Escaping the Algorithm (Part 1)

Do you feel like social media just isn’t what it used to be? Or maybe that’s what you feel about the internet in general? A word was coined to describe the descent of many of the platforms that we use—from enjoyable to dysfunctionally addictive… that word is “enshittification,” which, to me feels pretty accurate.

As you know, the web in general has changed a lot over the last 20 years. Optimizing sites for monetization requires optimizing for attention. Justin Timberlake portrayal of Sean Parker in the Facebook movie, The Social Network, basically said, “You can’t put ads on a site while it’s growing. You need people to be addicted first.”

The first step of attention is a product people enjoy. The second step is making it addictive, or as they say in “the biz”, stick—because it’s far less onerous. Once you’ve done those things, then you bust out the ads.

But you have to acclimate the audience to the ads. You can’t just insert a bunch all at once. Like adding egg to an ice cream mixture that’s been on the stove, you have to temper it.

Goodbye Friends

Long ago we were used to seeing only the feeds of people we had selected or connected with—that sounds so nice. So ads only started showing up occasionally. Definitely not enough to bug us. But the big money is in selling lots and lots of ad space. And to do that, sites needed to adjust our expectations of our feeds to be less friends, and more random entertainment stuff.

I’ve completely ignoring the chemical addition that social media stimulates entirely here, which is regrettable but necessary to keep this short and readable. But, in short, every new post we scroll to is a small hit of drug. What’s in the box? Oh that… it’s fine I guess, but what’s in the next box. And on and on we scroll.

So, to reset expectations for how often we would see the friends and brands we’d chosen, the algorithm took over—resorting what was displayed based on math behind the scenes. Maybe you’re lucky enough to remember an internet that showed you posts chronologically. Most recent to least recent. You knew when you’d sense everything and you closed the app. Like email, chronological feeds have a finish line. Companies with growth targets can’t have that. So, the algorithm was promised to deliver the “most relevant” stuff first, and whatever else it felt like later.

Except over time, the other stuff wasn’t friends or brands or anything that we’d said we wanted to see. Much of the time it was innocuous enough, some memes and jokes and news. But them, memes turned mean. Those content creators that realized audience begat more audience, and they infiltrated our ecosystems. And gaining audience was even easier if you could prey on our emotions.

Hello Junk

And so our feeds filled with junk. But we held on, addicted to opening each new post like a Christmas gift anticipating for the best and getting a dopamine rush of glee or anger with each one, while also subconsciously hoping for some sign that our “friends” were still out there.

I did a test this week, just to see how quickly the feed can shift based on your activity. I both would and wouldn’t recommend this because of the consequences.

Each of us have a pretty defined world view around the topics we would define as important. We can disagree about those world views, and even what is important enough to be held as a worldview, but we all hold them.

For this-very simple-experiment, I decided to engage with posts that ran counter to my beliefs. It helped that Facebook in particular had been surfacing posts fairly regularly in that direction, so I took their bait on purpose. And the best way to signal to Facebook that you want more of something is to engage with it. And the strongest form of engagement—that I can tell—is taking a screen shot.

After a taking a literal handful of screenshots of alternative points of view, my feed was busted. Not slightly, but almost fully and completely unrecognizable. A sea of contrarian POVs with the occasional friendly island where I could linger for a moment on a post from someone I was connected with.

And while many of the posts were emotionally baiting, because I know how this stuff works, I was able to spend time there without a negative emotional outcomes. But even though my feed was wrecked, it was enlightening to see what “the other side” sees on a daily basis. Post after post reinforcing a central opinion around a half-dozen core beliefs.

For example, if a core belief of a group was that brick homes should be abolished, there are a core set of 6-12 posts, all slightly different but close enough to give the illusion of unity, and all help reinforce that core belief. Some may mock brick about its color and masonry. Some may try to attack brick based on fake evidence using Ai generated images that look entirely real. Some may show how groups of others have moved away from brick, helping you feel a community will be there for you when you too “hate the brick”.

Now repeat that same process for the other dozen or so core beliefs and you end up with hundreds of posts designed to program you with a specific impression about a topic, or reinforce your belief in it.

So, like I said, I both recommend this test to see what influences “the other side” in that space, and also don’t recommend it because it will ruin your feed. I’ve been trying to screenshot my way out of it and it’s been slow-going.

Algorithm = Bad

But it becomes incredibly easy to see how these spaces are bad for our minds, bad for our friendships, and bad for our ability to talk with others like adults about complicated stuff. When everything is identity politics, and every position we hold core to an identity that we demand respect for, there’s no room for common ground.

And so, we’re left with the algorithms. Feeding us emotion for profit. Holding access to our friends hostage in exchange for our attention, and our sanity.

But there’s hope. There are a number of ways to escape the algorithm. To find more time for important things. To stay connected with friends. To have deep, moving conversations instead of memetic quips.

I’ll share more about those tricks next time. Until then…

Here are some things I found interesting this week.

Real Things Look Fake Now - hankschannel - YouTuber Hank Green talks about how AI (and disinformation in general) has made it so that we don’t trust real things anymore. A big fear of generative AI’s ability to create real-looking fake-things was that people would believe the fake stuff was real. I think we discounted how we would also think real stuff was fake. If we can’t agree what’s real, do we even live in a shared reality anymore. https://youtube.com/watch?v=EVyhEUdiPUY&si=x3JJ8ZUygpBMSUdH

Judd Apatow Predicted the Manosphere - Wisecrack - The current manosphere we live in today is a reaction to a more empathetic and more intellectual male we’ve seen grow in popularity over the last 20 years. While Judd didn’t predict it per se, the evolution of the male leads in his movies aligns with what we’ve seen. Less friends. More muscle. Less studious. More ketamine fueled adrenalinistic competition. Oh, and less empathy, right J.D.? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LPJx5oqsOc

Harriet Tubman was removed from the National Parks Underground Railroad web page (and then put back after outcry). A similar situation to Jackie Robinson being removed from the Defense Department’s military service records page “on accident” as evidence of African-American slavery is wiped from federal records. It’s nice that we can muster enough support to retain these big names on some of these sites, but when the context around it changes (saying the people were important because they were important, rather than important because they did great things despite the hatred and systemic oppression they faced), it loses it’s potency. https://who13.com/news/harriet-tubman-reference-removed-from-national-parks-underground-railroad-web-page/

The expert who kept eye drops from blinding you was fired yesterday. Put simply, the little bit of government oversight that was still happening to protect consumers continues to erode. The FDA has been largely ineffective for decades (again, read No More Tears coming out this month). https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-expert-who-kept-eye-drops-from-blinding-you-was-fired-yesterday

Have people died as a result of US Aid being shut down? Yes, and the long-them implications are even worse. What’s gripping about this article is how we quickly we neglect thinking about soft power across the world. After reading “Everything is Tuberculosis” last month, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how cutting hundreds of thousands of people off from their medications for Tb, HIV, Malaria, and more will only create more drug-resistant variations for us to deal with later. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts-impact.html