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Manual browsing vs algorithmic feeds - which actually shows you what you want to see?
I spent last month switching between Reddit's old way of sorting by new and letting their algorithm pick my feed. The difference was night and day. Algorithm kept pushing me the same 3 topics that got lots of upvotes, while manual sorting showed me niche stuff I actually cared about. But then I missed some big community announcements that the algorithm would have caught. So which is worse - getting trapped in a bubble of your own making, or letting the machine decide what matters? Has anyone else run this test on their own?
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oscarc121mo ago
Wait... nobody else has done this? That's wild to me. I actually tried almost the exact same thing a few months ago and got totally burned by it. Manual browsing on a photography subreddit was great for days, but then I missed a sticky about a site-wide outage that had been up for three hours. The algorithm would've just put it right at the top of my feed.
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victor_robinson1mo ago
On r/formula1 I tried both approaches last season. Manual sorting by new showed me practice session analysis and obscure team radio clips that got buried by the algorithm. But the algorithm was the only reason I knew about the driver market announcement that broke at 3am my time. That sticky about the big regulation change? Never saw it manually because the sub was flooded with memes about it. The algorithm catches the signal through the noise, but it also decides for you what the signal is. I think a mix works better than picking one or the other.
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rowan_thomas841mo ago
Yeah but I think you're mixing things up a bit. That sticky about the regulation change, it was pinned at the top of the sub no matter how you sorted. The memes would have been underneath it, not hiding it. Manual sorting was probably just making you scroll past those top posts faster. @oscarc12 had a similar issue with that outage post, same thing. Sticky posts don't move even if you sort by new, they stay locked to the top of the page.
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