It’s not exactly a secret that there are plenty of people that are sick of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Ask why and you will hear any number of reasons:

  1. They are upset by the political content
  2. They are worried they are stuck in a filter bubble
  3. They dislike some aspect of the UI
  4. The most opinionated/sensational content gets the most likes
  5. They dislike how content is organized
  6. They find it exhausting to use

And of course there are many, many more. However I want to focus on the last couple of complaints that have to do with the structure of the social media feed itself. It is possible there is an intrinsic problem with the approach social media takes to providing users with content.

What is the problem with the social media feed? Here’s my working theory: imagine we are building a program that is handling an enormous amount of data. We don’t yet know what that data consists of, or how we are going to organize it. While having a discussion among the programmers about we should do I say, “lets just use an infinite unsorted list that our application has to consume one item at a time. Also, sometimes items in the list will randomly disappear.” Everyone else would think I had lost my mind. To be honest, that seems fair! There is no scenario where that is a reasonable way to handle a large data set. And yet, that is exactly how the social media feed asks its users to consume data.

A divide between a company and its users

It’s impossible to keep discussing the social media feed without pointing out the difference of interests between the company that creates a social media feed that users consume, and those users themselves. Because when I talk about how the feed is an infinite unsorted list, obviously that isn’t strictly true. Not only is the list finite, but from the company’s perspective it is a sorted list, but it is sorted along an by measuring “engagement” (however that might be defined) which is an excellent sorting mechanism for companies that rely on advertising for revenue. This sorting method creates an incentive for users to create posts that other users interact with, and the incentive is beneficial for advertisers since it increases the chances of users interacting with their advertisements since that is what users are now primed to do. This behavior that encourages post engagement is good for advertisers since it increases this behavior that encourages post engagement is good for advertisers since it increases

For the user none of this matters. Although the user can see that posts with higher engagement are prioritized by the social media feed, engagement itself doesn’t tell a narrative to the user. So from the user’s perspective these lists might as well be unsorted. This is a chaotic experience where a user can sharply vacillate between different types of emotional experiences. We cope with this in various ways, but the important thing to note is that this experience does require a coping mechanism.

Before Javascript really took off and extended the possibility of what the web could be the sort of things you read and experienced on the web were much more static. Although this was less efficient and interesting, it did have the benefit of consisting of narratively coherent content. People would write HTML documents that have a beginning, middle, and end. Even storytelling that plays around with the order of events still has an implied chronology. Conclusions, in particular, are very important because they allow the brain to relax a little. However the social media feed throws away that structure that humans have lived with throughout our history in favor of an infinite, discontiguous middle. Then our brains don’t get to relax, and we end of closing our Facebook or Twitter tab exhausted, and more than a little frustrated.

This is unfortunate since we already have models of what human-friendly infinite content looks like. A site like Amazon will show people endless amounts of stuff to buy, but it also has a way to break the infinite loop. You guessed it, its the purchase item screens. That forms a logical conclusion to the shopping narrative that Amazon creates. Meanwhile a site like Pinterest that doesn’t have any obvious way to break the infinite loop of content nonetheless avoids the pitfall of the social media feed by encouraging thematically coherent content, and curation.

At the moment the social media giants are safe due to lack of viable competitors. Amazon is for shopping, Pinterest is for looking an images, and social media is for people talking to each other. But I suspect that whoever creates a feed for people talking to each other that uses narratively sound principles for its flow will end up dictating the future of the web.