"De-Algofy": Becoming More Resilient To Robot Recommendations

I've had this article idea rattling around in my head for a bit, but given the state of, well, everything, i think now's maybe a good time to lay it down.

I used to be a huge proponent of social media, back in the early oughts and naughties (aughts and naughts? zeroes and teens?), before we understood that these sites ultimately cook your brain.

I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on exactly how they manage the brain braising process, but it involves a lot of highly paid psychologists and designers making the products we all use to be as addictive and "sticky" as possible. We all live in segmented realities, funneled into them by design and math, to get us to buy and listen to and read the "right" things, with "right" in this context being whatever the site owner wants from you. Unless they're doing Dr. Evil type plots (which, to be clear, some are!), what these sites and apps almost always want from you are two things: eyeballs on ads, and clicks on those ads.

The internet today looks completely different from the internet of the 90s, or the early 2000s. Back then, you had to go out and about on the "world wide web" and find cool websites. You'd collect those cool websites into bookmarks. Maybe you'd share those bookmarks with your friends. If you wrote a blog, maybe you were part of a "web ring" of like-minded writers that connected all of the disparate sites together sequentially.

That internet is almost all gone now. Now we just visit the same 5-10 sites, every day. It has affected our behaviors, our worldview, our politics, our social connections, everything. It's pretty gross if you think about it for too long, kinda like what happens if you linger on the cheese-making process ("we're going to take raw milk, we're gonna mix it with enzymes from a baby cow's stomach, we're going to stuff that in a cave for a couple years, and we're gonna wait for mold and bacteria and to ruin the milk, but in a tasty way!").

The internet of today is aggressively designed to part you with two things: your wallet, and your attention. Ideally, they grab your attention while deftly lifting your wallet, so you don't even notice. The art of misdirection ain't just for pickpockets, ya know.

So what can you do, if you wanted to reclaim your attention and keep people from picking your pockets? It takes effort, and some suggestions might sting more than others, but there are ways to throw sand into the gears of these invisible systems.

For the sake of writing cleverness, I'm going to call this process "De-algofying" - that is, defying The Algorithms (all hail The Algorithms) that do a lot of heavy lifting that influences our daily lives.

And really, the tl;dr is just to be mindful of what you're looking at, and why. Learn to ask yourself "Why am i seeing this content?" dozens of times a day. Be aware of how you arrived at that video. Trace your steps backwards - did you start watching this dude because you find him interesting, or because it was dropped right in front of you just at the right time?

Some caveats: I am not remotely an expert on the inner workings of these systems; the suggestions below are simply steps I've taken, or plan on taking, based on what I know about how the internet works as a technically-minded layperson that's been on the internet for 30 years. Specifically, I make zero guarantees that any of these steps work, or hide you from The Algorithm, or the prying eyes of spy agencies.

So, let's get to it.

This is one large, frightening, annoying step, but it's a critical one. Every social media site you have an account on (and some even that you don't) is tracking you everywhere online, mostly using cookies and other web tracking tricks, like invisible pixels and all of those "share this to XYZ now!" buttons you see everywhere.

Ever notice how a link you share has a bunch of gibberish appended to it, usually after a question mark in the URL? That's a lot of encrypted data about you and your browsing history that the sites track - where the link came from, who's sending, how you're sending it, when you're sending it, whether the content you're sharing was itself shown to you as part of a campaign, and lots more. Again, this isn't (usually) malicious, but it is a leaky sieve for privacy; and all of that data is absolutely being fed into your social media profile for future ad-targeting opportunities.

And once you're on the social media apps directly, they track you even more - what you're searching for, which friends you interact with, which ads catch your attention for 0.45 seconds longer, which way your mouse cursor moves. Maybe you'll be roped into what's called an A/B test, where a site might show you your regular social feed, but another user might see a slightly differently tweaked version of the same feed - perhaps the colors are different, or the font style has changed. Which user spent more time on the site, A or B? Do this sort of invisible user testing 400,000 times across a whole site's userbase, and eventually the companies get more data to dial in yet more advertising directly to your eyeballs, and the site gets 0.01% more addicting.

The entire social media experience of all the sites you've heard of, with some rare exceptions (Mastodon, and to a lesser extent, Bluesky), is tailored for your current experience today based on ALL your previous behavior. And those behaviors themselves get A/B tested, refined, algorithmically optimized, and re-fed to you, over and over and over and over.

Eventually, this leads to users having wildly different experiences. When I was still on Instagram, my timeline was almost all cats and modular synthesizers, crowding out even my real friends' ever-declining posting. My wife's was a lot of makeup, also cats (we like cats, man, what do you want), and various gothic-themed accounts. Our interactions with the IG feed influenced our future interactions with the IG feed, iterated thousands and thousands of times over years.

