Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

The author sort of (but not really) acknowledges this midway through, but this is basically a summary of the most recent Technology Connections video, <i>Algorithms are breaking how we think</i>:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;QEJpZjg8GuA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;QEJpZjg8GuA</a><p>I&#x27;d rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration&#x2F;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!

Social media has really proven that phrase that &quot;the medium is the message&quot;, which I remember long ago thinking was a little odd and not obviously true.<p>With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I&#x27;ve taken a cynically mechanistic view to this:<p>We&#x27;re basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren&#x27;t sufficient for advanced reasoning.<p>So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.

In a lot of ways I really like recommendation algorithms, regularly I&#x27;ve had youtube recommend a video that&#x27;s converted into new sub (eg. LiamTronix and his electric tractor conversion).<p>What we really need is &quot;responsible&quot; recommendation systems (that allow the joy of discovery while aggressively damping rage bait and extreme view points). They&#x27;d need to be trained with some kind of socially beneficial reward function rather than pure engagement or advertiser dollars.<p>Could such a recommendation systems operate on top of existing social graphs?

Reddit is unfortunately a major thing in my life. There&#x27;s an eternal battle between left and right politics in my small European country&#x27;s relevant subreddits.<p>Not very healthy - it&#x27;s like a never ending feed of &quot;someone is wrong on the Internet&quot;.<p>For the record: &quot;right&quot; here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party.<p>Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I do take a break, I see that the other side &quot;wins&quot; to a noticeably larger degree. Again, small country.

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.

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 &quot;platform guidelines&quot;—and that was my breaking point.<p>That moment made me realize something deeper: it wasn’t just the endless feed algorithms shaping my behavior, but also the platform &quot;guidelines&quot; themselves—subtly reinforcing a habit designed to keep me engaged for advertisers.<p>So I quit. Completely. What Worked for Me-<p>WHAT I STOPPED:<p>1. Deactivated my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Deleted my Twitter account.<p>2. Removed all social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) from my phone.<p>3. Deleted Chrome from my phone and switched to my OS’s default browser (Safari) in signed-out mode.<p>4. Kept only one messaging app—Telegram.<p>WHAT I STARTED<p>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.<p>2. Went outside more—leaving my phone behind.<p>RESULTs:<p>1. Surprisingly, I think about sex less often throughout the day.<p>2. My close relationships have improved—I now have more meaningful time for a few important people instead of spreading myself thin over thousands.<p>3. I worry less—both in frequency and intensity.<p>4. I’ve regained my ability to read novels for hours—which, for me, requires the longest chain of attention.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>I feel so much freer!

I can&#x27;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&#x27;t see a high probability of success. I sure hope I&#x27;m wrong.

This advice is missing something crucial which is how to discover new creators sans feeds. Not saying it&#x27;s impossible, but it&#x27;s something they excel at and they&#x27;ve extinguished a lot of the old ways.

This article that I discovered because it was at the top of HN&#x27;s frontpage is really telling it like it is!

This post sounds like it wants to be a manifesto but really doesn&#x27;t add up to much and lacks punch.<p>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&#x27;t engage with content that outrages or upsets me, so it doesn&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>I think there is an obvious answer though: taking control of the algorithm via AI. I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;re there yet, but it&#x27;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 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.<p>LinkedIn already has this feature and it&#x27;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.<p>I still personally find LinkedIn and Youtube to be a net-negative on my mental health, but these settings have helped a lot.

Yes totally! I like Reddit because you can pick your own subreddits but even that can be flooded by ragebait&#x2F;clickbait

Similar criticism was made of television: &quot;The great thing about television is that it&#x27;s so passive.&quot; - Ted Turner (TBS, CNN). A sizable fraction of the population has a TV on all the time.<p>His more important point is that recommendation algorithms combined with replies create terrible conversations. That helps explain why it&#x27;s so hard to discuss anything complicated on social media.

Read <i>Filterworld</i> by Kyle Chayka (&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bookshop.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;books&#x2F;filterworld-how-algorithms-flattened-culture-kyle-chayka&#x2F;20025251" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bookshop.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;books&#x2F;filterworld-how-algorithms-flat...</a>&gt;); it&#x27;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.<p>&gt;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&#x27;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, &quot;Taste enjoys beauty, without being able to explain it.&quot;<p>and then<p>&gt;As taste requires surprise, it also thrives on challenge and risk, treading too far in a particular direction. Safety may avoid embarrassment, but it&#x27;s also boring.<p>and so<p>&gt;The bounds of aesthetic acceptability become tighter and tighter until all that&#x27;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?<p>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.<p>All of these forms of passive content involve advertiser influence just the same as social media algorithms.<p>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&#x27;ve actually been working on something tackling exactly this for a little while now. It&#x27;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 &quot;local small town history&quot; and also &quot;important cs papers&quot;, and those interested in either or both can follow as they choose. It&#x27;s alts by default. And to start, it&#x27;s focused on links.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;s still invite-only, but anyone reading this page is obviously a great fit so here&#x27;s an invite link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lynkmi.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;signup&#x2F;?invite_code=333ee833-e3dd-4600-8436-fc1daa94db1e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lynkmi.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;signup&#x2F;?invite_code=333ee833-e3d...</a>

Couldn&#x27;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.<p>I can&#x27;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.

