My algorithm is failing me and I'm sick of it!
Something has long bothered me about the user experience (UX) design of social media apps. For years, I failed to put my finger on it, only acknowledging a weird feeling and a regular desire to get off the app despite the many incentives it uses to keep my thumb scrolling. Only after watching Tyler, the Creator's recent interview with Mav Carter, did I finally put a name to what was missing: distance.
In his interview, as he's often said in prior interviews and even in a number of his songs, Tyler discusses how weird it is for people to expect – and oftentimes demand – access to celebrities and popular figures they don't know personally. It's a long-standing conversation, very boomerish if you will, to declare that social media has made people, specifically fans, weird. It's simply not the whole truth. Social media has undoubtedly had an impact on people’s brains and intensified behaviors of all types, but make no mistake. People, including fans, have always had the capacity to be weird, overstep boundaries, and disregard the privacy and humanity of someone they admired (re: John Lennon, Selena, and Gianni Versace). But what fans today have that fans 50 years ago rarely had was access.
Not only with celebrity culture but for the rest of us too, the lines of boundaries have been blurred, making it easier and more common for people to share – and then expect everyone else to share – everything about them all the time.
But this is not to shame people for sharing things on the internet. I post my breakfast quite regularly, sometimes accompanied by a description in Japanese. Is it so I can present as healthy or interesting or a good cook or a disciplined nihongo student? Maybe. Or maybe I'm just proud of my breakfast and want my friends to see it without me having to text them all individually a picture of my eggs, sardines, spring mix, and avocado.
The point I seek to make is that the same distance many celebrities, including Tyler, have complained about being denied by weird fans is the exact same distance that I too am feeling denied by the very structure of how social media (namely, Instagram’s algorithm) works. There isn't enough distance between me and strangers on the internet, no matter how much I want it.
When my mom was growing up, her favorite artist was Natalie Cole. She'd play Natalie’s records in my grandparents’ basement and practice dance routines and performances, imagining herself singing with a band in a nightclub.
Wildly enough, my mom was the lead singer of a military band in Berlin in the late 70s, eventually garnering her and a new stateside band she led, PSI, a record deal in the early 80s. They declined the deal due to unfair terms and she pursued music education instead, celebrating her 40th year teaching this year!
Besides inspiring my mother to be on the brink of becoming an 80s pop-star, Natalie created music that resonated with my mom and brought movement into her body, and joy into her spirit. So, as any teen in the 70s would, my mother used the address of the record label on the back of the record to mail a letter to Natalie Cole, likely expressing her love for her music and joy of singing.
Then, Natalie Cole called my mother.
I can imagine the thrill, hearing my grandmother call "Toni, there's someone on the phone for you!" and my mother, perhaps still practicing her songs or doing her homework, running to see who it was. She claims she kept her cool on the short call, feeling overwhelmingly honored to be speaking to her favorite artist, but admits that as soon as the conversation ended, she ran and screamed all over the house for every person to hear: "I JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE WITH NATALIE COLE."
I love hearing her tell that story and seeing the childlike excitement light up her eyes all over again, and then I think about what I would do if Tyler or Missy or Matt Martians called my phone. I know what I did when the guitarist of my favorite jazz band DMed me briefly after I tagged them in my story (I replied calmly, but lost itttt in real time and told literally anyone who would listen).
But in reality, I've come to accept that the interaction my mom had with her favorite artist at the time is just not as likely to happen to me. Not to say it's impossible, but letters and phone calls were a mainstay of her youth, not so much mine.
An interaction like what my mom had and even what I had, a brief moment of proximity and acknowledgment of how much you're passionate about someone's work that ends as a good memory and a story to tell for the rest of your life, isn't enough for a lot of people because they are used to getting more from public figures, namely influencers. While I was more than satisfied with my brief DM interaction with the guitarist, the weird fan behavior Tyler describes demands more, which breeds surveillance, icky parasocial relationships, and feeling entitled to every personal detail of a public figure.
I got on Instagram when it first released in 2010 (don't tell my mama). Back then, as many of y'all remember, it was the most basic of basic social media. You only saw content from the people you followed in the order it was posted. No ads. No shopping. No reels. No GRWM. No AMA. No none of that. Just pictures from my friends (who also ain't had no business on instagram that early, if we're being honest lol).
Those were simpler days, where the content you got was the content you wanted. Wanted to see Rihanna's posts? Follow Rihanna! Don't want to see her posts? Simply don't follow Rihanna. It was truly that easy. Now? Not so much.
I don't follow Cardi B nor Offset, yet I discovered they were expecting another child and also getting a divorce seconds upon opening Instagram on a random afternoon. Gossip blogs existed long before Instagram, yet the platform has forced it into my feed despite me 1) not following the page, 2) never interacting with similar content and 3) not even following the people it's referencing. While in an ideal world, an algorithm should show me things I like and engage with, the reality is the algorithm failed miserably and showed me information I would’ve much preferred to never have known.
