Brands and bots are excluded from Spread and, like PI.FYI, the platform does not support advertising. Rather than working to maximize time on site, Rogers’ primary success metrics will be indicators of “meaningful” human engagement, such as when someone clicks on another user’s recommendation and later takes action, like signing up for a newsletter or subscription . He hopes this will align companies whose content is shared on Spread with the platform’s users. “I think there’s a nostalgia for what the original social media program was trying to accomplish,” Rogers says.
So you joined a social network without ranking algorithms – is everything OK now? Jonathan Stray, senior scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, has doubts. “There is now a body of research that shows that chronological is not necessarily better,” he says, adding that simpler feeds can promote recency bias and enable spam.
Stray does not believe that social harm is an inevitable result of complex algorithmic curation. However, he agrees with Rogers that the tech industry’s practice of maximizing engagement does not necessarily produce socially desirable outcomes.
Stray suspects that the solution to the problem of social media algorithms may actually be… more algorithms. “The fundamental problem is that there is far too much information for anyone to consume, so you have to reduce it somehow,” he says.
In January, Stray launched the Prosocial Ranking Challenge, a $60,000 competition aimed at advancing the development of feed ranking algorithms that prioritize socially desirable outcomes based on measures of user well-being and meaningfulness of a feed. From June to October, five winning algorithms will be tested using a browser extension on Facebook, X and Reddit.
Until a viable replacement emerges, bypassing engagement-focused algorithms generally means proceeding chronologically. There is evidence that people are also looking for this beyond niche platforms like PI.FYI and Spread.
For example, group messaging is often used as a supplement to artificially curated social media feeds. Private chats – infused with the logic of the clock – can provide a more intimate, less chaotic space to share and discuss insights from the algorithmic space: exchanging jokes, memes, links to videos and articles, and screenshots of social media posts .
Disregard for the algorithm could explain WhatsApp’s growing popularity in the US, which has long been ubiquitous elsewhere. Meta’s messaging app saw a 9 percent increase in daily users in the U.S. last year, according to data from Apptopia reported by The Wrap. Even within today’s dominant social apps, activity is shifting from public feeds to direct messaging, they say Business Insiderwhere chronology prevails.
While group chats may be ad-free and relatively controlled social environments, they come with their own biases. “If you look at sociology, we’ve seen a lot of research showing that people naturally look for things that don’t cause cognitive dissonance,” says Drake University’s Stoldt.
Although group messages provide a more organic method of compilation, they can still create echo chambers and other pitfalls associated with complex algorithms. And if the content of your group chat comes from each member’s respective highly personalized algorithmic feed, things can get even more complicated. Despite the flight to algorithm-free spaces, the fight for a perfect information feed is far from over.