In social media, customization would be superior to algorithm

The problem with social media apps is the lack of user customization for news feeds and content feeds. Developers have designed social media apps to automate nearly all feed preferences, leaving users highly dependent on an algorithm for the prioritization of content.

The algorithm is not based on the user’s expressed wants and interests but on the user’s perceived wants and interests (arrived upon through the algorithm’s collection and analysis of the user’s activity and personal data). The algorithm is then manipulated by automated censorship protocols, preference offered to paid promotion, and content given preference to spark higher engagement (which is not necessarily satisfying or welcome content for the user). On top of this, ads have proliferated to help pay for relatively useless innovations (bells and whistles) resulting from fruitless speculative expansion at social media companies that haven’t meaningfully improved their basic interfaces in many years.

Users have long cried out for simplistic chronological feeds. Users have long cried out for increased feed customization. Nearly universal and consistent appeals from users go ignored in favor of complex algorithms that users continually complain about. The apps keep getting less satisfying for users but no new apps have risen to the challenge to outshine these flawed monstrosities.

What sort of customization do users want?

I’ll speak exclusively on my own behalf here. Let me pick my top thirty YouTube channels and make a feed exclusive to them. Let me design custom feeds based on keywords and channels that I choose for myself. Instead of suggested videos, show me a list of categorized feeds (to which I can add my custom feeds). Next to any given video that is playing, show related videos (like back in the day) instead of suggested videos (which is redundant to the home page).

Let me turn off Shorts on YouTube, Reels on Instagram and Facebook, and Stories on Instagram and Facebook. I avoided downloading Vine, Snapchat, Coub and TikTok for a reason: I rarely (if ever) want to look at an infinite stream of random short form videos. Now, because of the rampant success of TikTok, you’ve all simultaneously embedded side scrollers for short form video feeds into all the vertical feeds for traditional social media apps. As I scroll down through text-based updates from my friends on Facebook, I’m suddenly confronted with the side quest of escaping an endless variety of vapid yet addictive funniest home videos that disrupts my intended social activity and cuts into my irl productivity. What’s next? Twitch streamers scrolling by on a diagonal feed? 3D cleaning product infomercials embedded into my phone contacts? Upside down backwards pulsating audiobooks in my cereal?

Can Instagram please be for pictures again? I want to look at drawings by my favorite pencil and ink illustration artists. I don’t care to watch an endless stream of videos featuring teenagers dancing and dogs farting. Let me enjoy my niches in peace.

Facebook needs to give people the option to set as their default feed a highly customizable feed consisting of posts by their actual friends and preferred pages in chronological order.

Twitter needs to stop pretending a character limit is meaningful when everyone just replies to their initial post with a fifteen-part series of small posts. Let people write short essays. You’d overtake Facebook tomorrow if you had more detailed profiles, custom picture albums (with captions) and a blog feature. Yes, I’m saying you should become MySpace.

An algorithm is useless for marketing to users.

Generating ads and content for feeds based on an algorithm isn’t useful to the user. You don’t know my interests better than I do so knowing them doesn’t help you market them to me effectively. The algorithm seeing that I like comic books and recommending the ten most popular comic books is annoying. If you can see that I’m into comic books then please assume I already know about the ten most popular comic books. If I just bought a bicycle, the last thing I need to see is three consecutive months of ads for bicycles. I can only ride one bicycle. You’d be better off pitching random things.

Algorithms are a good way to dupe companies into buying more ads because you can fool them into thinking you’re good at marketing. That’s why you use your algorithm. You notice that I shop at the same grocery store every week. You notice that I buy the same can of beans every week. If you manage to sell an ad to that grocery store for that can of beans and I continue to buy the beans (as I always have) then you can claim your ad was responsible for my future patronage and claim you made money for that grocery store.

Social media is a tool.

These days, it seems like we’re rushing toward an artificial intelligence revolution. Soon, we’ll hear people crying out for equal rights for our AI compatriots. Well, what about robots? What happened to robots? Aren’t we skipping a step here?

Remember protocol droids, service bots, Mobile Suit Gundams, security drones, etc. Remember robots that are not sentient beings (with a ghost in the shell) but machines designed to serve mankind (and not on a plate). Robots to use as tools. What happened to the dream of making life easier for regular people through the proliferation of affordable technological innovations for the Home of Tomorrow as exemplified by The Jetsons?

Artificial intelligence seems more about replacing working people with cheaper automated labor. That’s great for employers and corporations. They’ll finally have slave labor back. But, what about all of us (soon to be automated out of a job) worker bees? What about robots for regular people?

Working people don’t need artificial intelligence (outside of our video games and our tech hobbies). We need robots. We need robots to mow the lawn and do the dishes and remind us of our appointments. We need gadgets. We need gizmos.

Social media apps should be more like robots than artificial intelligence. We don’t need apps to think for us or to decide things for us. We need apps that do things. Never has a computer guessed correctly when attempting to think for me at any point that I can remember (excep for spellcheck and calculators). People are not as predictable as you suppose. All of the guessing and prognosticating gets in the way. Just follow my commands.

Let the users make their own decisions. Make everything as customizable as possible. Some users might not want to be bothered (they can rely on the default settings or your annoying algorithm) but many of us would like to fine tune and tinker with our feeds to get them just the way we want them. You could offer both an algorithm and a high level of user customization (the best of both worlds). Give people options.

You’re going to lose a whole lot of us to minimalist dumb phones and social media detox of you keep making our feeds more about you than us. Greed ruins everything eventually.