Published: Thu, 16 Jan 2025 20:03:55 -0800
Originally it was just to subscribe to the paid feed for Blocked and Reported, then I found Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn's show, America This Week. Substack's RSS feed's often are a few hours behind and so I found myself opening the app in order to get the shows as soon as they came out. Now it has become a bad habit to scroll through it in the morning.
At first most of my feed was written content, made up of the muddy blend of blog and journalism that has appeared over the past decade or so. I was pleased with this, finding the content interesting, but without the constant firing of the dopamine receptors found with short-form video platforms. I found engaging writers that I otherwise would not have found if it weren't for the algorithm supplying them to me.
Then a couple months ago I noticed a change in what was showing up in my feed. There were fewer long-form written posts and more snarky quips and comments with an attached photo or video, similar to what you would find on Twitter/X. I didn't necessarily dislike this change at first, but I found myself impulsively clicking on the orange squircle, like I had done with Instagram before I kicked it.
Now when I open the app it is almost solely the sort of dopamine-farming, intellectually-unchallenging cacophony of memes, viral videos, and misleading headlines, that I have been attempting to escape, but inevitably find myself surrounded by. Perhaps it is my own fault for engaging with these posts, perhaps it's the fault of the architects of these platforms, but nevertheless I'm there.
All social media platforms seem to follow the same pattern. A new site emerges, sparsely filled with content of a particular niche (i.e. Liberalism and Bluesky, Trump-flavored Conservativism and Rumble, lip-synced dancing and TikTok). This brings in people interested in that niche to the site and they start creating content of their own. Then there is a fork in the road, the new content either is diverse enough to bring in new people (TikTok), or it becomes an echo-chamber and becomes more or less irrelevant (Rumble (and currently Bluesky but its too soon to say)). For the sites that are able to escape their single niche, more and more people join the site, and in order to maintain engagement with the site, the recommendation algorithm is tweaked to maximize the amount of time spent on the site. This creates many silos, where users are eventually trapped in a box, not seeing large swaths of the content on the site, though highly-viral posts will be served regardless of the box you fall into. Eventually the content of one site is nearly identical to another.
I find myself in the conspiracy box on Substack. Although I am a conspiracy theorist, I don't think everything is controlled by some evil cabal, but nevertheless that is all I am fed the site. It's getting frustrating, because for those first couple months I really enjoyed reading opinions from various thinkers across the political spectrum. Occasionally some variation peeks through, but it is few and far between. It's all conspiracy posts, memes, conspiratorial memes, and the few people I followed before my feed got ruined.
I regularly check my email, If I don't respond quickly, send me a poke:
jasco.website@pm.me