How to train your Algorithm!

How to personalize your feels as a conscious social-media consumer

Random and irrelevant content on your social media feeds?
Interested in shifting to a better “digital diet” ?
Prefer more power to you the “User” ?

You are not alone. Read on to understand how you can be a conscious consumer of social media!

AI generated artwork — playing on the imagery from “How to Train your Dragon?”

Read on to understand how algorithms behave and how you can change your digital diet !

Here’s a mind-map on how social-media algorithms “select” the content that is “fed” to you…

The broad metrics that typical social media algorithms index upon

7 Tips to reset or influence your Digital Diet that worked for me:

Certainly! Here are specific tips to gain more control over your social media feeds while ensuring 100% human-like and SEO-friendly content:

1. Curate your following: Choose accounts aligned with your interests and values. Unfollow or mute irrelevant accounts. I also like to set notifications for my top 10 inspiring influencers.
2. Engage consciously: Interact with posts that interest you. Like, comment, and share relevant content to signal your preferences.
3. Utilize platform features: Customize settings related to your feed, notifications, and privacy based on your preferences. Youtube allows you to stop it’s algorithm from collecting your data. Linkedin allows you set interests. Twitter allows you to join Communities (really cool!).
4. Organize with lists or groups: Create categorized lists or join groups to view relevant content separately.
5. Report problematic content: Flag violations of guidelines or misleading information to improve platform quality.
6. App-blockers to take breaks and set limits: Establish boundaries for social media use, allocating specific time slots and taking regular breaks for personal well-being. Some App blockers that come handy are: AppBlock, FlipD, Freedom, Focus, Forest, etc. I personally liked Forest or Focus.
7. Use NewsFeed Eradicators: There are Safari/Chrome Extensions which erase your feed as soon as you open the Social Media platform. You can toggle them on/off — this also give you that necessary pause reminding you to be conscious and intentional with your social media usage.

A quick explainer on how algorithms behave differently across Instagram, Twitter, & LinkedIN

Let’s hope for a more personalized, safe, and controllable social media.
Now, if you are like me, and you seek different kind of information at different times — — be patient. Tomorrow’s algorithms will make today’s feeds look primitive.

For example, my social network applications completely fail to sense my patterns of doing financial research on weekends for my investments or learning from technology news in the mornings.

Imagine — If you want to change your “digital habits” you simply go to your settings and personalize your algorithm. Overtime you content consumption totally changes based on the new settings.

For ethical and empowering digital products, product managers must don the behavioural scientist hat more often than not. Meta and Google must take note and develop adaptive and flexible algorithms which give more power to the users (atleast the premium users) and not just to advertisers. DM me to discuss social network startup ideas. I have a few.

Happy browsing!