I seriously. I’m for realiously. I got like 8 different furry subs in my block list and filtered out terms like ‘yiff’ etc. You’d think the algorithm would have picked up that I’m not interested in that shit but I still can’t scroll a half hour without a wolf boner adorning my screen.

I know I can simply block all NSFW content but that’d just be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I’m also a little annoyed by the fact that people use “algorithm” to refer to a “recommendation system” for social media. “Recommendation system” is really the term that one should use, and on top of that, one should really say that the system as a whole is using a heuristic to come up with the best-possible content rather than an algorithm.

    …and looking at the Wikipedia page for “algorithm”, apparently they even explicitly point this out:

    In contrast, a heuristic is an approach to solving problems without well-defined correct or optimal results.[3] For example, although social media recommender systems are commonly called “algorithms”, they actually rely on heuristics as there is no truly “correct” recommendation.

    It’s probably not going away, since it’s entered popular usage, but it really isn’t a correct use of the computer science terminology.

    It’s kinda like someone decided to start calling the cylinders in a car’s engine “the metal thing”…which they are, but are far from the only “metal thing” in a car. Then they accidentally messed up the classification and called it “the plastic thing”. I mean, yeah, I get what people mean from context, same way an auto mechanic could interpret “the plastic thing” to mean “the cylinders”, but it kind of gnaws at my soul every time I see it.