Instagram Will Now Let You Follow Hashtags In Your Main Feed (theverge.com) 23
"Up until now, there were two ways to interact with a hashtag," reports The Verge. "You could click through a hashtag on a post, or you could search for a specific tag in the Explore section of the app." Today, Instagram is adding a new way to interact with a hashtag: the ability to follow hashtags so you can see top posts and Stories about a topic on your home page. From the report: You can now "follow" a hashtag the same way you would follow an account. Instagram's algorithms will then pick and choose some of the highlights from that collection and surface them in your main feed. It's a fundamental change to one of the largest social media platforms in the world, elevating your interest in adorable dogs or expensive automobiles to equal status with your friends and family. By contrast, the posts injected into my main feed based on the hashtags I chose to follow (#modernart, #bjj, #ancient) felt carefully curated. There is a lot of variety, even within those categories, but you can train the algorithm on what you do and don't like. Engage with the post by leaving a heart or a comment, and Instagram will assume you want more. Click the menu button on the top right of the post, and you can downvote the offending image by asking Instagram not to show you similar content for that hashtag again. After a few days of this, the art in my feed, both martial and modern, felt fine-tuned to my taste.
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online "social networks/media" bloats till they can follow the most idiotic popular thing, just like all the other "social networks/media". then they slowly die.
W00t! (Score:2)
Awesome.
What's a hashtag?
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Hashtag's the name of the panda on the Tonight Show. Also a keyword for when you tweet a snapgram.
meanwhile, on usenet (Score:1)
While the same concept does not directly apply, the idea was that this kind of thing was up to the client, and you could pick from a wide range of clients as you liked to get the functionality you wanted.
Then "web forums" came along and threw that idea out the window. Who needs user choice, anyway?
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#burn
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To what? Oh, to "Twitter Officially Launches 'Threads,' a New Feature For Easily Posting Tweetstorms"?
And I give a shit because?..... (Score:2)
As a tecchi, I give 2 grams of dogshit about this because? A) Someone paid you to post it; B) I'm way out of touch with how things work today.
I'ma gonna go with A, cuz I may be out of touch, but I'm damn near 60 y/o and have learned a thing or three about how things work.
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It's BeauHD. All he does is pick random stories from the slush pile to use as filler between his thinly disguised ads for Apple products and he thinks nobody notices.
this is (Score:1)
Hashtags in Instagram (Score:1)
Like diaspora* (Score:1)
So it just copies diaspora*.
INSTA-BS (Score:1)
Machine "learning" (Score:1)
The concept of "the machine 'learns' what I like/dislike by showing me more/less of those items after I rate them" behavior is concerning in the context of free-form information. In the case of Netflix, it's great, as that is entertainment. But as more and more people consume *information* from social media sources using algorithms like this, it will further divide society.
Soon everyone will only see "news" they agree with, instead of muti-faceted stories and derive their own opinions.
Ye who controls the al