My clean feed day turned into 4 hours of fighting the algorithm

Last Tuesday I decided to mute every account that felt noisy, maybe 80 handles total, and curate my feed down to just gardening and local news. Figured it would be a calm scroll before work, but by 9 AM the algorithm served me three posts about crypto scams and a video of a guy eating raw squid. I spent the next 4 hours unmuting people and reporting stuff as not interested, and somehow the site started showing me more engagement bait than ever. It felt like the system was angry I tried to take control, like it punished my boundaries with chaos. I get that personalization is a guess, but why does a clean start make things worse instead of better? Has anyone else tried a hard reset like that and ended up with a feed that feels more random than before? Maybe the algorithm reads restraint as a signal to test what sticks, but I'm not sure I want to play that game anymore.

2 comments

2 Comments

ryan_barnes28d ago

Did you check your mute list for spam accounts pretending to be gardening pages?

dakota41527d ago

Blocking them outright was way easier than dealing with that mess lol.