The scroll feeds are such a fundamental UX paradigm these days, it hardly feels like design decision. Even without space-age attention-maximizing ML, the feed of short posts, some pictures, and naturally variable reward is thoroughly captivating.

I recently joined Bluesky which allows user-programmed feed algorithms. They have a default "Discover" feed which is just chronological, safe-for-work content from the whole "atmosphere" as they call it. It's fairly entertaining, but noticeable bland; low-salt crackers, not Doritos. 

The beauty of algorithmic freedom is that you have many feeds to chose from. The "For You" feed by @spacecowboy17.bsky.social is a reverse chronological feed of posts by users who have liked what you've liked. In other words totally deterministic, no machine learning or surveillance necessary, and surprisingly I got sucked right in. That was very surprising to me, as I've been harshly blaming the big platforms' algorithms for years, but the rise of short-form content is clearly generated by in user preferences, too.

One confounding factor is that I had liked some reactions to outrageous news, and was then kind of stuck in a doomer feed of people sharing the same desperate, helpless horror unique to the politically-minded citizens of a failing democracy. Its interesting that doom and gloom was enough to supplement the high-tech meth-adfeedtamine of YouTub/Instagram/TicTok et all.

Putting aside the arresting case study of doom's effect on user engagement, the encounter actually made me more optimistic than ever about making a healthy alternative to the ad-tech information apps.

All my previous experiments in this space stalled because they simply weren't very engaging. Content sources notwithstanding, the big issue always seemed to me the need for large-scale machine learning and user surveillance to make the feed "highly palatable", as they say in the junk food industry. Scroll cards of Wikipedia articles and book summaries might as well be unsalted, boiled lima beans. It's great to try and get people to eat their vegetables, but if you want to sell them (and I do) you're going to need some oil and MSG.

Bluesky being an open platform means that I can experiment with turning this feed, which legitimately sucked me in, into something that serves some well-seasoned vegetables. You can check out the basic version here.