For the past year or so I&#x27;ve only been watching YouTube in private browser windows to avoid getting too stuck in an algo niche. Sometimes I&#x27;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.<p>Its especially interesting recently as Youtube encourages you to search for something before giving you recommendations, so you get to &quot;seed&quot; your session with topics you like. If nothing comes to mind I&#x27;ll just start with Practical Engineering and go from there.<p>The only downside is that I can&#x27;t &quot;like&quot; content to help the creators, since I&#x27;m not logged in

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.<p>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.<p>Socrates was even complaining about this, and it’s arguably far worse what is happening today than what he was seeing.

`We don’t all have the freedom, interest or willpower to delete social media from our lives entirely.`<p>i am really against this notion. why do we have to surrender ourselves to this forced reality. i really don&#x27;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&#x27;t tap on user&#x27;s backs and guide them to more moderate use because it doesn&#x27;t makes a difference.

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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.eutopian.io&#x2F;building-a-better-linkedin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.eutopian.io&#x2F;building-a-better-linkedin&#x2F;</a>

I don&#x27;t think algorithms are the problem at all...they only magnify existing biases and prejudices. We didn&#x27;t live in some magical fantastical happy-chappy world before the Internet where people didn&#x27;t beat their wives and any foreigner they could find, try to kill the gays, etc.

If you&#x27;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.<p>My solution to the horrendous algorithmic recommendations that YouTube tees up these days is DF Tube (Distraction Free YouTube). It&#x27;s a plugin available on the Firefox &amp; Chrome app stores, perhaps others. As with all browser plugins, decide whether you&#x27;re willing to trust the developer.<p>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:<p>- Notification Bell - Feed - Autoplay - Trending - Comments&#x2F;Live comments - Related videos<p>Here&#x27;s a link to chrome: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;df-tube-distraction-free&#x2F;mjdepdfccjgcndkmemponafgioodelna" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;df-tube-distraction...</a><p>Here&#x27;s a link to firefox: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;df-youtube&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;df-youtube&#x2F;</a>

I have two thumb rules about social media scrolling:<p>1. Use social media at only one particular time of the day. Inside a strict time window. That&#x27;s it. Even if you are sitting idly on a car, traveling, or even standing in a queue for something, don&#x27;t open the scroller app. Just be. Even if you are sick and in bed, don&#x27;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.<p>2. Don&#x27;t consume any content without premeditated intent. Don&#x27;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&#x2F;Math&#x2F;Programming YouTube account for ~15 minutes and add videos to Watch Later. That&#x27;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&#x27;re overstating the effects of the algorithms and putting too much blame on them. I think we need to recognize that the technology we&#x27;ve built is inherently addictive and also making human connections more impersonal.<p>If you took away the algorithms, I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;d necessarily have a relaxing social media feed. You&#x27;d still have people sharing so-called &quot;engaging&quot; material and you&#x27;d still have to deal with &quot;context collapse&quot; 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.

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.<p>The complete lack of control by users of their feed makes Feed Providers publishers imo. Give me control or take responsibility for the content.

Glad to see Bluesky mentioned. I look forward to trading custom feed algorithms like Pokémon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stronglytyped.uk&#x2F;articles&#x2F;bluesky-firehose-meet-hacker-news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stronglytyped.uk&#x2F;articles&#x2F;bluesky-firehose-meet-hack...</a>

Additionally, take action to shape your feeds to your desires rather than Big Tech&#x27;s desires. Block buttons exist for a reason, as does the &quot;don&#x27;t recommend this channel&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;t need that sort of rabid content in my feed.<p>Quick edit to add: block all parody accounts on Twitter as well. They almost never are actually worthwhile.<p>Also, did you know you can block advertisers on Twitter? It&#x27;s very catarthic.

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&#x27;t seem that different in my case, but I probably am catching some things that I would have missed otherwise.

&quot;we are being boiled like frogs&quot; is a great analogy, definitely going to use that one.

I remember years ago someone talking about the idea of &quot;open algorithms&quot; 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.<p>I understand why this never happened (algorithms are, after all, optimized to the benefit of the company, not the user), but still it&#x27;s a shame that this was never explored (at least not to my knowledge).

I&#x27;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.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freetubeapp.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freetubeapp.io&#x2F;</a>

The real issue is control. Facebook allowed you to go back to chronological view by appending &amp;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.<p>You also need filtering to remove the manufactured pop-culture dross like the Kardashians that is the new opium of the people.

I&#x27;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&#x27;ve used it daily for years and don&#x27;t anticipate going back to social media any time soon.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feedme.digital" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feedme.digital</a>

Currently ranked #1 on the HN feed!

