My first experience with the firehose was Usenet. In the pre-web Internet days, there was a global discussion board with thousands of topic-specific groups called newsgroups. You could subscribe to the newsgroups you were interested in, and see the messages posted to those groups. Using special software, called a newsreader, you could manage which groups you belonged to, and read, post, and respond to messages within those groups.

Some groups were more active than others. Niche newsgroups might only have a few posts per day, while popular ones could see a hundred or more. Managing it was pretty straightforward. The groups were like email folders, and the messages were similar to an email inbox. You could mark messages or entire folders as read if you didn’t want to see them. You could also subscribe or unsubscribe to any group at any time.

Fast-forward 15 years.

I’ve told my social media origin story many times. I discovered blogs and podcasts at the same time. I subscribed to podcasts about educational technology and listened to them in the car on the way to work each day. I started reading blogs, which I saw as an easy way to create an online journal or personal web site without having to be a web designer. Both of these tools removed the technical barriers to publication, so anyone could use them to express their ideas and share their perspectives. Both podcasts and blogs embraced RSS, which is a way to syndicate content across multiple platforms. I could subscribe to a podcast or a blog using special software, and the content would automatically be delivered to me when it was posted. I didn’t listen to everything. I didn’t read everything. But I received it all, and choose to consume or ignore each post, just like I did with newsgroups.

I met a lot of smart people through these technologies, and count them among my dearest friends and most influential colleagues. They’ve certainly shaped who I am, both professionally and personally.

Within a couple years, I signed up for Facebook and Twitter accounts. On Facebook, I could “friend” people, which meant I would see the things they posted, and they would see the things I posted. With Twitter, these could be two different groups of people. I follow people on Twitter whose content is relevant and useful for me. Others follow me on Twitter because they feel that the things I post are worthwhile. Those two groups often intersect, but they don’t have to. I always loved the idea that my teachers and my students can be two different groups of people.

Fast-forward 15 years.

I stopped using Twitter last year. I found that I was no longer seeing the things that were posted by the people I followed. Instead, I was seeing the posts that Twitter wanted me to see. I logged in to Twitter just now to see if I had any notifications. This is the thing they think is super important, and created a notification to make sure that I didn’t miss:

I don’t know who (what) that is, but it’s not what I signed up for. When I click “Home”, I see the “For You” feed, which is the stuff Twitter has selected for me. Some of the things in that feed are from people I follow. Many are not. They’re things that Twitter’s algorithm has decided to put there. And to make room for them, most of the posts from the people I actually follow aren’t visible anymore. If I click on their names, I can see what they’ve posted, and what’s missing from my feed.

On Facebook, I did a little tally of posts recently. Of the 80 posts at the top of my feed, four of them were from people or groups that I follow. A whopping 68 were suggested for me, groups they think I should join, or people that I can follow. The other 8 were either Facebook promotions (Friends You May Know, Reels selected for me) or they didn’t have any identifier indicating why I was seeing them.

Now, granted, I don’t have a ton of Facebook friends. And, truth be told, I have some of them muted. But still, when 85% of the content is selected for me, instead of by me I’ve clearly lost control.

As much as I hate this, perhaps the most annoying part of the Facebook algorithm is that it’s right much of the time. I took three tries to get those numbers, I cited above because I kept getting squirreled by content that really was interesting. Then I’d click on something, open in a new tab, and 10 minutes later I’d realize that I had been in the middle of counting and categorizing posts.

I used to think that the algorithms would save us from the information overload. There is no practical way for us to look at everything and decided what we will read. Algorithms should help curate resources, and combine feeds from multiple places to give us a single view of the most relevant stuff. I was super excited about tools like paper.li and Flipboard that appeared to do that in an engaging way. But the algorithms don’t serve me, the consumer of content. They serve the developer of the tool.

Ultimately, the goal of the algorithm is to make money. They do this by including sponsored content, sure. There’s plenty of advertising to go around. But they also do this by keeping me on the site and interacting with its content. Engagement is a huge generator of revenue. Facebook doesn’t want me clicking on links and going out to a news site somewhere. They want me to stay on the Facebook platform. Youtube REALLY wants, more than anything else in the world, for me to keep clicking on videos. They need me to watch the ads and consume more content. So each round of recommendations is similar to what I just watched, but just a little more extreme. The more I engage, the crazier the videos get, because they have to keep me watching them. Over time, that creates a feedback loop, where I start to see the world through the lens of the algorithm. But that algorithm is not designed to help me understand the world. It’s designed to keep me watching videos.

Fast-forward 15 years.

It’s foolish to try to predict 15 years into the future. But I’ll do it anyway. If we’re using services that we don’t pay for, we’re going to go back to the ones that give us control over what we see. I can’t trust a tool to gather news from the Associated Press, Reuters, and Al Jazeera and pull them together in a single place with the most relevant content. I’m going to need to go to the sources individually to get what I’m looking for. That will mean that I’ll have fewer sources of information, but it also means that I will need to be very diligent about making sure those sources are trustworthy. The cacophony of social media is just that, and it’ll continue to get worse. Civil discourse, consensus-building, and the search for common ground are not profitable.

There’s just no way to manage the information abundance. We’re going to end up ignoring huge volumes of content, simply because we have no reliable tools for aggregating and filtering it. Voices are going to be lost. If we want diversity of perspective, we’re going to have to actively look for it. Because the algorithms aren’t going to curate our content for us.