Lemmy’s “Top” is scaled based on what other Lemmy users are doing: upvotes, comments, etc. It’s basically the people who use the site collectively deciding what’s interesting, which is a lot of American politics these days.
Meta, Youtube, Twitter, etc. use what people on the site say as part of the algorithm, but they also examine the content to try to discover if it is something engaging or enraging. They compare it against models of what makes people stay engaged, so if there’s something with millions of comments and lots of “likes” but Meta doesn’t think it’s good content for them to sell ads against, they’ll push it down in the ranking.
The difference is in who decides what you see.
Lemmy’s “Top” is scaled based on what other Lemmy users are doing: upvotes, comments, etc. It’s basically the people who use the site collectively deciding what’s interesting, which is a lot of American politics these days.
Meta, Youtube, Twitter, etc. use what people on the site say as part of the algorithm, but they also examine the content to try to discover if it is something engaging or enraging. They compare it against models of what makes people stay engaged, so if there’s something with millions of comments and lots of “likes” but Meta doesn’t think it’s good content for them to sell ads against, they’ll push it down in the ranking.