Your internet life needs a Feeds Reboot — here’s how to do it

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

For the last few years, I have decided to do a Feeds Reboot on a weekend every year. I try to review the way things work on social platforms, streaming services, and news apps by systematically going through every subscription, follow, and follow-up I get. This is a good recommendation.

When I do a Feeds Reboot, I notice a huge increase in how relevant and interesting the internet is. I will try and extricate myself next year, but I don't know if it will spend the next 368 days degrading back into a morass. Yes, that's right! I am still moving in the right direction.

Feeds Reboot's purpose is to be more intentional about the internet. It is a good thing to do every year because it is a way to change what you see on the internet. The inescapable dance crazes on your TikTok For You page are probably the result of something you commented on, liked, or just happened to watch. To start fresh, you can declare to the internet that you're no longer the person you used to be, and to take control of your life's decisions.

The process has gotten more complicated over the years and now includes three steps: the Following Audit, the Mass Archive, and a more complicated step called the Feeds Reboot Pro Max.

The following audit is very easy to do. If you want to make sure you still are, you should go through your following list on social media and look at all the sources you follow. Better stuff tends to happen naturally, so don't worry about it. Make sure you only sign up for things you really care about, and don't sign up for things you don't.

The Mass Archive is exactly what it is. Do you have a lot of unread emails? Do you have a read-it-later app that has a lot of unread stuff? What number of unviewed snaps do you have? Get rid of all of it. If you feel chaotic, you can dump it all in a folder called "Archive". It will be there if you need it, but you won't. The point is that

If you just do those two things, your online life will feel more relevant and less overload. Every year after that is quicker, since you have a lifetime of feed choices.

The Feeds Reboot Pro Max is the next step in controlling your algorithm. It involves looking into how various social platforms understand what you like and care about.

TikTok isn't the only app that won't let you do this. Some apps give more fine-grained control over the program. It is possible to get the same information in a browser, but I have included the steps for their mobile apps. It is easier to do bulk actions on a laptop than it is on a desktop computer. They are in no order.

YouTube

• Go to your Library tab, then select View All above your watch history. Scroll back through everything you’ve watched, hit the three-dot button on the right side, and select Remove from watch history to also take it out of your recommendation pool.
• Or go nuclear: go to Settings, then History & privacy, and just click Clear watch history to wipe the whole thing and start over.
• You can also click on Manage all activity and tell YouTube (and other Google services) to purge all your activity after a certain period of time. I have mine set to 18 months, but you can also choose three months or three years of data for Google to keep around.

Image: YouTube/David Pierce

Instagram

• Go to Settings, then Ads, and then Ad Topics to see a list of all the categories advertisers can use to reach you. If you see one you don’t want, tap on it and select See Less.
• Go to your profile, tap on Following in the top right, and tap on the Least Interacted With category. Unfollow everything in there you don’t want anymore.

Facebook

• Go to Settings & privacy > Settings and select Your Time on Facebook. Hit See Settings under Get More From Your Time, then tap News Feed Preferences, and either add or remove people from your Favorites and Unfollow lists to control how often they appear in your feed. (Unfollowing people without unfriending them remains an underrated tactic on Facebook.)
• Go to Settings & privacy > Settings, look for Permissions, and select Ad preferences. Select Ad Topics at the top of the page, and you can see and edit all the topics Facebook tells advertisers you’re into. (This list mirrors the one on Instagram, by the way, so you should only need to tweak it in one place.)

Image: Facebook/David Pierce

Twitter

• Go to Settings > Privacy and safety, select Content you see, and review both the Topics and the Interests Twitter has for you. Unfollow the ones you no longer want, and opt in to the suggested topics that sound most interesting.

LinkedIn

• Go to Settings & Privacy > Advertising data, then select Interest categories. You’ll be presented with everything LinkedIn thinks you care about and can turn off any you don’t.

Streaming services

• Most streaming services have a feature — usually under some phrase like “Watch history” or in the menu where you manage your Continue Watching section — that lets you control what the service uses to inform your recommendations. I would do this on all your services more often than once a year.
• In Netflix, for instance, it only works on the web: under your profile picture, go to your Account, look for your profile picture in Profile & Parental Controls, then select Viewing activity. Click on the Hide icon next to anything you’d rather not show up in your viewing history or inform your recommendations going forward.

Over the years, I have talked to people who recommend a more scorched-earth version of a Feeds Reboot. They said you should rebuild your feeds naturally by periodically unfollowing everyone. The purpose is the same and it feels like it's too much for me. You will eventually dislike the outputs if you don't tend to your inputs.

It's up to the platforms to make this process simpler and more transparent, so that you can change it. A lot of Facebook's information is hidden in settings menus, but you can see and change everything from your search history to a detailed list of everything the platform thinks you care about.

The Feeds Reboot is still going on. This is an excellent project for a long weekend.