The author sort of (but not really) acknowledges this midway through, but this is basically a summary of the most recent Technology Connections video, Algorithms are breaking how we think:
I'd rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration/source for this post at the beginning and explicitly, rather than just mentioning the video in passing midway through, but at least they do link to it!
I was definitely influenced to write this by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch.
I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work.
It's also intended as something you can link to your friends and family that might be a little more digestible than a 30 minute video.
This video is overall better in terms of emphasis, and goes into how to use tools available to intentionally curate the media that you choose to consume as a primary method, rather than it being hidden in a list.
It focuses on the harmful nature of infinitely scrolling content. Cutting out all infinite scrolling apps has had a hugely positive effect on my productivity and mental health.
I tried watching that video, but found it to be pretty bad. The beginning was good - demonstrating how much information we have at our fingertips, yet don't use. But then it veers off into what feels like a lot of personal frustrations he has - with the replies he's gotten at BlueSky, with politics, with the media, etc., and it feels like he's using algorithms as an excuse to vent against things he doesn't like.
The worst part is, it feels like he's making the same mistakes he's warning others about yet doesn't even realize it. He claims the bad BlueSky users are the result of algorithms, but doesn't (from what I can tell) see that his problem is that he's paying attention to a feed that brings those people to him. He complains about social media turning everything into a monolithic good vs. evil outrage generator, but then he does the exact same thing when talking about the New York Time's Canada editorial. You can say he's justified in that, but isn't everyone going to believe that they're the exception and that their outrage is justified?
I've seen this kind of criticism before, where it feels like someone is captured by something, can't escape it, gets annoyed by certain elements of it, and then creates a criticism of it that's more about venting their personal frustrations than actually escaping it (since they can't see how trapped they themselves are).
I find this claim unlikely, since there have always been crazies on the internet, and main issue is that a single crazy person can be online 24/7 with an output that dwarfs a dozen normal people.
Steve jobs said computers are a bicycle for the mind. Falling off a bicycle without a helmet is a great way to become a donut. Maybe computer users need helmets too. Please join me in abusing this metaphor.
In the spirit of the video (and the article), I'm watching this on Freetube [0] while hiding the comments, recommended videos tab, and pretty much everything else apart from the video description.
Malgorhitms are. We could, if we didn't confuse use it with LoTR entities, have belgorhitms, which would not only be recommended by Kahneman & Tversky, but also recommend by intelligence analysts, the historical opposites of corporate analysts, minions Belegron.
Algorhitms, "changing how one thinks" is real, and ultimately good. The social changes, when they start expecting you to Anki your work contract (which would, if the Anki was monitored, be highly legally effective against you); or requiring you know Kellyed Bayesian decision theory because that's a prequsite for getting reasonably priced insurance, or simply, surviving, that is unknown. I give 37.7% confidence Elon Musk was gaming in 2025 U.S. politics using construct akin to a Bayesian decision tree.
It would be great if one didn't have to change how one thinks, whether they delve into CLRS or TikTok.
Since they already reference Technology Connections in the article, and since this is a great essay but not new ideas, let's also call out other important voices - in particular Shoshana Zuboff's "Surveillance Capitalism", Cory Doctorow, and the many others who have put their backs into helping us understand how these sick systems work.
Social media has really proven that phrase that "the medium is the message", which I remember long ago thinking was a little odd and not obviously true.
With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this:
We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasoning.
> So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.
For what its worth, 500 years ago people were just as worried about books as we are today about newsfeeds. But it took a long time for books to ultimately decentralize enough to become a more egalitarian, community knowledge. But even that's not entirely the case now. Books can be propaganda just like everything else.
I highly recommend reading Marshal McLuhan's book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man from which that phrase originates (and not just a Wikipedia summary, different medium after all!)
The feed's >contents< are the message. And >the feed< is easily abused by content providers who have a PROFIT (Ferengi!) motive.
BUT I agree that The Feed is tightly intertwined with The Message. It is the enabler for HUGE audience capture. Versus the much smaller old-school audience capture of cult-psychology tactics.
“The medium is the message” goes both ways though. For social media, the inverse is not just “go read a book” but the far more challenging “go write a book”. That’s just not something I’m going to do. I’m certainly not going to find a publisher, get past the gatekeepers, and find a wide enough audience to make the big chunk of time I had to devote to writing worth it.
Your social media tools allow you to block content. I use this feature on youtube all the time. If I see a channel that's posting garbage or propaganda or flat out lies I just click the three dots and say 'Don't Recommend Channel.'
My youtube feed is a pleasant experience every day. There's no CNN or Fox news, no yelling talking heads trying to convince each other in existential terms, no jingoistic propaganda trying to influence me.
It's like what it was meant to be 20 years ago. Why do people not do this?
In a lot of ways I really like recommendation algorithms, regularly I've had youtube recommend a video that's converted into new sub (eg. LiamTronix and his electric tractor conversion).
What we really need is "responsible" recommendation systems (that allow the joy of discovery while aggressively damping rage bait and extreme view points). They'd need to be trained with some kind of socially beneficial reward function rather than pure engagement or advertiser dollars.
Could such a recommendation systems operate on top of existing social graphs?
How do you decide what is an extreme view point? This "socially beneficial reward function" could, and actually has, lead to things Google Gemini's depiction Founding Fathers or Vikings, etc.
Reddit is unfortunately a major thing in my life. There's an eternal battle between left and right politics in my small European country's relevant subreddits.
Not very healthy - it's like a never ending feed of "someone is wrong on the Internet".
For the record: "right" here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party.
Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I do take a break, I see that the other side "wins" to a noticeably larger degree. Again, small country.
What finally helped me break out of those bad habits was reframing who I was trying to convince of an argument. Let's face it, it's highly unlikely you're going to ever convince someone you're directly arguing with online just by the simple fact you're arguing, which often suggests some sort of impasse.
Instead, argue as if you're trying to convince the bored reader who has climbed down through the comments (for some reason), who has found value in this discourse and is trying to get more or better perspectives. That is someone you can convince of your position.
It's been a lot easier to engage in text discourse ever since I had that epiphany, because instead of taking every bait and trying to correct every wrong, I'm only engaging with folks arguing with data, with perspective, with good faith more often than not. That leads to better outcomes, I believe, instead of just contributing to so much noise.
It's fascinating, and being "The Subject" of the fascination and never truly "Objective" is a particular conundrum! Good luck with the "unfortunately" aspect -- totally possible to stop. (sexual humor warning: https://imgur.com/dont-touch-girls-m0Qk8)
I think it's part of being human.
I invite a brain specialist to step in here and comment which regions of the brain compelled us to agree with those whom we also feel we "need".
EDIT: .. cut to ncr100 proceeding to open youtube.com ...
For me peak internet was mid 2000s StumbleUpon. Finding random sites at the click of a button lightly sorted by theme. One major difference was people weren’t competing to get the most views. Of course monetized sites wanted more but today’s feeds create a sort of homogeneity I find less interesting because people are trying to appease an algorithm not viewers.
While this isn't at all like StumbleUpon, I've been enjoying a similar sense of discovery by adding https://indieblog.page/random as a bookmark to my web browser. Whenever I have some spare time and feel like surfing the web the old-fashioned way, I click this bookmark and get a random post from an independent blog. It's definitely a refreshing and much calmer experience compared to the black-box-algorithm-driven feeds of mainstream social media.
I used to be a social media addict and had even accepted the term addict for some time. But mid-last year, Facebook flagged one of my posts for violating its "platform guidelines"—and that was my breaking point.
