Tangent: There's a study that I can't access, but the abstract claims that during the 2020 election, chronological feeds exposed Facebook users to more "untrustworthy content", without necessarily having an effect on people's political knowledge or polarization [1]:
> We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms, the amount of content classified as uncivil or containing slur words they saw decreased on Facebook, and the amount of content from moderate friends and sources with ideologically mixed audiences they saw increased on Facebook. Despite these substantial changes in users’ on-platform experience, the chronological feed did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes during the 3-month study period.
Regulation forcing the unbundling of client software from content hosting. Then people can choose different client software depending on which algorithms they'd like to sort things by.
Spamming is the trivial way to manipulate chronological feeds. It is so bad that they need active moderation or ranking to prevent a board from going into a state of absolute uselessness.
I haven't used Facebook in 15 years, but I don't recall spam being a problem. I saw my friend's posts and replies by people who are friends with my friend.
That model may not work with all social media, but as far as I remember it worked for Facebook.
What's the alternative? Even HN has "algorithmic content" the algorithm is based on voting and time.