Un-Invent the Algorithm

---

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

---

I don’t want to un-invent social media. I want to un-invent the algorithm.

Social media has its benefits, and I’m not pretending otherwise. I’m on it because I love people. I like seeing the ordinary texture of my friends’ days, and the small windows it gives into the worlds of people I care about.

But the algorithm isn’t “people.” It’s an invisible editor. It decides what rises to the top of your feed and what sinks out of sight. And it doesn’t seem to reward what is truest or kindest or most worth knowing. It rewards what keeps us hooked: outrage, provocation, and the hot-take version of reality.

I’m tired of the steady drip of posts designed to make you react. A provocative headline. A breathless claim. A link that turns out to be untrue—or technically true in the way a magician is “technically” not lying. It’s click-bait: not an attempt to inform, but a way of luring you in to whatever sits behind the curtain—attention, money, influence, a tribal win. It’s hard not to feel that this is becoming the modus operandi of modern life: not persuasion, not careful thought, just agitation.

So I’ve changed how I respond. I don’t even bother clicking most of the time. I see the heading, feel the tug, and then I go and fact-check it on a news site instead of rewarding the lure. That’s a small act, but it’s also a sadness: it means I’m learning to treat the feed as suspicious by default.

And it raises the question I don’t like admitting out loud: is it worth being there at all?

The only thing that keeps me on is the people that I love. I just wish there were more of them, and less of the other. Less of the machine that profits from our agitation. Less of the invisible editor, constantly rearranging the room so that the loudest person is always nearest the microphone.

I don’t want to un-invent social media. I want to un-invent the algorithm—so we can get back to what I came for in the first place: people.