Fired My Algorithm. Here's What I Found When I Started Steering Myself.
Fired My Algorithm. Here's What I Found When I Started Steering Myself.
Somewhere between the fourteenth sponsored post and the third piece of outrage bait before noon, Marcus Webb hit a wall. He wasn't looking for a philosophy. He was just tired. "I realized I hadn't actually chosen to read anything in months," says the 34-year-old software contractor from Raleigh, North Carolina. "Something had been choosing for me, and it was doing a terrible job."
So he did something that felt almost radical in 2024: he stopped. Closed the apps. Unsubscribed from the feeds. And then, slowly, started building his own internet from scratch.
He's not alone. Across the country, a loose but growing subculture of people — developers, writers, teachers, librarians, designers, and plenty of people who don't fit any of those labels — have quietly walked away from algorithmic content delivery and replaced it with something older, slower, and entirely self-directed. They're using RSS readers, hand-maintained blogrolls, curated link lists, and personal reading queues to control exactly what reaches their eyes. No engagement optimization. No behavioral targeting. No feed that learns your worst impulses and feeds them back to you.
It sounds like a lot of work. That's sort of the point.
What "Curating Your Own Internet" Actually Means
The tools themselves aren't complicated. RSS — Really Simple Syndication — has been around since the late nineties. It's a standardized format that lets websites publish updates in a machine-readable stream. You subscribe to those streams in a reader app, and the app shows you everything in chronological order. No algorithm. No ads served between posts. No hidden ranking logic deciding what you see first. Just the thing, in the order it was published.
NetNewsWire is free, open source, and runs natively on Mac and iOS. Miniflux is self-hostable for people who want zero third-party involvement. Feedbin and Inoreader offer polished web-based options with reasonable pricing. The barrier to entry is genuinely low — the harder part is psychological.
Beyond RSS, people are reviving the blogroll: a simple, publicly visible list of websites someone actually reads and recommends. It was standard practice in the early web, died somewhere around the rise of Twitter, and is now making a quiet comeback on personal sites built with tools like Hugo, Jekyll, or plain HTML. Some people maintain curated link lists — updated weekly or monthly — where they share what they've actually been reading, minus the algorithmic packaging.
"It's like the difference between getting handed a menu and being able to walk into the kitchen," says Dani Reyes, a UX researcher based in Austin who made the switch eighteen months ago. "I didn't know how much I'd been eating whatever they put in front of me until I started cooking for myself."
The Mental Shift Is the Hardest Part
Everyone who's done this says the same thing: the first few weeks feel weird. Not bad, exactly — just unfamiliar. You open your RSS reader and there's nothing new because you haven't added anything yet. That blankness is disorienting when you're used to a feed that's always full, always moving, always performing urgency.
Marcus describes it as "detox, but for your attention." He spent the first month just noticing how often he reached for his phone expecting to be fed something. "The reflex was still there. I'd open the reader, see a handful of posts from blogs I'd just started following, read them, and then... that was it. There was nothing left to scroll. I had to actually sit with that."
The discovery problem is real. Algorithms, whatever their faults, do surface things you wouldn't have found on your own. Without one, you need a replacement strategy. Most people in this community solve it the old-fashioned way: following links. Someone's blogroll leads to a site you didn't know existed. A post links to three other writers worth following. A curated link list from someone whose taste you trust becomes a gateway to a dozen new subscriptions.
"It's slower," admits Jordan Taft, a high school history teacher in Portland, Oregon, who now maintains a blogroll of forty-three sites. "But what I find actually sticks. I remember reading it. I think about it later. That almost never happened when I was doomscrolling."
What They're Actually Finding
Here's what's interesting: the content people discover through self-curation tends to look nothing like what algorithms serve. Less news cycle churn. More long-form thinking. Independent researchers, niche hobbyists, working professionals writing about their actual fields, academics who post outside their institutions, small-town journalists doing real local work.
Dani follows a hydrologist in Montana who writes about water rights. A retired foreign service officer who publishes occasional essays on diplomacy. A woodworker in Vermont who documents every project with unusual rigor. None of this would have surfaced in an engagement-optimized feed — it doesn't perform well enough, isn't controversial enough, doesn't trigger the response patterns that platforms reward.
"The internet I have now is genuinely interesting," she says. "The one I had before was just loud."
Jordan has started sharing his blogroll with students as part of a media literacy unit. "I want them to understand that the web isn't just whatever the algorithm shows you. There's an actual internet out there if you go looking for it."
How to Start Without Losing Your Mind
Nobody's saying you need to nuke your accounts today. But if you want to experiment, the entry point is simple:
Pick a reader. NetNewsWire if you're on Apple devices. Feedbin or Inoreader if you want web access. Miniflux if you want to self-host. All of them are fine.
Start with ten sites. Not fifty. Ten. Find things you already like — a newsletter you actually read, a publication you respect, a blogger you've bookmarked and forgotten. Add their RSS feeds. Give it two weeks before you add more.
Follow the links. When a post references another writer, check them out. When someone publishes a blogroll, skim it. This is how the network grows.
Let it be slow. You don't need to check it every hour. Once a day is fine. Once every few days is fine. The posts will still be there. They're not competing for your attention — that's the whole point.
Consider going public. Even a simple list of what you're reading, posted somewhere, contributes to the ecosystem. Other people find things through your list. You find things through theirs. The whole thing works because people share.
No Grip, No Algorithm
There's something almost stubborn about this whole movement — and that's exactly what makes it worth paying attention to. These aren't people who think they've found a perfect system. They're people who decided that outsourcing their intellectual diet to a profit-optimizing machine wasn't working for them, and did something about it.
The algorithm didn't pick that. They did. And after a while, that distinction starts to feel like the whole thing.
Marcus still has his RSS reader open in a tab right now. Forty-one subscriptions, updated at whatever pace the writers feel like publishing. "Some of them post twice a week," he says. "Some post twice a year. It doesn't matter. When they do, I actually read it." He pauses. "I can't remember the last time I said that about anything I found on social media."
