A Feed Is an Edited Publication and It Has an Editor Who Is Not You

I chose to follow about four hundred accounts. What I read is a selection from those, plus material from accounts I did not choose, ordered by criteria I do not know, refreshed continuously. Describing that as “what the people I follow are saying” is inaccurate in a way that took me an embarrassingly long time to take seriously.

The gap is easy to demonstrate and I would recommend anyone do it once. Take a handful of accounts you consider yourself a regular reader of and go to their pages directly. In my case, of eight people I would have said I read closely, I had seen a small fraction of what they had posted in the previous month, and in two cases I had seen almost nothing for weeks and had not noticed their absence — because an absence is invisible in a feed that is always full.

What follows from this is a set of small corrections that have made me a slightly less confused person.

The first is that “everyone is talking about X” is a statement about a selection, not about a population. The selection is optimised for engagement, and things that produce engagement are not a random sample of things being said. I have twice been confident that a topic was dominating a community and been wrong when I went and looked directly.

The second is that a person who seems to have changed is often a person the ranking has changed its mind about. Someone whose considered posts I used to see, whose angry ones I now see, has not necessarily become angrier. The angry ones perform better and the considered ones did not reach me. I have no way to distinguish these from inside the feed, which is the uncomfortable part.

The third, and the one I act on: if I actually want to read someone, I have to go to them. A feed is a discovery mechanism and it is quite good at that. It is not a subscription, despite using the word follow, and treating it as one means my reading is determined by an editor whose goals are not mine and are not secret — they are stated in the company’s filings.

What I do now is small and mildly inconvenient. About fifteen accounts are in a list I read directly, in order, a few times a week. The feed remains, for finding things. The distinction between the two costs me nothing and it means that when I say I read someone, it is true.

I would add that none of this requires believing the platforms are acting in bad faith. An engagement-ranked feed is a defensible product and I use one daily. The error is entirely on my side: I described my own reading as something it was not, for years, and made judgements about people and about what was happening based on a description that was wrong.