Can tech please give us manual mode?
News of Google Inbox shutting down hit the presses today and has certainly opened up the debate among those who found it useful and folks like me who hated having their mail/updates pre-sorted and pray Gmail won’t eventually turn into Inbox. But that’s just me, a lot of folks really loved Inbox and probably feel as betrayed as I did a few years ago when Reader was put to sleep.
But if I had it my way, I’d eliminate all presorting and algorithmic decisions made about what information I see first. One important email gets missorted and overlooked and I can never forgive it. Hell, if I could, I’d get rid of spam filter altogether. Let me figure out what’s spam and what’s not — too often, a crucial email gets wrongly sorted. It drives me batshit. I also have quite a bit of tech OCD, which is another topic for another day.
As I was driving today, I was thinking about Inbox’s always-on, pre-sort algorithm and all the other information feeds that I use. My car’s transmission has three drive modes, your standard automatic “drive,” a sport mode that sacrifices fuel economy for performance and a no-frills manual. Some cars give you a “tow” mode or a mode for going up steep grades. Great — but with manual mode, I have full control to manage all of this myself. As the car’s “user,” I really appreciate having the agency to make decisions for myself.
There’s a lot of conversation and outcry about the algorithms in social media newsfeeds, which by displaying posts outside of the logical, chronological, order implicitly tell the end user that the algorithm does a better job of selecting what they want, and need to see. Tech keeps signaling it’s getting better with this. I think it’s getting worse. Even after the latest Instagram update, I’ll see posts about community events that have already passed, or baseball scores from games that happened days ago. Why should a publisher struggle so much to provide timely updates to their followers on these networks, is something I’ll never quite understand.
In any case, for the tech OCD guys — the users like me who like having the manual option in our car, at the very least I wish we had a choice. On the desktop Facebook, you can sort posts by most recent order (it’s a hidden feature, but it’s in there). On mobile? Not so much. Inconsistent features across devices doesn’t seem like the result of a tech limitation, but the mandate of a computer program or a hidden team of humans telling you that their way of consuming information is best.
At the very least, having a choice to not use the algorithms seems like a nice compromise. Unless this is the first time you’ve been on the internet in a few years, you probably feel like social networks aren’t actually doing anything in the best interests of its users right now. But that’s sure to be the most important topic of debate in the next few years.
Personally, I can be better equipped to sift through the noise of information and find truth and wisdom if I don’t have an unreliable algorithm taking the first pass for me.
Let me keep my inbox transmission in manual.