That moment made me realize something deeper: it wasn’t just the endless feed algorithms shaping my behavior, but also the platform "guidelines" themselves—subtly reinforcing a habit designed to keep me engaged for advertisers.
So I quit. Completely. What Worked for Me-
WHAT I STOPPED:
1. Deactivated my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Deleted my Twitter account.
2. Removed all social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) from my phone.
3. Deleted Chrome from my phone and switched to my OS’s default browser (Safari) in signed-out mode.
4. Kept only one messaging app—Telegram.
WHAT I STARTED
1. Installed News Feed Eradicator on my computer (Chrome). I can still check messages and notifications (e.g., LinkedIn), but I don’t let the feed hijack my focus.
2. Went outside more—leaving my phone behind.
RESULTs:
1. Surprisingly, I think about sex less often throughout the day.
2. My close relationships have improved—I now have more meaningful time for a few important people instead of spreading myself thin over thousands.
3. I worry less—both in frequency and intensity.
4. I’ve regained my ability to read novels for hours—which, for me, requires the longest chain of attention.
5. My perspective is changing. The way I see the world feels different. I’ll need more time to articulate this fully, but I can sense the shift happening.
I disabled my YouTube watch history and installed Unhook. Combined, this essentially hides all recommendations, shorts, etc. I had tried blocking YouTube completely in the past, but it's a genuinely useful tool for learning and work. The new approach still lets me pull information while shielding me from the endless rabbitholes and passive consumption.
I can't help thinking that those receptive to the message would have drawn consequences long since. The feeds themselves would have chased them away. Can you wean a crack addict by telling them to stop using? Maybe, but I don't see a high probability of success. I sure hope I'm wrong.
> 5. Talk about it - if you’re reading this you a already know this is a problem. Your friends and family may not be aware of how their feeds are manipulating their attention and beliefs. Without intervention, the radicalisation of opinions, and the consequences we’re already seeing, will only escalate.
This is not Crack fortunately.
Physical dependence -> dopamine -> euphoria, escape, coping with stress + anxiety -> cannot feel pleasure without the drug -> craving for the drug / dependence. Recovery includes confronting the physical feeling that the drug is essential for perceived well-being.
Psychological dependence (TikTok / Insta Feed) -> sense of belonging, validation, purpose -> sense of identity via subculture, especially for "marginalized" or "insecure" individuals -> (side-note, some TikTok / Insta / MAGA+Dem / feeds CREATE+encourage the sense of marginalization / insecurity) -> us versus them -> isolation, only valuing subculture views, promoted distorted beliefs, detachment -> dependence (again). Recovery includes depression, anxiety, and feelings of loss.
WEANING
- Drug: medical intervention, therapy, support, relapse prevention
This advice is missing something crucial which is how to discover new creators sans feeds. Not saying it's impossible, but it's something they excel at and they've extinguished a lot of the old ways.
Yeah this is super key. I think it's still possible to highlight new creators without algos, one way is to just involve more (only) humans in the process. This is what we're doing at Twigg, effectively letting users decide what gets highlighted and elevated to the rest of our members. - Too early to say how it'll play out, but it seems to be working well soo far...
This post sounds like it wants to be a manifesto but really doesn't add up to much and lacks punch.
Getting away from the algos is untenable if you use the mainstream internet in any capacity. The trick is to be more intentional about gaming them to your advantage. My feeds usually surface things I value because I am deliberate about what signals I reinforce. I don't engage with content that outrages or upsets me, so it doesn't show me it. Some people are rage addicts and want to get into a doom loop because it fulfills their psychological sense of certainty that things will only get worse. Other people are ignorant of the algorithms and how they work so they never realize it is presenting a distorted picture.
Having varied pipelines for information intake is important too. Forums like this that are non-algorithmic, doing your own searches, visiting websites you like directly, all of this lends itself to that end. No need to go luddite if you like your internet things. Just be conscious of consumption.
I feel like there are two approaches that are never gonna work: self-control and asking companies to change.
I think there is an obvious answer though: taking control of the algorithm via AI. I don't think we're there yet, but it's gotta be a matter of time until somebody makes a local AI agent that browses all these feeds and then filters them to your satisfaction (x% about politics, y% upbeat, z% violence, z% about video games).
I was thinking that, that what I'd like is an AI that knows me and I can ask what's out there I'd like to see and I can give it instructions. Not really just percentages but what's interesting for me which I guess requires quite a lot of knowledge of me.
This is such an interesting idea! - Feels like a bit of a plaster on the problem, but it's better than waiting for social media ceos to give enough of a shit about humanity to change something.
I think a cool idea for future legislation may be to force social media companies like Youtube, Reddit, Instagram, X and Tiktok to allow users to easily disable machine learning-generated recommendations.
LinkedIn already has this feature and it's significantly reduced the amount of rage-inducing influencer hot takes that show up on my feed. You can also turn off your watch history to get far fewer recommendations on Youtube.
I still personally find LinkedIn and Youtube to be a net-negative on my mental health, but these settings have helped a lot.
I find Youtube amazing when you never leave subscriptions page (excluding all clutter such as community posts and short videos), just a list of videos from creators you find entertaining.
Reddit, in my opinion, is the absolute worst platform for this. It's incredibly easy to manipulate the appearance of consensus opinion. Also, the degree of power the individual moderators have on shaping conversations means instead of an algorithm choosing what you see, someone who spends up to 8 hours a day on Reddit chooses what you see. Lots of these moderators are not the sort of people who should have any place shaping conversations.
Most subreddits tend towards complete bubbles, where anything that goes against the prevailing opinions gets down voted into oblivion or outright deleted by mods.
Even so, reddit is a huge echo chamber. The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do. And the upvote system encourages groupthink. Votes being hidden on HN I think is excellent.
Similar criticism was made of television: "The great thing about television is that it's so passive." - Ted Turner (TBS, CNN). A sizable fraction of the population has a TV on all the time.
His more important point is that recommendation algorithms combined with replies create terrible conversations. That helps explain why it's so hard to discuss anything complicated on social media.
Read Filterworld by Kyle Chayka (<https://bookshop.org/p/books/filterworld-how-algorithms-flat...>); it's a fine enough read, and while I thought myself already avoiding a lot of algorithmic stuff, he did a good job pointing out the places where I was still being dictated to (e.g. what businesses a map surfaced, what flights the search engine promoted). His discussion of tastemakers and curation were the most interesting part, I thought, and in particular how algorithms push toward the boring.
>Taste is an abstract, ineffable, unstable thing. A listener to music or reader of a book cannot truly tell if they will enjoy something before they experience it; pleasure in a piece of art is never guaranteed. So when encountering an artwork, we immediately evaluate it by some set of mental principles, and, hopefully, find the beauty in it, feel affirmed, even if we can't quite describe what that beauty is or how exactly we determined it in the first place. Taste is supposed to be ambiguous. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben summarized in his 1979 monograph on taste, "Taste enjoys beauty, without being able to explain it."
and then
>As taste requires surprise, it also thrives on challenge and risk, treading too far in a particular direction. Safety may avoid embarrassment, but it's also boring.
and so
>The bounds of aesthetic acceptability become tighter and tighter until all that's left is a column in the middle. While popular styles shift, like moving targets, the centralization and normalization persist.
Just as a bit of a devil’s advocate thought process, isn’t reading a newspaper, magazine, or watching a TV station very similar in basic concept to an algorithmic content feed?
They’re more crude but it’s the same idea. You tell a company you like a general topic by choosing a channel, magazine, or section of the newspaper. They give you content that is curated. This curation is automatic and sophisticated in social media apps but is more manual in legacy media, but the idea is generally the same. At some point someone or something is taking a guess at what kind of content you want to see.