Again, gossip blogs and celebrities simply being in the public discourse is hardly novel at all. People gossiped about Jesus (evidence that people have been weird since JUMP)! But what I miss about the gossip blog era is CHOICE. I could choose to go to the blogs and read the latest gossip about whatever celebrity. And if I wanted to know nothing, I simply didn't even have to type in the website or pick up the tabloid at the grocery store. There was a place for the people who wanted it and they knew where to find it easily. I love that for them! But what I hate for me is that once on the app, my sense of choice in the content presented to me feels muted and getting what I want without having to accept what I don’t feels like a tradeoff that grows more annoying by the day.
Similarly, I fondly recall the early days of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”! It was a television show on a specific channel at a specific time. It didn't come on National Geographic or Boomerang in between Sharkfest or Pink Panther and Pals. If I wanted to go learn about that family, there was a specific place where I could go do that. And if I didn't, that information wouldn't find its way to me anyway because it was on a different channel entirely.
Alas, that boundary granted to me by more traditional media was short-lived. Everything I know now about Kim Kardashian I have learned against my will. I have never googled that woman a day in my life, yet I know the names of her children. But it didn't have to be that way. Growing up, my access to her life was secluded to a particular channel I would see, but pass by, on the TV guide. But once I started using social media more and once Instagram decided to stop limiting my feed to people I chose but to offer novel content to me as well, my autonomy over what I consumed diminished. Sure, I could choose to log off of Instagram completely to avoid posts I don’t want to see, but that’s like turning the entire TV off because I don’t want to watch reality TV shows. Whereas I could change the channel on the tv set, I don’t have that same level of choice with immediate results on social media.
They don’t make money from connection, they make money from consumption. The more influencers, more products, more brands, more STUFF, they can show you (even if you never looked for it, followed it, or interacted with something similar) the more money they make! It’s all a business, and I get it. I just wish I had a choice to participate in it without feeling like I have to completely disconnect from the app altogether.
But I don’t want to do that. I get a lot of valuable information from Instagram, specifically. I love my local paper, but lots of local events exclusively use Instagram for their marketing because traditional advertising is too expensive, cumbersome, or doesn't make much sense for their business/organizations (this is why I loveee a good newsletter; it's the perfect middle ground).
So to stay connected with the happenings in my community, I keep an app on my phone that will give me content I don't want (though I will say, sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised and am shown a very interesting looking Dutch couch or a new cafe opening in my city).
I sacrifice distance from strangers for connectivity with community and it feels deeply unfair that it's one or the other. To stay up to date with my community and its events, dinners, open studios, and workshops, I have to see a thousand apartment tours, one hundred OOTD videos, and an excessive amount of hauls that try to convince me my closet isn't ready for the new season. What kind of trade off is that??? Of course I could scroll through, but is that good UX? I think not.
Let's just make some noise for the one, the only, Pinterest. A true star to ease our pain, Pinterest's UX team really did what needed to be done. It feels like they give you exactly what you want and only what you want until you search for something else, at which point they will start showing you some of that as well.
It's an experience based truly on receiving what you came for. It knows my boards, it knows what I've been interested in seeing recently, it even knows that I'm plotting a mac and cheese coup at my family's Thanksgiving dinner this year, and it's preparing me accordingly with more ideas for an avant-garde approach to the southern classic.
Now imagine if other socials stopped masking their goals under the guise of being catered "for you," and truly used a highly focused, yet flexible algorithm that prioritizes what I, the user, want to see. Pinterest has already done the work I'm afraid these other apps will never be able to return to: building for people.
I could certainly continue to scroll through until I reach the content I go on Instagram to get, but that doesn't really address the core issue. Though I don’t even look at them or search them out, creators and their content are literally forced into my feed when all I really want to do is see what my friends, the people I know in real life, are up to without having to call every single one of them every week to hear an update (I probably end up doing that anyway, but socials undoubtedly make it easier, especially for those all-important weak ties).
But strangers I don't even follow? That is your HOME and your CHILDREN. Why do I, a stranger, need to see it? And more importantly, why can’t I opt out of seeing it EVEN IF I DON’T FOLLOW YOU. Like do I have to go as far as blocking creators just to feel a sense of distance? No, that's too much work for a user and too much to ask of a UX product team I know for a fact has the talent to build a way for folks who just want a little space to have that without leaving the app entirely.
But I still have choice and I still exercise that choice. I choose to stay on Instagram, with intermittent breaks throughout the year, because it is an indispensable tool for doing what is most important to me in this season of my life: staying connected to the people and happenings in my community. Is instagram the only way, or even the main way I connect with people? No. But it’s a tool to stay up to date on the things I want to know, a tool I find useful but don’t really enjoy using all the time.
And I’m still figuring all that out and what to do about it and I think that’s okay.
