Avoid Content Served by a Dynamic Recommendation Feed
In my ongoing search for a simpler, and deeper life I have been looking for simple rules to help me navigate one of my main sources of chaos: the digital world.
As a kind of the 90's I grow up loving technology. I still remember the hours spent playing Pinball on my old Windows XP pc. This love for computers and technology led me pursuing an engineering career, and a PhD in the field of deep learning.
In between, something happened. I got lost in the weeds of social media, and ultra processed content like YouTube, reddit and so on. The initial feeling of discovering a new subreddit, with time, transformed into an endless scrolling of hundreds if not thousands of posts per day. An amazingly YouTube video, lead to hours and hours passed watching random content which left me feeling empty and guilty for having wasted my time.
I know with certainty that being a digital junkie is something that I don't want for my life. But how to avoid it? If you are a smoker, and you want to quit, just don't light up another cigarette. But digital media is everywhere, and it feels unavoidable. It sometimes seems that all forces are pulling you into this deep hole where your attention must be focused on a screen.
After much thinking and trials I came up with one simple rule. Avoid content served by a dynamic recommendation feed. The key word here is dynamic. A news website like The Verge it's the same for both me and you. There is no dynamic part here. Meaning that the order in which the articles are shown is not influenced by my past and present viewing preferences. This is not the same for websites where the feed is dynamically adjusted. Open reddit on two incognito tabs and scroll both of them. The first few posts will be the same, and after a while you will see a divergence in the feeds. The algorithm is adapting to you, and is trying to maximize just one thing: the time you spend on that page.
Much has been written about the negative effects of social media and digital junk media. In my personal experience, I leave these websites/apps feeling depleted of mental energy, numb to my emotions and guilty that I spent time on such things. Nothing is lost by avoiding places with such algorithms.