It is a perfectly curated window into my insane and inquiring mind. It knows precisely which videos will tickle me and which memes will gently distract me from the slow collapse of humankind. On Tuesday the Australian government announced “world-leading” reforms that would force social media platforms to allow users to opt-out of algorithms, dubbed “my feed, my way”.
On the same day, I was delighted to be confronted with a video on Instagram of a woman accidentally spilling a bucket of eels on a Chinese train. Dozens of eels slithered among the passengers, who appeared not as surprised as I would have expected. In bed that night, after sending the video to several friends and watching it multiple times, I lamented to my partner how I would find content like this if my accounts weren’t at the whim of the algorithm gods.
But would it be the same? So, for 24 hours, I decided to manually turn off my algorithm via little-known settings on Instagram to get a sense of how the reforms might change my feed. This feature allows you to limit your feed to posts from accounts you are following, in chronological order.
This is basically what social media feeds, including Facebook, looked like when they first started. Would I be thrust back into the old days of social media, to how things were before artificial intelligence and Elon Musk bought Twitter and everything became an ad? As a reminder of how things used to be, I scroll back to my first posts on Instagram and find sepia-heavy pictures of trees, gigs and friends.
I am gripped with nostalgia for 2012, when all my posts got eight likes and no comments and I only followed two dozen close friends from school. For a truly “authentic” social media experience, I trawl through my contacts and unfollow any account that isn’t a person I have met in real life. It is refreshing to unfollow news accounts, and politicians, but sad to let go of funny influencers and meme accounts and chefs.
In total, about 100 accounts get the axe. I refresh my feed, and it only takes about 10 minutes of scrolling to run out of content to look at. For the first time in years, Instagram informs me I have reached the “End of following”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