I&#x27;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 have been using News Feed Eradicator <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;news-feed-eradicator&#x2F;fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;news-feed-eradicato...</a> for close to a decade now in my computer browsers. This is awesome. Desperately seeking something similar for mobile browsers.

This!<p>Turned off &quot;Discover&quot; on my Android phone. Was weird first. I felt like I might miss out on something, some important bit of information. &quot;Sometimes it does show me interested things&quot; I thought. And, true, sometimes I get shown a scientific article that would missed otherwise.<p>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&#x27;s the post that&#x27;s the problem<p>The solution is very simple, just limit the like count of posts in your feed.

There is a simple method not to kill FB&#x27;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 &#x27;drive&#x27; 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.

Cut the cord but for infinite-scroll addiction.

[brought to you by a HN ranking algorithm]

Related: FOSDEM 2025 talk &quot;Build your own timeline algorithm&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fosdem.org&#x2F;2025&#x2F;schedule&#x2F;event&#x2F;fosdem-2025-5601-build-your-own-timeline-algorithm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fosdem.org&#x2F;2025&#x2F;schedule&#x2F;event&#x2F;fosdem-2025-5601-buil...</a><p>Only on Mastodon!

I have just recently launched (last week) A side project which helps people block (via dns) social media on a schedule.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrolldaddy.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrolldaddy.app</a><p>If you don’t have the ability to alter your feeds, taking a break from them is the next best thing.

For most of my life I&#x27;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.<p>So far that doesn&#x27;t include any algorithms I&#x27;ve run into.

I changed my to a write-only relationship with social media a couple years ago and I&#x27;m building an app called POSSE Party to help others do the same thing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;posseparty.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;posseparty.com&#x2F;</a>

Maybe just don&#x27;t use social media in general. I do have an X account which I want to delete. Other than that I don&#x27;t have FB, Instagram, Tiktok or anything similar.<p>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&#x27;s screen time limits is a good place to start.

Hey, <i>every</i> feed. Let&#x27;s not pretend HN isn&#x27;t guilty of it, too.

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&#x27;t looking great these days.

It&#x27;s ironic that we&#x27;re discovering this article from a feed. Sorry to tell you folks, but there&#x27;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.

I built a small service to get all the RSS feeds of hn posts you interacted with: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hntorss.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hntorss.com&#x2F;</a>

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.

Why do people really need to be told this? This is fundamentally obvious at the most extreme basic of levels. It&#x27;s as obvious as a red cube being red.

Ironically this post is #1 on my hackernews feed

It is interesting to see what platforms are on what side. While I left Reddit, Imgur is a place I go every now and then.

Say what you will about Bluesky, but having your follower feed just be people you follow is extremely refreshing.

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.

First, stop letting what you read dictate what you think, regardless of how the material was selected.

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.<p>Also, if you ever want to revisit a video, just use chromes history, but you&#x27;ll find also this rarely happens if ever.

I use Discord as a workaround. I value the opinions of others not marketing PR algorithms.

I just want an algo where I set the reward function instead of “dwell time and view ads”

I&#x27;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&#x27;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 <i>follow</i> versus the things I want to be vaguely aware of. It&#x27;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).<p>I haven&#x27;t been on any kind of Facebook&#x2F;Instagram&#x2F;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&#x2F;when you return. From a naive person&#x27;s perspective, social media is flat out strange. It&#x27;s got its own culture, lingo, and social constructs that feel a little odd. It&#x27;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&#x27;s one they&#x27;d like. This makes no sense to me.

I&#x27;ve been thinking about an ideal &quot;algorithm&quot; for myself.<p>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.<p>The most delightful experiences I&#x27;ve had is when something totally random pops in from someplace. It could come from anywhere, but I&#x27;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&#x27;ve already consumed that the additional value of that content is extremely low, often even negative.<p>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.

Tell that to MAGA, live and breathe the Russian firehouse feed

More non-political solutions for political problems.

I honestly think that platforms that are large enough should either not have algorithmic feeds at all, or have a public algorithm for it.

I love the irony of this being #1 on the HN feed.

Oh stfu, I have tried everything to gain exposure, if I suck this bad, just tell me to eat a bullet and stop my wasting my time.

I deleted Xitter for this reason recently.<p>Too much disinfo: community notes and grok are IMO just running cover for the disinfo firehose.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Edit: I didn’t really use it before 2024, so I cannot comment on what it was like under the last management.<p>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.

What if our primary feed is HN?

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.<p>It sounds too invasive. To violating. Too extreme. Too much power in the hands of the button holder.<p>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.<p>The electrodes aren’t necessary.

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&#x27;s somewhat hidden &quot;Following&quot; tab, only to find that even when I explicitly ask to see posts from people that I&#x27;m following, literally every second post is &quot;recommended for you&quot; bullshit.

Who hasn’t known this since 2018 or earlier? Im14andthisisdeep vibes

Without online advertising most of the drivel would disappear.<p>There will still be communities and fringe opinion and that is healthy. You won&#x27;t have content generated just to push advertisements alone which is not.

Algorithmic feeds were about when I stopped feeling proud of Silicon Valley.