All of these forms of passive content involve advertiser influence just the same as social media algorithms.
Maybe algorithmic media isn’t always so alarmingly bad? Maybe it’s okay to have some downtime and just allow someone else to fill that time? It was acceptable for the comics section of the newspaper to waste some time in your day but it’s so harmful for for some silly meme content to do the same just because technology was involved in the latter.
I've actually been working on something tackling exactly this for a little while now. It's a social network where you post to your own curated tags, and people can follow any subset of those. So you can post both your "local small town history" and also "important cs papers", and those interested in either or both can follow as they choose. It's alts by default. And to start, it's focused on links.
Reverse chronological is sacrosanct and it will always remain ad free to keep incentives aligned with it being a place I like to spend time. Every tag also has its own RSS feed.
The basic idea with tags sounds very similar to Reddit. Especially with the initial focus on links. Reddit has degenerated into something a bit different, however. Why would your app stay true to the original concept in the face of scaling and financial pressure?
Couldn't agree more! This problem is severe for me, I ended building limitphone.com to lock down my Android phone so that I CANNOT bypass blocked apps (using mdm built-in to Android). It has a custom build of firefox that blocks in the browser that allows me to still watch a single youtube video.
I would disable all short videos in the feed on every platform because they are completely useless but it is not possible in these apps.
I can't remove the apps because I might need them to check something important or write someone, so I forced to use my willpower to skip these videos everyday.
Last year I realized I could block things on facebook with the ublock ad blocker. Now when I go to facebook there's a clean empty page and I can navigate to just what I want to see. If you're using something app based that won't work though
For the past year or so I've only been watching YouTube in private browser windows to avoid getting too stuck in an algo niche. Sometimes I'll have the window open for a few days at a time and build up different interests in the recommendations. Eventually either an unplanned restart or intentionally closing the window makes me start from scratch.
Its especially interesting recently as Youtube encourages you to search for something before giving you recommendations, so you get to "seed" your session with topics you like. If nothing comes to mind I'll just start with Practical Engineering and go from there.
The only downside is that I can't "like" content to help the creators, since I'm not logged in
YouTube for me as a search results never a destination. And my search browser is anonymous. It clears all data when I exit. If I could "like" content without logging in I would - but I can't.
I’ve turned off all my social media feeds and use Tapestry now which presents posts from some of them in pure chronological order. This include this site, Bluesky, RSS feeds, YouTube and more. I am enjoying it a lot.
I no longer see Facebook, Instagram or X and I’m okay with that.
I’m surprised there is never more acknowledgement of this. Just look around at the other people you see in public. If they aren’t actively walking, the phone is out, sometimes even while walking. You can’t really think deeply about your life and situation if every waking second is spent looking at brainrot social media. Even people with a nose buried in a book are trading precious time in their own mind developing their own thoughts for that to instead be filled with others words and ideas.
Socrates was even complaining about this, and it’s arguably far worse what is happening today than what he was seeing.
So while there is plenty of viral brainrot media out there, reading substantive material that promotes understanding or introspection looks almost the same. And it's more profound than what I'd be thinking about in the dentist waiting room or long hardware store line.
`We don’t all have the freedom, interest or willpower to delete social media from our lives entirely.`
i am really against this notion. why do we have to surrender ourselves to this forced reality. i really don't find any other beneficial use of social media except of advertise and making profit. (personally i see it immoral to feed this evil machine and run away).
so the only real solution is to delete social media altogether or don't tap on user's backs and guide them to more moderate use because it doesn't makes a difference.
exactly... can confrim it's possible to live a normal fulfilling life after deleting Facebook, then twitter, then IG, then reddit as each transitioned from fun to ad/propaganda platforms. it's sad to see the addict brain justification "I literally can't delete it because $reason" become an immutable truth.
I suggested a few years ago an alternative business model for platforms[1]. Rather than selling ads, sell people the ability to filter. Buy some in-platform filtration either from a provider or from another user of the platform. It had been a particularly frustrating day.
I don't think algorithms are the problem at all...they only magnify existing biases and prejudices. We didn't live in some magical fantastical happy-chappy world before the Internet where people didn't beat their wives and any foreigner they could find, try to kill the gays, etc.
If you're a longtime YouTube consumer, you know that the platform has become just as enshittified as Twitter or Instagram, jumping on the micro-attention infini-scroll band-wagon with YouTube Shorts.
My solution to the horrendous algorithmic recommendations that YouTube tees up these days is DF Tube (Distraction Free YouTube). It's a plugin available on the Firefox & Chrome app stores, perhaps others. As with all browser plugins, decide whether you're willing to trust the developer.
DF Tube goes the full mile by attacking the YouTube DOM and eliminating (with extreme prejudice) anything other than a search bar, a video, and core menu functions. That means the following are gone:
- Notification Bell
- Feed
- Autoplay
- Trending
- Comments/Live comments
- Related videos
I have two thumb rules about social media scrolling:
1. Use social media at only one particular time of the day. Inside a strict time window. That's it. Even if you are sitting idly on a car, traveling, or even standing in a queue for something, don't open the scroller app. Just be. Even if you are sick and in bed, don't open the scroller. Make a conversation, read a book, watch a movie, listen to a talk, but never open the scroller. This I learned from Cal Newport, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I will say this has made my life better. And if you do this for some months, you will like the changes in your brain.
2. Don't consume any content without premeditated intent. Don't aimlessly scroll, ever. This point is there in the OP. I scroll a particular FB group only for ~10 ninutes a day. I scroll my very narrow CS/Math/Programming YouTube account for ~15 minutes and add videos to Watch Later. That's it.
I agree with the sentiment that algorithms do affect what we see in our feeds and often the things we see are chosen because they are deemed more engaging by said algorithm, but I also think we're overstating the effects of the algorithms and putting too much blame on them. I think we need to recognize that the technology we've built is inherently addictive and also making human connections more impersonal.
If you took away the algorithms, I don't think you'd necessarily have a relaxing social media feed. You'd still have people sharing so-called "engaging" material and you'd still have to deal with "context collapse" and disagreeable discussions. I think the anonymous nature of online connections inherently make them more impersonal compared with actual face to face ones. And being constantly connected to other human beings digitally (even strangers) is incredibly addictive.
Well, I agree with you. I would add that in some ways this entire thread is an example of the problem it's trying to address. There is a kind of bubble here of virtue signaling how much you disable all recommendations or get off entirely of social media, unless it is only used some Correct, Zen sort of way. This acts a social contagion if you like and how the Correct Opinion is established. I think certainly for impressionable minds, it is quite problematic. For adults that have self-control, maybe it is good to have the feeds so you can test yourself? A lot of people talk about how their mental health has improved so dramatically now they follow the Correct Way and disable social media or whatever... that's good, I mean, I'm happy for them, but maybe it could help you establish mental resilience by facing those feeds without adverse mental health outcomes? I don't know.
I would pay tons of money for control of the algorithms. It’s annoying I can’t tell YouTube, twitter, etc. what type of content I want to see, what I do not, the frequency, etc.
The complete lack of control by users of their feed makes Feed Providers publishers imo. Give me control or take responsibility for the content.
Unfortunately, the Bluesky Discover feed is utterly garbage, seemingly insistent on pushing political content, especially of the resistlib variety, no matter how many times I give "not interested" feedback. It's essentially the mirror version of the twitter For You algorithm; less overtly heinous but still a deeply unhealthy engagement trap. You definitely have to use custom feeds and the other features, but the most prominent and easiest point of entry for new users is a drip feed of ragebait.
