Kill Your Feeds
Importance: 6 | # | tech, social-media
We used to control apps like Facebook and Instagram with our own choices. They became daily comforts, making the world seem a little bit smaller and closer by bringing the people that we cared about together in to one place.
But from the perspective of these companies, that’s a problem. Our personal worlds, our friends, family, and connections, are finite. Once we’ve caught up, we put the app down. That’s bad for business.
So what can we do?
- Go directly to the source - if you like a particular TikTok creator, Facebook page or YouTube channel, skip the feed and go directly to their pages. Consider bookmarking their profiles individually.
- Learn to find information and entertainment without a feed - try to find a creator making videos or writing about a topic of interest without having to stumble across them in a feed.
...
I've been thinking more about how useful a personal recommendation sytem would be. The idea is that you have a software that goes through your feeds - instagram, twitter, hackernews, favourite blogs, and anything else you want and gathers all of the data. These posts are then ranked as per your liking and you have full control over the ranking. This will be more of an explotative algorithm rather than explorative. But there are ways to incorporate exploration.
An obvious objection here is about money - who's going to pay to serve you the content. I would love it if each platform accepts some fee and provides an api for easy access of the feed.