![]() ![]() If photographs accumulated Pulse in a linear fashion, the Popular filter would be a largely static register of the most popular images ever uploaded to the site. ![]() A high Affection entitles you to dislike images: most users do not have access to the option.Įven if the site designers were secretive about the intent behind this design (they’re not) it would be fairly easy to see the intent. (It does not move from gaining or losing followers.) It only goes down if an image is disliked or if the user deletes an image that had likes and favors on it. This does not decline over time: it simply gets bigger and bigger as the user’s images gain favor and votes. However, photographers also have a measure that cumulates in a linear manner, called Affection. (If an image is ever selected as an Editors’ Choice, it retains that filter for the rest of its time on the site.) An image can continue to garner favors and votes after its Pulse starts ebbing, but this will at best slow its recursion to the average. Once it reaches its peak rating, it begins to slowly decline in Pulse at a steady temporal pace until it hits 50, reverting again to Fresh in time. A photo moves from Fresh to Upcoming to Popular as it climbs in Pulse. Pulse is a highly engineered algorithim: it leaps quickly above 50 from one combination of a favor plus a vote (you learn quickly that this is what it means to have a 59.7 Pulse) and then accumulates more and more slowly as it approaches 90 (out of 100), making a move past 99.4 exceedingly difficult. 500px users can also comment on an image.Īt 500px, votes and favors influence a measure called Pulse, which is visible on thumbnails from a mouseover. In addition, as at Flickr, you can choose to follow another user, but at 500px, the activity of the users you follow fills the filter called “Flow”–you see not only what they post but also what they have voted and favored. They have added two ways to rank: a “like” button, also known as a “vote”, and a “favorite” button, which filters the image into a user’s personal archive. An algorithm that relates favors, comments and views ranks photos as more or less “interesting”, and in turn, “interestingness” is used to identify which pictures should be highlighted in the area of the site called Explore.ĥ00px uses somewhat similar mechanics to move images between filters called “Fresh”, “Upcoming” and “Popular”, and to move them within those designations. Flickr’s rating system is fairly rudimentary and linear: users can favorite a picture, they can comment on a picture, and the total views of pictures are tracked. 13) Along the way, I’m going to compare these sites expressly to massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, to show how similar the design imaginaries and their attendant contradictions and crises are across a broad range of algorithmic media.ĥ00px is the most interesting of the two sites in this sense, in part because of attention to interface and audience I described in my first post in this series. ![]() Katherine Hayles’ new book How We Think, in which she charts “a complex syncopation between conscious and unconscious perceptions for humans and the integration of surface displays and algorithmic procedures for machines”. In particular, I’m going to try and work within the approach described very well in Chapter Four of N. With less theoretical savvy and detail, I’m going to try to do the same in this analysis of 500px and Flickr. Galloway often tries to chart a path out of the typical binaries of bad or good interfaces and implementations, away from the debate over whether algorithms and AI are a boot stamping on the human face forever. New media theorists and digital humanists, most prominently Alexander Galloway, have been writing over the last decade about “algorithmic culture”, about practices, interpretations and readings that arise within and around algorithmic media.
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