Recommendation for the EU, please force social media platforms to offer support for custom feed algorithms/plugins. If they don't offer them, ban them from the EU market.
Long term, once we figure out how to generate feeds that are aren't socially corrosive dumpster fires. Mandate platforms default to using one of a set of approved models (maybe we need a recommendation engine benchmark that scores social divisiveness).
Additionally, take action to shape your feeds to your desires rather than Big Tech's desires. Block buttons exist for a reason, as does the "don't recommend this channel" button on YouTube. Clickbait? People raging about politics who clearly have no desire to seriously consider the other side? Stupid memes that will do little to benefit your time? All of them get the chopping block.
As a space fan, I necessarily see a lot of people on Twitter who are blindly pro- or anti-Elon. Both types get blocked, not because I disagree with them but because I don't need that sort of rabid content in my feed.
Quick edit to add: block all parody accounts on Twitter as well. They almost never are actually worthwhile.
Also, did you know you can block advertisers on Twitter? It's very catarthic.
World can be a very futuristic experience, or it can be (almost) as it would be say 2005 or even earlier.
My parents and most of their generation experience it in a very similar way. I would say even despite missing out few cool things overall their life experience is better. Simpler, more positive.
I am aiming desperately for similar position. I dont care about coolest new tech unless i can/have to use it directly at my work. I stopped watching most of politics since there is no win there, just mental abyss. I know its sort of giving up, but I cant win this fight so why bother, just wait it out.
One effect I can see that comes with massive power - dont let orange man drag you into his pit of unstable misery, its like a black hole. Engaging with any related info has this effect. He is not exceptional in this, had exes with similar 'skill', but his power is a massive multiplier. Be stronger than him, for yourself and your closest ones.
After watching the Technology Connections video, I realized that YouTube ReVanced has an option to default to the subscriptions tab rather than the home page. It doesn't seem that different in my case, but I probably am catching some things that I would have missed otherwise.
I remember years ago someone talking about the idea of "open algorithms" in the sense that for any given platform the sort algorithm itself could theoretically be made available for users to submit and share their own custom sorting implementations. A company could just release some DSL of config setup that would make it possible to tweak your own feed. Even if this was tricky, you can image users that were more technical creating algorithms that other users could apply.
I understand why this never happened (algorithms are, after all, optimized to the benefit of the company, not the user), but still it's a shame that this was never explored (at least not to my knowledge).
I think the whole custom sort DSL is swinging the pendulum back a bit too hard. People just want a deterministic sort, with no injected ads or hate-bait, from exactly the people they follow, with the ability to apply basic filters on top of that. You know, the old default, the one that was designed to be useful, not to extract maximum ad dollars from people’s eyeballs with vacuum tubes.
I've mentioned this in another comment but the Freetube [0] client for YouTube has settings that let you hide pretty much every distraction apart from the video. You can even exclude videos in your search result if they contain a set phrase (great for avoiding political bait). I know there are extensions that do all these things but I find this to be a nice all-in-one solution, and the UI is more responsive too. (It does suffer from expiring sessions and the like though.)
The real issue is control. Facebook allowed you to go back to chronological view by appending &sk=chr to the URL, but they removed that safety valve at some point. Depending on context you may want to sort your feed chronologically, by relevance (which requires training or AI), or more exotic ways, but none of the platforms will give you that modicum of agency.
You also need filtering to remove the manufactured pop-culture dross like the Kardashians that is the new opium of the people.
I've been building a simple RSS feed reader just for the purpose of taking back control of my attention. It allows me to subscribe to my favorite youtube channels, reddit threads, HN, etc. The best part is I can mute feeds and catch up later without the pressure of consumption. I've used it daily for years and don't anticipate going back to social media any time soon.
I've been thinking about this, to get rid of feeds I need something that will allow me to find posts and videos via related keywords. I want to be able to search for information by myself, but in this time, I need to be able to do it at scale. AI Agents that do research for me is a step in the right direction. Also, I think the platforms would resist this by trying to gatekeep information by all means necessary.
I regularly use Twitter's search function with "latest" reverse chrono results, to follow topics without following people, and it works fine. I have a few bookmarked to save the typing and adjust the searches occasionally to refine them, minusing out some word or person, or adding another term to drill in (see advanced search for a decent set of options.)
My point is, search still works. We don't have to take their feed, or even the feed we create following people. We can just search that shit out. And search results bookmarks in a folder work great for managing that.
Turned off "Discover" on my Android phone. Was weird first. I felt like I might miss out on something, some important bit of information. "Sometimes it does show me interested things" I thought. And, true, sometimes I get shown a scientific article that would missed otherwise.
But just like when I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts years back, I did not miss any important event.
If you compare posts to food then a post with many likes is like hyperpalatable food, and a post with many likes that shows up in your feed is like a hyperpalatable food that the algorithm thinks you will like. Nothing wrong with the algorithm, it's the post that's the problem
The solution is very simple, just limit the like count of posts in your feed.
There is a simple method not to kill FB's algorithm but to use it for your own good. Unsubscribe, unfollow and unlike every page or group. Fb will start showing you the best posts of some groups and, by your choices, you can 'drive' which groups are arriving on the feed. In the end you will receive the best posts from your favorite group of groups
There will always be something dictating what you think until you really feel interested in actually thinking yourself and develop a critical and exploratory mindset. The active audience of this website probably is predominantly blessed with having this kind of mindset already but the general population probably lacks any incentive for developing it.
The general population figures out all kinds of complex things and loves it when tech provides solutions to those complexities. Commercials suck and Tivo flew off the shelves in part because of 30 second skip. Half of browser users have an ad blocker. No one was handed these by their Big Tech overlords, they sought them out and used them to fix their "feeds". Give people some credit that if we make good tools available, they'll avail themselves of those. The active audience of this website is probably capable of building some of those. So, get to it instead of lamenting the fall.
For most of my life I've generally relied on advice or information about potential sources from trusted peers and sources I know are reliable because they can and will back up their reasoning with reliable references.
So far that doesn't include any algorithms I've run into.
I changed my to a write-only relationship with social media a couple years ago and I'm building an app called POSSE Party to help others do the same thing https://posseparty.com/
Maybe just don't use social media in general. I do have an X account which I want to delete. Other than that I don't have FB, Instagram, Tiktok or anything similar.
Social media is a cancer. It only benefits those who have the money to power the algorithms.
I found it helpful to create friction between you and algorithms, such as uBlock filter that blocks feed page and suggested videos panel. Harder to do so for apps, but Apple's screen time limits is a good place to start.
Cohost was an attempt to do exactly this, a chronological-only feed that just showed the users and tags you had explicitly decided to follow. And it died. Things aren't looking great these days.
It's ironic that we're discovering this article from a feed. Sorry to tell you folks, but there's no defense against FOMO other than willpower. And the willpower is currently in short supply.
I enjoy YouTube but the algorithms get a little crazy after a while. I solve this be deleting my history every month. The algorithm then falls back to channels that I subscribe to or similar channels.
This is spot on and exactly why I built digest. You bypass the algos entirely and are shown only what you want to see, not what the algos want you to see.
I collected all my URLs I visited and organized them into a few groups: daily, weekly, monthly. Then sent that to a LLM requesting creation of files for generating bookmark tabs for my browser. After import, I have a well organized personal data feed to cycle thru in an efficient manner. I review daily material once; weekly periodically. This helps me limit excessive scrolling.
disabling history on YouTube disables short feeds and recommendations on the home page. It takes 10 seconds and has saved easily thousands of hours and mental sanity.
Also, if you ever want to revisit a video, just use chromes history, but you'll find also this rarely happens if ever.
