They still do. There are algorithms to fetch whatever will be shown on your feed. They may be as straightforward as fetching a user's follow list and displaying their posts chronologically in reverse. That's still an algorithm.
I'm sure Gaiman means specifically the kind of "smart" feed algorithm like FB etc employ. That said, I really dislike this trend of equating "algorithms" to something wicked. I write them for a living, and I'd rather we kept writing and employing them.
> They may be as straightforward as fetching a user's follow list and displaying their posts chronologically in reverse. That's still an algorithm.
Correct, it's absolutely an algorithm. Crucially, it involves extra steps to make it scalable without needing a materialized inbox. Or at least that's how Tumblr's reverse-chron dashboard worked from 2009ish through at least 2018, maybe still today.
There were a bunch of optimizations in there to keep the queries fast, and minimize the number of rows that need to be examined and sorted. One key step involved cross-referencing the blogs you follow against their latest post timestamp. For example, say you're fetching posts 11-20 on the reverse-chron feed. The worst-case is that posts 1-20 all come from different blogs, so you can sort the list of followed blogs by latest-post-timestamp, and then only examine/sort posts from the top 20. (That's a slight simplification; you actually need to look at the timestamp from post 10, and examine posts from however many followed blogs posted since then, plus 10 more. I spent months of my life tuning this stuff back in 2011-2012...)
That all said, in the context of dashboard feeds, "algorithm" often just means the opposite of reverse-chron. But even then, the "no algorithms" statement is completely incorrect! Tumblr has a "Best Stuff First" setting which controls whether or not your feed is reverse-chron. For a while in late 2017 (iirc) onwards, this setting was even enabled by default... maybe still is?
I'm sure Gaiman means specifically the kind of "smart" feed algorithm like FB etc employ. That said, I really dislike this trend of equating "algorithms" to something wicked. I write them for a living, and I'd rather we kept writing and employing them.