These sites are all gigantic, writhing masses of algorithms designed to show you things that tickle your reptile brain. One of the biggest impacts to de-algofying your daily existence is kicking these sites to the curb.

Did I say I got rid of IG? Well, almost, but not quite. I indeed deleted my personal social media account of many years, tied to my friends and family and using my real name. That account is gone. instead, I have a different Instagram account, but it's aggressively curated for exactly one purpose: my music-making. I share my songs to other like-minded music accounts, interact only with those other folks in the hobby, follow related hashtags, and that's it. As a result, the feed is entirely dedicated to my hobby. Now, to be sure, the site still throws the occasional funny animal video or spatula sale, but I make a point to scroll past, even if the cat is cute (and all cats are cute) or the spatula is very lovely. This is the "being mindful" part of all this. A pleasant side effect is I use Instagram much less now that it's focused on exactly one thing, and I only open the app up when I'm in a music mood. Less screen time is always a positive.

If your business or hobby runs directly through social media, create a profile that interacts with just that use case, and aggressively curate the experience to keep it focused.

Find Your Niche(s) And Get Specific

Surely you use part of your internet time to pursue a hobby or five. Even though the modern day internet has atrophied severely, there's plenty of niches to be found for whatever interests you. There are still specific car forums and technical sites and weird art projects all over the place, each filled to the brim with other people extremely into your very specific interest.

You don't need Facebook groups or Instagram hashtags to find your people - you just need to go out and find the people powered sites that still exist, and frequent those instead. And you will often find that these "hidden" sites carry higher quality conversations - they may be actively moderated, or perhaps the user base is more mature in their discussions. And those sites in turn might have non-web-based communities, such as Discord servers or, if you're really deep in the murky depths, IRC.

Seek Out Subreddits Below The "Garbage Threshold"

Reddit is a wonderful website; I use it often, and appending "reddit" to a web search often makes the difference between a useless set of results or an actual answer to your question. But it also comes with a certain... reputation of being a weird place filled with aggressive weirdos and cranks. And it's true! Reddit IS full of aggressive weirdos and cranks! They are seemingly everywhere!

But only seemingly. There is a secret to responsible Reddit usage, and it is related to the previous point - you need to seek out niches. Reddit is large and old enough that there are almost assuredly at least three active subreddits dedicated to your hobby or special interest. The tricky thing is finding the right one.

There's an unwritten, vaguely specified Law on Reddit, generally stated as "the quality of a subreddit is inversely proportional to how large it is". There is a gulf between the experiences of, say, r/Cooking (membership: 4.3 million) and a more niche culinary subreddit like r/NoScrapLeftBehind (membership: 45,000). This isn't to say that you are going to have a bad time on a large subreddit, but more often than not the discussion and content that bubbles to the top are going to be more generic and less interesting. Whereas in r/cooking you might see the same "How do I cook more vegetarian meals?" questions asked day in and day out, over on r/Vegan (1.9 million members) you might find more nuanced discussions about complete proteins or the finer points of making seitan at home. If you want to focus in even further, you could even go to r/seitan (4,500 members) and talk endlessly about your favorite wheat gluten dish.

(What is the Garbage Threshold, anyway? In my experience, subreddits start to get a bit shaky around 100k subscribers, and lose the quality plot entirely by 250k. Your mileage may vary.)

Other Humans Like Stuff Too - Listen To Them

Gather round children, and hear a tale of the Before Times, back when we didn't have Spotify or Amazon or Facebook showing us content to consume; we had to ask our friends what they liked!

Believe it or not, other people have rich inner lives, and one of the best ways to have a great discussion with another person, even a stranger, is to share media tastes. Shows, books, music, film - whatever.

The people in your life have deep, arcane knowledge about all sorts of media. One of my former co-workers has a Plex server filled with Soviet-era Polish films. Another friend is an expert in samurai movies, which have influenced everything from spaghetti westerns to Star Wars. I have buddies with an encyclopedic knowledge of hip hop, others of martial arts movies, some know comic books, yet others can parse the threads of meaning and satire throughout the Godzilla franchise.

Are your friends not cool? Well, first, find better friends, but secondly, no problem - seek out film critics and music critics. No, not anonymous reviews on RottenTomatoes written by yahoos like me, but from people who went to school for it. The New York Times Book Review is a wonderful resource and starting point for, well, books. NPR has a books we love feature. Pitchfork is a good starting point for music. And these aren't even the most in-depth resources out there! They're just the most visible and mainstream. As you read reviews and begin to follow critics, you'll naturally branch out. As one of my favorite deep dive examples, here's Ishkur's Guide To Electronic Music - a fully interactive timeline of the origins of dozens of musical genres (sorry about your weekend, it's shot now.)

