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Judge rules YouTube, Facebook and Reddit must face lawsuits claiming they helped radicalize a mass shooter | CNN Business (www.cnn.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

While this is true for Facebook and YouTube - last time I checked, reddit doesn't personalise feeds in that way. It was my impression that if two people subscribe to the same subreddits, they will see the exact same posts, based on time and upvotes.

Then again, I only ever used third party apps and old.reddit.com, so that might have changed since then.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Mate, I never got the same homepage twice on my old reddit account. I dunno how you can claim that two people with identical subs would see the same page. That's just patently not true and hasn't been for years.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Quite simple, aniki. The feeds were ordered by hot, new, or top.

    New was ORDER BY date DESC. Top was ORDER BY upvotes DESC. And hot was a slightly more complicated order that used a mixture of upvotes and time.

    You can easily verify this by opening 2 different browsers in incognito mode and go to the old reddit frontpage - I get the same results in either. Again - I can't account for the new reddit site because I never used it for more than a few minutes, but that's definitely how they old one worked and still seems to.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    It's probably not true anymore, but at the time this guy was being radicalized, you're right, it wasn't algorithmically catered to them. At least not in the sense that it was intentionally exposing them to a specific type of content.

    I suppose you can think of the way reddit works (or used to work) as being content agnostic. The algorithm is not aware of the sorts of things it's suggesting to you, it's just showing you things based on subreddit popularity and user voting, regardless of what it is.

    In the case of YouTube and Facebook, their algorithms are taking into account the actual content and funneling you towards similar content algorithmically, in a way that is unique to you. Which means at some point their algorithm is acknowledging "this content has problematic elements, let's suggest more problematic content"

    (Again, modern reddit, at least on the app, is likely engaging in this now to some degree)

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