I'm in the midst of completing this using FreshRSS and a suite of open source apps that provide the capacity for making functional feeds of almost any kind of periodic content, supplied to me in chronological order, in a list of basic formatted text headlines that are not visually distinguished by anything other than the host favicon, or published cover image if I've toggled that view. I have moved most of my news, YouTube, and blog feeds and I feel less inclined to scroll endlessly, and it makes me more intentional about the things I want to follow versus the things I want to be vaguely aware of. It's been a little work, as a sysadmin I find this kind of self-hosting pretty natural, but I have found it worthwhile (and there are easier options, if maybe not so thoroughly decentralized, Feedly is what I recommend for folks less-inclined towards the nuts and bolts).
I haven't been on any kind of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter social network for several years now, I also encourage people to try giving it up for 2-3 months, and I wager that it will feel distinctly odd and uncomfortable if/when you return. From a naive person's perspective, social media is flat out strange. It's got its own culture, lingo, and social constructs that feel a little odd. It's easy to see how it might be manipulative in a lot of subtle ways. But I do admit I lost touch with some people whom I miss. Each person should find their own balance with algorithmically determined content feeds, but I am a firm believer it should be, on balance, less.
Seems like a mode of thinking that is appearing everywhere, not just on social media. Go to MOD Pizza. You can order any toppings you want--your favorites. Yet many if not most people will go through the menu of preselected toppings combos to see if there's one they'd like. This makes no sense to me.
Sometimes I just want to eat some food without making 50 decisions. I'm not a chef, I don't know what pairs well together. If picking my own toppings, I will end up getting a plain pepperoni pizza. If there is a pre-built combo that looks appealing, it gives me the opportunity to branch out a little more and maybe find something new I like.
I'm happy places exist that let people be a little more creative, or allow me the same if I'm in the mood, but it's not something I want all the time. I really like places where I can simple order a #4 without any substitutions and my order is done. Growing up as a picky eater, I caught a lot of flack as a kid for substitutions; my orders never felt easy like other people. I like when my order can be easy.
That... does not seem analogous. MOD isn't giving you a personalized set of combinations they think you'd like, with the top recommendations happening to include some sponsored ingredient. It's like every other pizza shops since the dawn of pizza shops: fixed toppings menu or a build-your-own option.
Choices take energy. If there are curated defaults it's often more pleasant to save that energy for something else. And most people don't have a sole "favorite" choice that they'd go to every time vs trying variety. Heck, you could even spend more energy on deciding whether or not to go somewhere else entirely.
Algorithmic content feeds are a much more important battle to fight, but "spend more effort on every single other decision too" is not gonna put people in a place to want to be more selective. It'll tire them out more and make them more likely to just put on the default idiot box feed.
Freedom of choice isn't that freeing if you don't have time/money to actually permute through all the options to find what you like.
This is the actual reason why the door is continually held open for propaganda and centralized control. Decentralizing everything struggles with inefficiency problems.
The first person to really discover and popularize this was Edward Bernays — who invented Public Relations to help corporations and politicians weaponize this inefficiency. He kicked off the "Mad Men" of 20th century New York.
The introduction to Bernays's book "Propaganda" lays this out very clearly:
We will keep giving up control to centralized forces until we can share information freely and efficiently about what choices lead to better/worse outcomes in a decentralized way.
It is easier to communicate a pre-selected option (maybe with a change or two) than to order from scratch sometimes.
But ordering pizza and getting news have different stakes anyway, so I think these problems should be handled differently. It is reasonable to offload pizza topping decisions, but we should try to learn a bit about the actual positions/competencies of our elected officials.
If I'm going to MOD Pizza, I'm going because I want to eat something quick and easy. I'm not necessarily going there to maximize my pizza-eating experience. I honestly prefer picking something from the menu and maybe adding some extra toppings.
In general, I don't personally enjoy having to make decisions about particular ingredients when I go somewhere to eat. It's mental energy I don't want to have to expend. Not having any dietary restrictions, I personally prefer somewhere that offers a fixed set of items. I'd also say that when I was younger, I was afraid of making the wrong choices and didn't know what some ingredients were whenever I'd go somewhere that did have choices, so that added a little bit of anxiety.
The combinatorial space is huge, and when I scan through the _curated_ list, I expect the establishment to provide some options from that space that are Actually Good. Maybe something I wouldn’t usually go for calls out to me. It’s an idea generator.
There’s this concept of “babble and prune” (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/babble-and-prune) and I argue that for food (and probably most opinions…) the prune aspect is where your personal taste gets most expressed. So they are doing you a service by pre-babbling a set of options for you prune.
Maybe this framework can shed some sense :)
In other words: I’m just trying to get a good pizza, man, I’m not some kind of pizza artist.
I've been thinking about an ideal "algorithm" for myself.
I read a lot of online content, from all kinds of sources. Different types of content: short-form, long-form, memes, WaPo editorials, sports, politics, tech, stuff, weird stuff, off-beat, serious, rants, opinions, facts.
The most delightful experiences I've had is when something totally random pops in from someplace. It could come from anywhere, but I've noticed that the best surprises come from places like longreads.com, which collect good writing across a diverse set topics and sources. Pretty much all social platforms do a horrible job at this, and recommend content that is so similar to content I've already consumed that the additional value of that content is extremely low, often even negative.
I think the ideal algorithm for me would be randomly suggestions after filtering out the garbage. No ads disguised as journalism, no influencer content, no clickbait, no spam, no AI slop, etc. I would jump on a platform that does this immediately. Even better, if the platform allowed me to control the knobs on what I consider to be garbage and not garbage.
I don’t think most people would willingly allow someone to implant an electrode into their brains that could influence what they think with the world’s largest corporations pushing the button on the other end.
It sounds too invasive. To violating. Too extreme. Too much power in the hands of the button holder.
But this is effectively what we’re doing with our phones and watches in particular. It’s one of the reasons I’ve disabled notifications on almost everything.
Based on the title, I expected some advice about how to actually eliminate some feeds. Instead, the article is basically some advice to focus less on the feeds. Regardless, I was inspired to check out Instagram's somewhat hidden "Following" tab, only to find that even when I explicitly ask to see posts from people that I'm following, literally every second post is "recommended for you" bullshit.
Without online advertising most of the drivel would disappear.
There will still be communities and fringe opinion and that is healthy. You won't have content generated just to push advertisements alone which is not.
It's still very easy to catch up on the latest trends and developments and what people are building and talking about. Even though most of us kinda hate it, it does have weight.
I have heard this a few times now, what is going on? The news hasn't mentioned anything about Neo Nazis, and there is no large organized effort to round up the Jews, let alone exterminate them. This seems like hyperbolic language that is in really poor taste, which undermines the seriousness of what the second world war was fought over.
lolinder|1 year ago
https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA
I'd rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration/source for this post at the beginning and explicitly, rather than just mentioning the video in passing midway through, but at least they do link to it!
tom_usher|1 year ago
I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work.
It's also intended as something you can link to your friends and family that might be a little more digestible than a 30 minute video.
zdw|1 year ago
nerevarthelame|1 year ago
It focuses on the harmful nature of infinitely scrolling content. Cutting out all infinite scrolling apps has had a hugely positive effect on my productivity and mental health.
gonzobonzo|11 months ago
The worst part is, it feels like he's making the same mistakes he's warning others about yet doesn't even realize it. He claims the bad BlueSky users are the result of algorithms, but doesn't (from what I can tell) see that his problem is that he's paying attention to a feed that brings those people to him. He complains about social media turning everything into a monolithic good vs. evil outrage generator, but then he does the exact same thing when talking about the New York Time's Canada editorial. You can say he's justified in that, but isn't everyone going to believe that they're the exception and that their outrage is justified?
