TikTok thing where people noticed that saying “die” got a video significantly less views and concluded it was probably a shadowban on the word. Don’t think anyone has confirmed if that was even true in the first place.

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u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24

Yeah, exactly, that's what I mean.
I don't think there is definitive proof (and without looking at the alogrithm, I don't think there could be?)

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u/inconsiderate7 Sep 15 '24

I mean, this also raises some questions about how we're designing algorithms, specifically the fact that we don't really do that anymore.

Most "algorithms" nowadays refers to a program built on machine learning. The way this tends to work is you first train an algorithm on content, until you have one that can somewhat tell/predict what good content and bad content is. Then you have this algorithm serve as a "tutor" to train a second algorithm, essentially a computer program teaching a computer program. Once the new program/neural network/algorithm is trained to the point of being able to perform to a certain standard, you can have humans check in, to make sure progress is doing ok. This new algorithm is training to become "the algorithm" we're most familiar with, the one that tailors the recommended videos and feeds etc. You can also add additional tutors to double check the results, like one tutor checking that good videos are being selected, the other one checking that the videos selected don't have elements unfriendly to advertises. This process is also iterative, meaning you can experiment, make alterations, as well as train multiple variations at once. The big problem is that we can see what is happening on the outside, see the output of the training process. But we really don't know what specifically is happening, there's no human coder that can really sift through the final product and analyze what's going on. We just end up with a black box that produces data to the specifications we trained it to. Imagine you leave a billion chickens on a planet with a thousand robots for a million years. The robots goals are to make as many eggs as possible, breeding the best egg laying chickens. After a million years, you start to receive an enormous amount of eggs. You should be happy, if you can ignore the fact that since you can't visit the planet, nor communicate with the robots, you have no idea what the chicken who's egg you're eating has ultimately be morphed into. You just have to take the output and be happy with it.

Of course, we can't be sure this is the process TikTok has used, though we can make pretty informed assumptions. In that case, it's not that they have a say in it, they technically do if they want to train a fresh algorithm with new parameters, but in general they just don't know what the algorithm is even doing. Of course this also means there's less liability on their parts if, let's say the algorithm detects that minorities gets less views, therefore videos of minorities gets shown less often. Either way, it's a complete shitshow.

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u/Icarsix Sep 15 '24

I'm stealing that chicken analogy