How to train your social media feed to show content you actually like

It began, like many quiet reckonings of our time, during the coronavirus lockdown.

There was little to do, nowhere to go, and far too much time to scroll. At first, it felt harmless, just a way to pass the hours. But slowly, something unsettling revealed itself. Even when I did not like a piece of content, when it annoyed me enough to react badly, or leave a dismissive comment, it kept coming back. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly, until my feed felt like an echo chamber of things I never asked for.

That was the moment I understood something fundamental. On social media, attention is indistinguishable from approval.

Much later, I would learn that this is structural. We live inside what scholars call the attention economy, a system where human attention is treated as a scarce and valuable resource, and platforms are designed to capture and hold it.

In such a system, it does not matter whether you love something or hate it. What matters is that you looked.

The platforms did not care about my preferences. They cared about my pauses. Unintentionally, I had been training the algorithm to serve me my own irritation.

At some point, it stopped being amusing. It became taxing for my peace of mind. But I did not want my mood, attention, or curiosity dictated by a system that followed my impulses more faithfully than my intentions. So I decided to take control.

What followed was not a dramatic digital detox. It was methodical. I began to use social media on my own terms.

The first step was restraint. I realised that disengagement is a form of power. If I did not like something, I refused to interact with it. No arguments, no dislikes. I scrolled past it as if it did not exist. When necessary, I hid posts. I unfriended many people whose content created a “rage-bait pattern” I did not want in my feed. Where social constraints made that difficult, I simply unfollowed them.

I also made a more personal decision. I do not enjoy video content, or at least not the kind that dominates social media. I may sit through a four-hour film as long as it is not propaganda. But 30-second shorts that say nothing but lead to numerous others on the trot do not interest me. Every such video I encountered was either ignored or actively hidden.

At the same time, I became deliberate about what I did want to see. If the algorithm learned from me, I would teach it properly.

I began to engage more with the kind of content I genuinely valued: long-form writing, thoughtful features, and deeply reported pieces. I shared articles from publications I trusted and admired, such as The New Yorker or The Atlantic. I also added specific individuals, journalists, and pages whose work I respected to my favourites and set them to see first, ensuring their content appeared at the top of my feed.

Sometimes I shared content simply to return to them later, like bookmarks across my timeline. More often, I interacted with them with a quiet awareness that this too was a signal. Because in the attention economy, every action is data.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, my feed began to change. The noise thinned. In their place came things I had chosen myself: stories, ideas, and perspectives that aligned with my interests rather than imposed themselves. Social media stopped feeling like a chaotic stream and began to resemble a curated space.

Today, I do not open these platforms with the same vulnerability to distraction. I do not rely on them to tell me what matters. I have other sources for that, more intentional and reliable. But when I do scroll, I encounter things that interest me, not things that demand my attention.

I did not defeat the algorithm. That would be too grand a claim. But I learned how to live with it without surrendering to it. I trained it to follow my preferences rather than my impulses.

In doing so, I reclaimed something the attention economy constantly tries to take away: the agency over my own attention.