I've seen this kind of criticism before, where it feels like someone is captured by something, can't escape it, gets annoyed by certain elements of it, and then creates a criticism of it that's more about venting their personal frustrations than actually escaping it (since they can't see how trapped they themselves are).
I find this claim unlikely, since there have always been crazies on the internet, and main issue is that a single crazy person can be online 24/7 with an output that dwarfs a dozen normal people.
hooverd|1 year ago
AndyKelley|1 year ago
cameldrv|1 year ago
mnky9800n|11 months ago
unknown|11 months ago
[deleted]
C-x_C-f|11 months ago
[0] https://freetubeapp.io/
gcanyon|11 months ago
Xen9|11 months ago
Algorhitms, "changing how one thinks" is real, and ultimately good. The social changes, when they start expecting you to Anki your work contract (which would, if the Anki was monitored, be highly legally effective against you); or requiring you know Kellyed Bayesian decision theory because that's a prequsite for getting reasonably priced insurance, or simply, surviving, that is unknown. I give 37.7% confidence Elon Musk was gaming in 2025 U.S. politics using construct akin to a Bayesian decision tree.
It would be great if one didn't have to change how one thinks, whether they delve into CLRS or TikTok.
daniel_reetz|1 year ago
svara|1 year ago
With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this:
We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasoning.
So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.
williamtrask|1 year ago
For what its worth, 500 years ago people were just as worried about books as we are today about newsfeeds. But it took a long time for books to ultimately decentralize enough to become a more egalitarian, community knowledge. But even that's not entirely the case now. Books can be propaganda just like everything else.
ddq|1 year ago
ncr100|1 year ago
The feed's >contents< are the message. And >the feed< is easily abused by content providers who have a PROFIT (Ferengi!) motive.
BUT I agree that The Feed is tightly intertwined with The Message. It is the enabler for HUGE audience capture. Versus the much smaller old-school audience capture of cult-psychology tactics.
jahewson|1 year ago
timewizard|1 year ago
Your social media tools allow you to block content. I use this feature on youtube all the time. If I see a channel that's posting garbage or propaganda or flat out lies I just click the three dots and say 'Don't Recommend Channel.'
My youtube feed is a pleasant experience every day. There's no CNN or Fox news, no yelling talking heads trying to convince each other in existential terms, no jingoistic propaganda trying to influence me.
It's like what it was meant to be 20 years ago. Why do people not do this?
rxmmah|11 months ago
grumpy-de-sre|1 year ago
What we really need is "responsible" recommendation systems (that allow the joy of discovery while aggressively damping rage bait and extreme view points). They'd need to be trained with some kind of socially beneficial reward function rather than pure engagement or advertiser dollars.
Could such a recommendation systems operate on top of existing social graphs?
YZF|1 year ago
dinkumthinkum|11 months ago
lysace|1 year ago
Not very healthy - it's like a never ending feed of "someone is wrong on the Internet".
For the record: "right" here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party.
Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I do take a break, I see that the other side "wins" to a noticeably larger degree. Again, small country.
stego-tech|1 year ago
Instead, argue as if you're trying to convince the bored reader who has climbed down through the comments (for some reason), who has found value in this discourse and is trying to get more or better perspectives. That is someone you can convince of your position.
It's been a lot easier to engage in text discourse ever since I had that epiphany, because instead of taking every bait and trying to correct every wrong, I'm only engaging with folks arguing with data, with perspective, with good faith more often than not. That leads to better outcomes, I believe, instead of just contributing to so much noise.
fph|1 year ago
crims0n|1 year ago
ncr100|1 year ago
I think it's part of being human.
I invite a brain specialist to step in here and comment which regions of the brain compelled us to agree with those whom we also feel we "need".
EDIT: .. cut to ncr100 proceeding to open youtube.com ...
trescenzi|1 year ago
susam|1 year ago
mattlondon|1 year ago
A lot of the sites there are pre-2020 era but some weird and wonderful stuff!
hedayet|11 months ago
That moment made me realize something deeper: it wasn’t just the endless feed algorithms shaping my behavior, but also the platform "guidelines" themselves—subtly reinforcing a habit designed to keep me engaged for advertisers.
So I quit. Completely. What Worked for Me-
WHAT I STOPPED:
1. Deactivated my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Deleted my Twitter account.
2. Removed all social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) from my phone.
3. Deleted Chrome from my phone and switched to my OS’s default browser (Safari) in signed-out mode.
4. Kept only one messaging app—Telegram.
WHAT I STARTED
1. Installed News Feed Eradicator on my computer (Chrome). I can still check messages and notifications (e.g., LinkedIn), but I don’t let the feed hijack my focus.
2. Went outside more—leaving my phone behind.
RESULTs:
1. Surprisingly, I think about sex less often throughout the day.
2. My close relationships have improved—I now have more meaningful time for a few important people instead of spreading myself thin over thousands.
3. I worry less—both in frequency and intensity.
4. I’ve regained my ability to read novels for hours—which, for me, requires the longest chain of attention.
5. My perspective is changing. The way I see the world feels different. I’ll need more time to articulate this fully, but I can sense the shift happening.
ffiirree|11 months ago
nisalperi|1 year ago
I feel so much freer!
tempodox|1 year ago
ncr100|1 year ago
This is not Crack fortunately.
Physical dependence -> dopamine -> euphoria, escape, coping with stress + anxiety -> cannot feel pleasure without the drug -> craving for the drug / dependence. Recovery includes confronting the physical feeling that the drug is essential for perceived well-being.
Psychological dependence (TikTok / Insta Feed) -> sense of belonging, validation, purpose -> sense of identity via subculture, especially for "marginalized" or "insecure" individuals -> (side-note, some TikTok / Insta / MAGA+Dem / feeds CREATE+encourage the sense of marginalization / insecurity) -> us versus them -> isolation, only valuing subculture views, promoted distorted beliefs, detachment -> dependence (again). Recovery includes depression, anxiety, and feelings of loss.
WEANING
- Drug: medical intervention, therapy, support, relapse prevention
- Social: therapy, reconnection, critical thinking development, finding alt purpose, gradual separation
gavmor|1 year ago
cratermoon|1 year ago
letmeinhere|1 year ago
tom_usher|1 year ago
The more people that do this the more we can start rebuilding networks of people we trust and still retain control over the diversity of our sources.
1: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
bitmasher9|11 months ago
* In Bluesky I read retweets and comments to find new people to follow.
* I send content to friends and they send some back. I’ve found creators this way.
* Search for interesting topics, see who is generating content on those topics. Follow/subscribe if you’d like to see more.
otter_is_fine|11 months ago
xg15|1 year ago
EigenLord|11 months ago
Getting away from the algos is untenable if you use the mainstream internet in any capacity. The trick is to be more intentional about gaming them to your advantage. My feeds usually surface things I value because I am deliberate about what signals I reinforce. I don't engage with content that outrages or upsets me, so it doesn't show me it. Some people are rage addicts and want to get into a doom loop because it fulfills their psychological sense of certainty that things will only get worse. Other people are ignorant of the algorithms and how they work so they never realize it is presenting a distorted picture.
