Leaving Algorithm-Driven Spaces
If you spend a lot of time on places like Bearblog, Ooh Directory, and Bubbles Town, you run into a few common themes in blogging. One of them that particularly interested me this year is the "feed annoyance" post. I am not calling anyone out specifically: this isn't about something that only happened recently or that a recent blogger did (although many have). This is more about the fact that it happens so often from so many people, and it made me want to think and read about it.
I am not immune, of course. I'll get to that later.
Scenario: You're looking at your favorite feed aggregator site hoping to find some interesting blog posts to read. Either you've already gone through your favorites list or you don't keep one, and you still feel like you're craving more words and thoughts from others.
As you go through the list today, this week, over the last month, you find yourself getting increasingly frustrated, exasperated by the repetitive topics, informal grammar or too-strict grammar and structure, and what feels like performative noise. It's not what you came here for - today, on the feed, but also 2 years ago when you started blogging or monitoring for posts.
Then you make a post about it. Something compels you, I am not sure what. What compelled me for this post was curiosity after seeing a pattern.
Probably others make posts in response to your post.
When I am in this moment with you, I'm reading your post about it after observing it myself because I too crave the way others express themselves digitally. Your post makes me mad. Not because I agree or disagree with what you prefer, but that you feel you can demand what you should be seeing in the blog aggregator feed.
The first time this happened to me was almost a year ago now, and I got so irate I had to take a few weeks off the feeds. How dare people try to dictate how others express things! But as time went by, and I got back into my feed habits to satiate those cravings, I started to see things from a different angle. I started to see patterns where many of the people who complained about how others post, were the same people who started blogging partially (or sometimes completely) to escape algorithm-driven platforms.
I don't know anyone's ages but it's possible several of these bloggers never experienced an internet without predatory algorithms. They knew they wanted away from that but they didn't actually know what they were getting into on the other side. What happens to your feed and the stuff that's shown to you when it's no longer being curated to the data you're feeding it? Do they even know how much behavioral data goes into their experience online?
Do they know that by trying to completely 'avoid algorithms' they no longer have systems that are catering to their personal data - what they like/comment, when they like it, the milliseconds spent lingering vs a literally immediate scroll… Do they know that leaving algorithm-driven online spaces means they will see a bunch of stuff they don't want to see?
That's my frustration. Not that people are doing things I don't like, or that I accidentally read a post it turned out I wasn't interested in, or even that people talk about worldviews I could never respect… it's that people have a problem with that. You chose to come here, you wanted a place like this. This is what it's like in places like this. They have minimal if any algorithmic presence: new, trending, hot. Not: behavioral readings, individual user interest, eye tracking.
If you want a place that caters more to your needs and curates a feed to stuff you'd rather see, find a blogging site that does that. Keep bookmarks. Use an RSS feed reader instead to collect the voices of people you want to read.
But maybe this isn't an individual rant, maybe what I'm observing is how our relationship with the internet has changed over the last 15 years or so. Maybe hyper-tuned algorithmic feeds have altered what we expect when we get online.
Maybe social media platforms and major media engines have been training us to expect seamless, individualized curation. Algorithmic feeds learn our implicit preferences and continuously filter out the rest. Without realizing it, maybe we've grown accustomed to an internet that has done its best to fit us as a group and as individuals. You lose the habit or expectation of encountering unfiltered human activity when platforms are constantly tailoring to your needs (so they can understand best which ads to serve you).
If you take a break or vow to "quit algorithms" forever, it definitely feels like an extreme change, and not the one you were looking for. For example: Maybe you wanted to find like-minded people and enjoy spaces that felt like they gave you more of a community, vs the isolation of having to compete for ranking on a social media feed just for your IRL friends to see your posts. (This example is based on me: I was looking for this when I started doing huge social media breaks and re-engaging with smaller web spaces that were more intentional, including Neocities as well as blogging platforms. I think it impacts us all in different ways, not just what this post is talking about or my experience.)
The expectation of seamlessness doesn't magically disappear because you left that part of your digital life behind. An uncurated feed such as a raw trending page based on simple votes/recent posts isn't tuned to anyone's personal taste. It's a mirror of the current preferences of a collective group of strangers who are all there for different reasons and all craving different words/formats/ideas.
To someone conditioned by algorithms, that content probably feels repetitive, unpolished, or irrelevant - and it's often interpreted as a failure of the platform. The instinct is to demand the space is fixed/filtered to their needs… instead of recognizing that by leaving algorithm-driven spaces to prefer small, low-feature platforms, the burden of selection has shifted to the individual.
I see this reaction everywhere, not just on blogging feeds reacting to who is writing and how they're doing it. Platforms without algorithmic gatekeeping draw people for many different reasons; some may want to publish polished essays, others are seeking a sandbox to find their voice or test half-formed ideas. On this blog, I am exploring topics I am not an expert in.
When we assume everyone is here for the same purpose (or should be), variation feels like noise. Language and expression on the web doesn't work that way, though. An uncurated web is naturally messy, varied, and occasionally annoying. If you want to stick around, learn to meet it with curiosity, or filter it in your own way so you can comfortably navigate spaces that aren't catered to anyone. (Or don't, keep complaining. I recognize that by making this post... I'm making one of those posts.)