Aggregators Tilt East

UI design is hard; fairness is hard. Fair UI design? No chance.

I was doing my usual afternoon walk today and thinking about traffic lights and their influence on walking patterns.

Specifically: I think I have identified that there is a bias in my route.

I think that because of the traffic light timings at two junctions and because I cross in the direction with the “first green”, I am much more likely to walk my whole route “counterclockwise” than “clockwise”.

It recalls to me the puzzle:

> At my local train station, there is a train to the beach every hour; and a train to the city every hour.

>

> I decide to split my time evenly between the beach and the city, and reason that my arrival time at the train station is random, so I can do that by taking whichever train comes first.

>

> But after some weeks I look back and find that I spent almost all my time at the beach. What went wrong?

What went wrong—spoiler alert, stop here if you want to think about it first!—is that, without loss of generality, the beach train comes hourly at ten past the hour, while the city train comes hourly at sixteen minutes past the hour; and so if I arrive at random then take the next train, 90% of the time I will end up at the beach.

Regularity has led to a persistent, strong bias.

Aggregators

I realize that Geminispace aggregators have such a regularity; and a persistent, strong bias to go with it.

The Gemsub aggregation format uses coarse timestamps: they just give the day.

Then, aggregators—looking at Antenna and Cosmos, for example—show posts batched by day, with the most prominence given to “today”; it’s at the top.

So the earlier in the day you post, the more time your post spends in the most prominent section.

The difference is dramatic:

If you post at 1h GMT, your post spends 23 hours in the top section, and for a lot of that it sees little competition within the section.

If on the other hand you post at 23h GMT, your post spends only a single hour in the top section, and shares it everyone else.

Does It Matter?

Not at the scale we have today—I guess most people read everything.

But I don’t think we’re too far off the point where it matters; consider if there were five times as many daily posts, for example.

Gemlogger Fix

Individuals could arrange to post near the start of the day, or post with tomorrow’s date.

But this is worse than no fix at all—because it’s a way for some subset of people to opt in to making their posts more visible.

An actual fix to the bias needs to apply evenly.

Aggregator Fix

Aggregators could apply a UI fix: they could hide posts from “today” by default.

I’m so used to instant updates that it’s hard to fully wrap my head around this idea; but I wonder if I could get used to such a “slow mode” and so to checking aggregators only once per day, because I know that nothing new is going to show up—in the default view—during the day.

Then, aggregators would no longer tilt east.

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