Fuck the Feed

The premise

The problem with social media isn’t that people are posting things. It’s that the algorithm has been given a shape, and that shape is called the feed. The feed is the mechanism of the algorithm. So what we’re really talking about is creating your own algorithm, and building that algorithm around intentionality.

The original promise of social media was that we would be fed information we care about through our social connections, on the reasonable assumption that if you connect with someone, you probably care about what they care about. That promise mutated. The feed now exists to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. What we call social media isn’t really social media anymore. It’s addictive media.

We chase likes and meaningless connections, and in the process we lose deep thought, and we lose real relationships.

AI slop is just humans optimising for the feed, for reach. It isn’t AI’s fault that humans use it to produce content that is perfectly tuned to the feed, and that in the process loses all of its humanity. The feed is a hungry beast that’s never satiated. It’s not the AI’s fault. It’s ours. We are always trying to make our posts addictive rather than nourishing.

The feed is the monster. The feed is the algorithm.

So: fuck the feed.

The rules

These are the rules by which we fuck the feed.

1. 1

   Be intentional with your attention

   Why are you here, and what will you do differently if you know? Attention without intention is just drift, so decide what you're actually trying to pay attention to, and why, before anything reaches you.

2. 2

   No walled gardens: jump the fence

   Don't settle for customising one platform's algorithm inside its walls. AI is the glue that stitches every platform into a single firehose that's yours, no shared protocol and no permission required.

3. 3

   Know people, don't follow them

   Following scales infinitely and means nothing; knowing is Dunbar-scale and means everything. Connect with actual people instead of hinting to an algorithm about the content you want.

4. 4

   Engage deeply

   A like is a phantom signal pretending to be connection. Instead of liking, comment; instead of reposting, rethink: take the thought, add your flavour, make your own.

5. 5

   Protect your lizard

   So much of the feed is engineered to hijack your lizard brain, which is why it's ugly, clickbaited, optimised for the first sentence. Let AI be the first gatekeeper, judging everything against your best self, not your addicted one: rewriting, reframing, or simply filtering.

6. 6

   Search the world, not the feed

   Echo chambers come from only listening to your own connections. Pull from the whole world (a global alert on a topic, not your friends' takes on it) and let AI surface only what your intentions actually want.

7. 7

   Trust nothing, check everything

   Not community notes, your notes. Let your own AI fact-check and push back on every input before it lands in your head. It won't always be right, but humans aren't either, and scrutiny beats letting it all through unexamined.

8. 8

   Your attention is not free

   Every capture has to earn its place by producing value: Connect, Enjoy, Remember, or Share. If it does none of the four, it never needed to reach you in the first place.

The shape of the solution

The process is simple in outline. You set your intentions, what you’re trying to pay attention to, and why. You build one firehose across everything: sources that push (emails, newsletters, notifications), sources you pull (polled feeds, subreddits, RSS, Google Alerts), and things you actively save as you move through the world, which skip the queue because a manual save is you telling the system this matters. Then AI narrows the firehose down to only what matches your intentions, hands each survivor to you as a chat, and every chat ends in one of four actions.

You adjust your algorithm by adjusting two things: your firehose (what goes in) and your intentions (the filter for your attention). And everything that makes it through passes a final guard you built yourself: fact-checking, reframing, lizard-brain protection. Then you act: connect, enjoy, remember, share. If none of those, it never needed to reach you.

I’m building exactly this with Witness.

The bigger frame

Everything is a feed. You yourself are a feed. You can post on LinkedIn, on Substack, on any platform you want, because we’re ignoring their feeds. All of them. Your website is a platform without a feed, because you post on it and people browsing the internet is their feed.

The feed used to be curiosity. Browsing the web was a self-curated feed driven by what you wanted to find. Social media narrowed that down to whatever your echo chamber happens to be saying. This approach restores the old relationship. Social media sites become inputs to your firehose, nothing more. AI curates your real feed.

Be intentional with your attention.