Having varied pipelines for information intake is important too. Forums like this that are non-algorithmic, doing your own searches, visiting websites you like directly, all of this lends itself to that end. No need to go luddite if you like your internet things. Just be conscious of consumption.
zug_zug|1 year ago
I think there is an obvious answer though: taking control of the algorithm via AI. I don't think we're there yet, but it's gotta be a matter of time until somebody makes a local AI agent that browses all these feeds and then filters them to your satisfaction (x% about politics, y% upbeat, z% violence, z% about video games).
tim333|11 months ago
otter_is_fine|11 months ago
joshdavham|1 year ago
LinkedIn already has this feature and it's significantly reduced the amount of rage-inducing influencer hot takes that show up on my feed. You can also turn off your watch history to get far fewer recommendations on Youtube.
I still personally find LinkedIn and Youtube to be a net-negative on my mental health, but these settings have helped a lot.
ivanjermakov|1 year ago
ph4evers|1 year ago
icepat|1 year ago
gooosle|1 year ago
cedws|1 year ago
brikym|1 year ago
[deleted]
Animats|11 months ago
His more important point is that recommendation algorithms combined with replies create terrible conversations. That helps explain why it's so hard to discuss anything complicated on social media.
Amorymeltzer|11 months ago
>Taste is an abstract, ineffable, unstable thing. A listener to music or reader of a book cannot truly tell if they will enjoy something before they experience it; pleasure in a piece of art is never guaranteed. So when encountering an artwork, we immediately evaluate it by some set of mental principles, and, hopefully, find the beauty in it, feel affirmed, even if we can't quite describe what that beauty is or how exactly we determined it in the first place. Taste is supposed to be ambiguous. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben summarized in his 1979 monograph on taste, "Taste enjoys beauty, without being able to explain it."
and then
>As taste requires surprise, it also thrives on challenge and risk, treading too far in a particular direction. Safety may avoid embarrassment, but it's also boring.
and so
>The bounds of aesthetic acceptability become tighter and tighter until all that's left is a column in the middle. While popular styles shift, like moving targets, the centralization and normalization persist.
dangus|11 months ago
They’re more crude but it’s the same idea. You tell a company you like a general topic by choosing a channel, magazine, or section of the newspaper. They give you content that is curated. This curation is automatic and sophisticated in social media apps but is more manual in legacy media, but the idea is generally the same. At some point someone or something is taking a guess at what kind of content you want to see.
All of these forms of passive content involve advertiser influence just the same as social media algorithms.
Maybe algorithmic media isn’t always so alarmingly bad? Maybe it’s okay to have some downtime and just allow someone else to fill that time? It was acceptable for the comics section of the newspaper to waste some time in your day but it’s so harmful for for some silly meme content to do the same just because technology was involved in the latter.
OisinMoran|1 year ago
Reverse chronological is sacrosanct and it will always remain ad free to keep incentives aligned with it being a place I like to spend time. Every tag also has its own RSS feed.
It's still invite-only, but anyone reading this page is obviously a great fit so here's an invite link: https://lynkmi.com/accounts/signup/?invite_code=333ee833-e3d...
tmoravec|1 year ago
richardgill88|11 months ago
velancogito|1 year ago
I can't remove the apps because I might need them to check something important or write someone, so I forced to use my willpower to skip these videos everyday.
bgood456|11 months ago
r0p3|1 year ago
Its especially interesting recently as Youtube encourages you to search for something before giving you recommendations, so you get to "seed" your session with topics you like. If nothing comes to mind I'll just start with Practical Engineering and go from there.
The only downside is that I can't "like" content to help the creators, since I'm not logged in
intrasight|1 year ago
callumprentice|1 year ago
I no longer see Facebook, Instagram or X and I’m okay with that.
burgerrito|1 year ago
kjkjadksj|1 year ago
Socrates was even complaining about this, and it’s arguably far worse what is happening today than what he was seeing.
outer_web|1 year ago
rxmmah|11 months ago
i am really against this notion. why do we have to surrender ourselves to this forced reality. i really don't find any other beneficial use of social media except of advertise and making profit. (personally i see it immoral to feed this evil machine and run away). so the only real solution is to delete social media altogether or don't tap on user's backs and guide them to more moderate use because it doesn't makes a difference.
Liquix|11 months ago
nickdothutton|1 year ago
[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
unknown|11 months ago
[deleted]
fennecfoxy|11 months ago
gnarlouse|1 year ago
My solution to the horrendous algorithmic recommendations that YouTube tees up these days is DF Tube (Distraction Free YouTube). It's a plugin available on the Firefox & Chrome app stores, perhaps others. As with all browser plugins, decide whether you're willing to trust the developer.
DF Tube goes the full mile by attacking the YouTube DOM and eliminating (with extreme prejudice) anything other than a search bar, a video, and core menu functions. That means the following are gone:
- Notification Bell - Feed - Autoplay - Trending - Comments/Live comments - Related videos
Here's a link to chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/df-tube-distraction...
Here's a link to firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/
chasd00|1 year ago
__rito__|11 months ago
1. Use social media at only one particular time of the day. Inside a strict time window. That's it. Even if you are sitting idly on a car, traveling, or even standing in a queue for something, don't open the scroller app. Just be. Even if you are sick and in bed, don't open the scroller. Make a conversation, read a book, watch a movie, listen to a talk, but never open the scroller. This I learned from Cal Newport, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I will say this has made my life better. And if you do this for some months, you will like the changes in your brain.
2. Don't consume any content without premeditated intent. Don't aimlessly scroll, ever. This point is there in the OP. I scroll a particular FB group only for ~10 ninutes a day. I scroll my very narrow CS/Math/Programming YouTube account for ~15 minutes and add videos to Watch Later. That's it.
allenu|1 year ago
If you took away the algorithms, I don't think you'd necessarily have a relaxing social media feed. You'd still have people sharing so-called "engaging" material and you'd still have to deal with "context collapse" and disagreeable discussions. I think the anonymous nature of online connections inherently make them more impersonal compared with actual face to face ones. And being constantly connected to other human beings digitally (even strangers) is incredibly addictive.
dinkumthinkum|11 months ago
thoughtstheseus|11 months ago
The complete lack of control by users of their feed makes Feed Providers publishers imo. Give me control or take responsibility for the content.
gavmor|1 year ago
ddq|1 year ago
grumpy-de-sre|1 year ago
Long term, once we figure out how to generate feeds that are aren't socially corrosive dumpster fires. Mandate platforms default to using one of a set of approved models (maybe we need a recommendation engine benchmark that scores social divisiveness).
LorenDB|1 year ago
As a space fan, I necessarily see a lot of people on Twitter who are blindly pro- or anti-Elon. Both types get blocked, not because I disagree with them but because I don't need that sort of rabid content in my feed.
Quick edit to add: block all parody accounts on Twitter as well. They almost never are actually worthwhile.
Also, did you know you can block advertisers on Twitter? It's very catarthic.
jajko|1 year ago
My parents and most of their generation experience it in a very similar way. I would say even despite missing out few cool things overall their life experience is better. Simpler, more positive.
I am aiming desperately for similar position. I dont care about coolest new tech unless i can/have to use it directly at my work. I stopped watching most of politics since there is no win there, just mental abyss. I know its sort of giving up, but I cant win this fight so why bother, just wait it out.