Congratulations, you are making your own "recommendation algorithm". All hail your algorithm. Now you can ditch Spotify and Amazon Kindle Recommendations.

Want To Make An Artist's Day? Ask Them About Their Inspirations

The next time you get to go to an art gallery opening, or a music release day, or an arts symposium - and if you haven't done those things, please do; your local university or library will likely have some, or know where to find them - corner one of the artists by the snack table and, if they're up to it, ask them about their inspirations. If you can't make it to events in person, follow artists you enjoy, from big acts down to local talent. Chances are they will eventually name-drop those who inspired them.

Art is never created in a vacuum, and anyone who makes art of any stripe pulls inspiration from those that came before them. Chances are anyone in your life who makes art of any grade can drop about fifty of their influences directly on your head at a moment's notice.

Even if the artist is not at the top of their field, they're still immersed in the craft. They can give you threads to follow to find new art to enjoy.

Your Hobby Has A Local Scene - Find It

When I started getting into modular synthesizers, I attended a local organization's "introduction to making electronic music" seminar at my local library. The event was packed, standing room only, filled with folks that were very interested in starting music production. I was hooked, I wanted to know more, and I wanted to talk to people who knew about making music. Unfortunately, their next event wasn't going to be for six months, so I got impatient and started my own monthly meetup group. To my surprise, people showed up. Those people became friends. Those friends invited me to shows. Which introduced me to more musicians. Which led to more shows. Now, I'm plugged in deep to a local music scene I had no idea existed even a year ago.

This story can be easily repeated by anyone with almost any sort of hobby. Puzzles, knitting, biking, hiking, foraging, kickboxing - if you aren't living in the middle of nowhere, there are people around you that have the same interests as you do. You just need to find them. Sites like Meetup are an okay starting point; I only say okay because Meetup has been getting expensive. Following local artists on social media is fine, if you insist on staying on social media; keeping an eye on your local alternative paper (like the blessed Metro Times) can clue you in to gatherings too.

Your Library Is Wonderful

You should really start going to your library more often. They aren't just warehouses for books anymore. They have periodicals. They have movies to lend. They have music to listen to. They hold events. They showcase local artists. They host talks. Some even have tool lending libraries. Your local library is a cultural hub and a community center. Your local librarians can point you in many new directions for reading, movie, or group recommendations.

Do you have a university nearby? Even better - chances are they have libraries too, some open to the public. And if they're big enough, they may even hold lecture series, free to anyone, on wide-ranging topics from experts in their field.

Finally, Throw Sand In The Algorithms

Even with all the above steps, you're still going to be tracked, and you're still going to have sites throwing "recommended content" at you, along with lots and lots of ads. A great way to avoid getting sucked into an algorithmic funnel is to throw sand into the gears of 'em, such that when you do stumble upon one in the wild, it's less likely to be attuned to you, helping you remain immune to their siren calls.

Ublock Origin is a must-have for sensible browsing nowadays. Blocks nearly all ads, trackers, social media buttons, cookies, and more. Ublock is also available on mobile browsers via Firefox.
For the more technically inclined of us, there's also Pi-Hole, which blocks ads and other nasty stuff from your network at the DNS level, meaning that ad networks won't even load properly anywhere on your home network - instead, they just blank out. Combined with Ublock above, you can aggressively tune out tons of algo slop before it even reaches your device.
VPNs - virtual private networks - are tools that anonymize your browsing further, making websites think you're browsing from Iceland or Germany or Thailand even though you're sitting in your underwear in Kansas City. Websites thinking you're French will try to serve you French content, but joke's on them, I only know English!
Reject non-essential cookies - cookies can be useful, such as remembering your login credentials, but lots of cookies exist to track you. There are plenty of plugins to keep those at bay (including Ublock above), but it's also important to read and reject all of those "non-essential" cookies you see via popups thanks to European privacy laws.
Reject Location Tracking - lots of ads are time and place relevant; if a website thinks you're in downtown NYC, it might have an ad for the nearest Starbucks ready for your face. You don't need to tell everyone where you're going all the time - turn off the location feature on your phone unless you're navigating, and reject your browser any time it wants to know your location. Do note that your location can still be tracked with these steps, but less accurately.
Give garbage information when signing up for accounts - it turns out that no, most websites really don't need your phone number and address to function, even though they ask for it. And they really don't need to know your birthday or gender or real name, either. Are they required fields? Cool, I am now a 110 year old named Boblo Island that holds the phone number 1-555-837-5309. Are they asking for an email address? Get an email that's used only for signups. Gmail, Zoho, or ProtonMail all work and are all free.

There are plenty more ways to hide your tracks, but that's going a bit beyond the scope of this already meandering article.

I do hope the above suggestions help you escape whatever algorithmic purgatory you've found yourself stuck in.