Social media For You feed pages are a bit like public town squares but the means of navigation is less intentional compared to an actual town square where I can actually choose where to walk and what to look at.
At least for me, I seldom visit my following feed on X unless I'm searching for a user who I've noticed hasn't posted in a while or posted something interesting that I want to refer back to because I forgot to bookmark it.
Usually, I just scroll through the For You page and I'm very apprehensive of liking tweets as the X algorithm will start flooding similar tweets all over my feed as a way to keep me hooked more onto the platform, obviously.
I can like a tweet without wanting to see more of similar tweets. Maybe it was just a tweet of a funny meme or a travel image that I enjoyed in the moment, like this one:
funny how the next tweet starts with "Dear algorithm", almost adopted it as a title for this post.
So long as it doesn't mess with the X algorithm, I'm happy.
It's frustrating because a single like becomes a signal that I want my entire feed transformed around that topic. Sometimes I just want to appreciate something without it defining my entire experience.
In a real town square, nodding at one street performer doesn't mean fifty more appear around you!
The lack of control makes me more passive, less engaged and I've noticed myself hesitating before interacting with anything on legacy social media, which in some ways feels backward, as in shouldn't social media make us more social, not less?
On the other side of the spectrum, I think the algorithm takes a backseat from being the problem to a potential solution given the sheer amount of content that's being created every second. Without some kind of filtering, we'd all drown in the noise.
But then also, If I'm hesitant to like posts because it messes with my feed, imagine being a creator who pours hours into something only to have it buried because it doesn't fit the algorithm's idea of engaging content?
A travel photo like this one above might get some engagement from travel enthusiasts, but unless it sparks controversy or instant reactions, it's quickly buried under content designed to trigger stronger responses.
I don't know but such a realization does create this weird pressure where creators aren't making content first for people anymore. They're making it for the algorithm first, hoping it'll then show it to a lot of people, which means the middleman has become the main audience and the main audience is pushed to the fringes of relevance, i.e an afterthought.
With how public town squares have evolved into algorithmic feeds, I guess a potential solution for creators and consumers alike is rethinking how we interact online, where's the balance between curation and control?
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