What makes a social media algorithm effective?
If you want to truly understand how we use social media and how social media affects us, this is something to keep at the forefront of your mind.
Before we dig in too far, though, let’s start from the beginning of the user journey. For the sake of imagining the entire process, I’ll be basing my analysis on Twitter, although these ideas will be generally applicable to any social media platform.
When someone joins a new social media platform, what happens?
In The Beginning
The beginning of a user’s social media account is one of the toughest challenges. They start from 0: no followers, the platform has no data on what they like, and the user has no reason to come back.
This is where priorities tend to diverge between the user and the platform. The goals of the platform: get the user to come back, turn the app into a habit, and keep them online and engaged.
The goals for the user: it depends. Maybe they are there to make friends. Maybe they want to build an audience. Maybe they are looking for a real-time news feed.
In Twitter’s case, they ask about broad interests and suggest the biggest accounts to follow in those topics. But those accounts likely won’t be the ones who you actually interact with. So now, you’ve got at least two different types of accounts you need to find for your feed.
Now, you’ve got large accounts to follow at least, but you aren’t talking to anyone yet. If you post, nobody will see it. You’re a nobody. So you’ve got to seek out others in your range. Maybe you’ve got friends on the platform already that you can connect with. That helps. Otherwise, you’re on a mission to find the others. That’s a phrase I’ve really latched on to from Rob Hardy. In his words,
It’s about finding your people, Making friends, and doing life together.
But Twitter won’t help you do this. That’s not what their goal is. It takes work to find the others. Social media isn’t really a passive game. But if you want to get as many users as possible, you want to take the work aspect out. The goal needs to be to get people online and keep them there.
Enter the “feed”.
Feeding the Beast
What does Twitter need in order to keep you on the platform? They need you to engage. Why? Because if you aren’t engaging, you aren’t giving them data. If you aren’t giving them data, they don’t know what you like. If they don’t know what you like, they can’t put ads in front of you that you are likely to click.
So there’s the Home feed. It’s based on a number of things, but it comes down to two main categories: who you follow and what you interact with.
Now think about what type of content you engage with the most. Is it positive, helpful content?
Or is it stuff that angers you, upsets you, or triggers an intense emotional reaction?
Here’s a challenge: pay attention to what you do on social media. Think about what happens when you send that response to someone, and think about what you will feel if Twitter shows you more of that content. Is that something you would welcome?
Once you start to think about it this way, you start to realize how certain groups of people game the system by posting things that intentionally get under people’s skin and trigger these kinds of reactions. That gets stuff into your feed on a regular basis. And then a bunch of these accounts will start working in tandem, because they all benefit from this boost.
And Twitter, noticing the engagement happening, continues to spread it further.
But is that really what you want as a user?
Gaining Control
This is why having control over what you see is so important. Giving that control up to someone else allows external forces to hijack your feed based on emotional responses. And it’s really easy to let it happen, especially if you don’t think about what you are doing and the consequences of those actions. Twitter leads you to this by default.
But when you take control over your actions, you can certainly tune your experience. It’s tough when you started down the wrong path, though. I’m currently following too many people, for example. I try to cut that number down, because I’m not seeing what I really want to see. But when I started, I wanted to get insights into a number of different viewpoints that I don’t normally get to see in the people around me. Since I’ve done this, I realize there are some views I agree with, some I don’t, but it helps me constantly expand my view of the world.
That doesn’t help me build relationships though, which I’m missing from Twitter. I’m bad at this by default, because my Twitter experience isn’t optimized for it.
What if it was?
This is why I’m excited for new approaches, like that of Bluesky. I can create different feeds based on the desire for different outcomes. Sometimes, I want to broadcast ideas. That’s the idea of “building an audience”. Sometimes I want to interact with cool people building cool things. Sometimes I want to find the others.
Twitter won’t let me do that. Bluesky will.
See why I’m excited for Bluesky?
This Week In Content
Going to play around with a new section in the newsletter. Let me know if you like it, hate it, whatever.
I wrote this about a week ago, and it seems to be pretty relevant for this discussion: The Future Isn’t 1000 True Fans, It’s 100 True Friends.
My YouTube channel is up and running, and this video is over 1000 views, which kinda blows my mind (also, totally blew my kids’ minds with the fact that I got that many views, and definitely earned me some street cred).
Finally, I found this newsletter, which really dug into the whole decentralized social media landscape.