One effect I can see that comes with massive power - dont let orange man drag you into his pit of unstable misery, its like a black hole. Engaging with any related info has this effect. He is not exceptional in this, had exes with similar 'skill', but his power is a massive multiplier. Be stronger than him, for yourself and your closest ones.
nfriedly|1 year ago
j3s|1 year ago
crystal_revenge|1 year ago
I understand why this never happened (algorithms are, after all, optimized to the benefit of the company, not the user), but still it's a shame that this was never explored (at least not to my knowledge).
corytheboyd|1 year ago
martythemaniak|1 year ago
C-x_C-f|11 months ago
[0] https://freetubeapp.io/
fmajid|11 months ago
You also need filtering to remove the manufactured pop-culture dross like the Kardashians that is the new opium of the people.
fs_software|11 months ago
https://feedme.digital
dfee|1 year ago
mifydev|1 year ago
asadotzler|1 year ago
My point is, search still works. We don't have to take their feed, or even the feed we create following people. We can just search that shit out. And search results bookmarks in a folder work great for managing that.
omacetamol|11 months ago
linuxhansl|1 year ago
Turned off "Discover" on my Android phone. Was weird first. I felt like I might miss out on something, some important bit of information. "Sometimes it does show me interested things" I thought. And, true, sometimes I get shown a scientific article that would missed otherwise.
But just like when I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts years back, I did not miss any important event.
casey2|11 months ago
The solution is very simple, just limit the like count of posts in your feed.
tsoukase|1 year ago
qwerty456127|1 year ago
asadotzler|1 year ago
righthand|1 year ago
ripped_britches|11 months ago
Tepix|1 year ago
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5601-buil...
Only on Mastodon!
jeremyt|1 year ago
https://scrolldaddy.app
If you don’t have the ability to alter your feeds, taking a break from them is the next best thing.
8bitsrule|11 months ago
So far that doesn't include any algorithms I've run into.
searls|11 months ago
markus_zhang|1 year ago
Social media is a cancer. It only benefits those who have the money to power the algorithms.
ivanjermakov|1 year ago
Funes-|11 months ago
bbarn|11 months ago
BrenBarn|11 months ago
ein0p|1 year ago
__alexander|1 year ago
golergka|11 months ago
digest|11 months ago
Exuma|1 year ago
bravoetch|1 year ago
Suggest to someone that they turn off their phone and leave it at home, and watch them have an almost painful physical reaction.
jurschreuder|1 year ago
ge96|1 year ago
LandoCalrissian|11 months ago
zippyman55|1 year ago
kazinator|1 year ago
kevo1ution|1 year ago
Also, if you ever want to revisit a video, just use chromes history, but you'll find also this rarely happens if ever.
Deprogrammer9|11 months ago
kwerk|11 months ago
nativeit|11 months ago
I haven't been on any kind of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter social network for several years now, I also encourage people to try giving it up for 2-3 months, and I wager that it will feel distinctly odd and uncomfortable if/when you return. From a naive person's perspective, social media is flat out strange. It's got its own culture, lingo, and social constructs that feel a little odd. It's easy to see how it might be manipulative in a lot of subtle ways. But I do admit I lost touch with some people whom I miss. Each person should find their own balance with algorithmically determined content feeds, but I am a firm believer it should be, on balance, less.
MarkLowenstein|1 year ago
al_borland|1 year ago
I'm happy places exist that let people be a little more creative, or allow me the same if I'm in the mood, but it's not something I want all the time. I really like places where I can simple order a #4 without any substitutions and my order is done. Growing up as a picky eater, I caught a lot of flack as a kid for substitutions; my orders never felt easy like other people. I like when my order can be easy.
dymk|1 year ago
majormajor|1 year ago
Algorithmic content feeds are a much more important battle to fight, but "spend more effort on every single other decision too" is not gonna put people in a place to want to be more selective. It'll tire them out more and make them more likely to just put on the default idiot box feed.
gruez|1 year ago
see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue
williamtrask|1 year ago
This is the actual reason why the door is continually held open for propaganda and centralized control. Decentralizing everything struggles with inefficiency problems.
The first person to really discover and popularize this was Edward Bernays — who invented Public Relations to help corporations and politicians weaponize this inefficiency. He kicked off the "Mad Men" of 20th century New York.
The introduction to Bernays's book "Propaganda" lays this out very clearly:
https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_en...
Or if you don't like reading... another overview of Bernays is Adam Curtis's "Century of the Self"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
We will keep giving up control to centralized forces until we can share information freely and efficiently about what choices lead to better/worse outcomes in a decentralized way.
bee_rider|1 year ago
But ordering pizza and getting news have different stakes anyway, so I think these problems should be handled differently. It is reasonable to offload pizza topping decisions, but we should try to learn a bit about the actual positions/competencies of our elected officials.
allenu|1 year ago
In general, I don't personally enjoy having to make decisions about particular ingredients when I go somewhere to eat. It's mental energy I don't want to have to expend. Not having any dietary restrictions, I personally prefer somewhere that offers a fixed set of items. I'd also say that when I was younger, I was afraid of making the wrong choices and didn't know what some ingredients were whenever I'd go somewhere that did have choices, so that added a little bit of anxiety.
cmrx64|1 year ago
There’s this concept of “babble and prune” (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/babble-and-prune) and I argue that for food (and probably most opinions…) the prune aspect is where your personal taste gets most expressed. So they are doing you a service by pre-babbling a set of options for you prune.
Maybe this framework can shed some sense :)
In other words: I’m just trying to get a good pizza, man, I’m not some kind of pizza artist.
Mobius01|1 year ago
gorbachev|1 year ago
I read a lot of online content, from all kinds of sources. Different types of content: short-form, long-form, memes, WaPo editorials, sports, politics, tech, stuff, weird stuff, off-beat, serious, rants, opinions, facts.
The most delightful experiences I've had is when something totally random pops in from someplace. It could come from anywhere, but I've noticed that the best surprises come from places like longreads.com, which collect good writing across a diverse set topics and sources. Pretty much all social platforms do a horrible job at this, and recommend content that is so similar to content I've already consumed that the additional value of that content is extremely low, often even negative.
I think the ideal algorithm for me would be randomly suggestions after filtering out the garbage. No ads disguised as journalism, no influencer content, no clickbait, no spam, no AI slop, etc. I would jump on a platform that does this immediately. Even better, if the platform allowed me to control the knobs on what I consider to be garbage and not garbage.
lostlogin|1 year ago
SubiculumCode|1 year ago
tehjoker|11 months ago
sega_sai|1 year ago
foobarbecue|1 year ago
Murderwords|11 months ago
mikrl|1 year ago
Too much disinfo: community notes and grok are IMO just running cover for the disinfo firehose.
Saw the highest profile figure on the platform (yes him) retweet the most knee jerk takes that could be easily fact checked, but weren’t.
Instead of getting upset or trying to fight it, I yanked out the algo slop cable and am back in the real world. It’s great.
Edit: I didn’t really use it before 2024, so I cannot comment on what it was like under the last management.
I also tend to seek out conflicting views to my own when reading books, so it’s not that I’m just raging at ‘the other side’ either.
snappr021|1 year ago
bravoetch|1 year ago
haswell|1 year ago
It sounds too invasive. To violating. Too extreme. Too much power in the hands of the button holder.
But this is effectively what we’re doing with our phones and watches in particular. It’s one of the reasons I’ve disabled notifications on almost everything.
The electrodes aren’t necessary.
yosito|11 months ago
epictacactus|11 months ago
dearing|1 year ago
There will still be communities and fringe opinion and that is healthy. You won't have content generated just to push advertisements alone which is not.
QuadrupleA|11 months ago
unknown|11 months ago
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meetkevin|1 year ago
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scics|1 year ago
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MaxikCZ|1 year ago
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casey2|11 months ago
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whoitwas|1 year ago
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firtoz|11 months ago
tac19|11 months ago
I have heard this a few times now, what is going on? The news hasn't mentioned anything about Neo Nazis, and there is no large organized effort to round up the Jews, let alone exterminate them. This seems like hyperbolic language that is in really poor taste, which undermines the seriousness of what the second world war was fought over.