write a diary for your algorithm
when i was a kid, my dream was to be a member of a Nielsen family. Nielsen families were American families who kept diaries of what TV shows they watched, which were then used to generate the ratings that determined how successful the shows were. television was my family's religion and so being a Nielsen family would basically mean God was listening to us.
in 2026, there is no TV guide; no orderly, legible schedule of monoculture content. our video feed algorithms are atomized and ephemeral, always melting into air. as they mutate over time, this can feel like a loss. i still have deep nostalgia for my TikTok algorithm when i first started using the app years ago, how it really could give me a kind of infinite jest, to entertain me for as long as i was willing to scroll. today, i still drag myself through it, always hoping to be surprised by a glimmer of delight, but the quality is a shadow of what it once was.
regardless of the process of the progress of enshittification on your algorithms, it's an interesting exercise in "self" documentation to be your algorithm's amanuensis. there's nothing stopping you from just manually sitting next to your phone with a notebook and a pen, but i made this little app to make it easier and more fun:
just screen record yourself scrolling on your phone, then put the video in (should work on either mobile or desktop on modern browsers). the app will break your feed into the component parts and then give you a form to annotate what you see, in whatever style you like (the easiest is to just write "objective" single sentence descriptions of what's there). export that (with or without thumbnails) and share it in your newsletter or wherever! everything is local; your data never goes anywhere and it disappears as soon as you close the tab.
as a test, here's a report of about five minutes of my Instagram Reels feed this morning. this is a little flat and underdeveloped because of the time spent working on the app, but i’ll make more that are more interesting!
Elsewhere
Hamilton Nolan, rayne fisher-quann, and Katie Gatti Tassin talking (with transcript) about Substack and labor