Significant attention is paid to “the algorithm.” A few days ago, I heard someone tell me in an unsolicited outreach that I needed to pay attention to the LinkedIn algorithm to make more money from the platform. They tried to teach me some fundamental concepts about this algorithm, which all seemed obvious. If you use any platform for a length of time, you will start to notice patterns. Those patterns become rather obvious to us humans – because we are quite exceptional at identifying patterns. I have spent considerable time in my life pondering just why humans can conceive of and actually play the game of Chess at such a high level. This is primarily an exercise of pattern matching at the most rudimentary level.
Algorithms in Daily Life
Anyway, these patterns, or what fancy people like to call “the algorithm,” are everywhere in our day-to-day lives. I started to contemplate this for a while. I realized that I am definitely being fed information by a variety of algorithms. I made a short list:
1. My snail mail is following a pattern. My junk mail is different from my neighbor’s junk mail, so I am getting a regular incoming stream of junk mail that various mass marketers and political campaigns use to target me.
2. My X account is definitely following a pattern based on what it presumes is interesting to me. It even says that, “for you.” Playing around with this, I started only clicking on and looking at posts in one topic area. It took about 24 hours and my feed changed considerably.
3. I note the same behavior and pattern with Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Spotify, and other services that I subscribe to. Interesting is that they are all slightly different but they have the same general consideration. Upon investigation, I can change these to behave differently on each of the platforms.
4. My streaming services, such as Netflix and others have the same behavior. We all know this and interestingly enough, I compared each of my family members with me. My daughter’s is full of anime, my wife’s is full of period piece dramas and home shopping shows, and mine is full of documentaries.
5. My search results from a few search engines, I do not just use Google anymore, are also different. That is interesting. I think I am going to play around with this concept and start searching for content in a particular genre on one engine and reserve some items for another engine. See what happens.
6. AI tools – I did not think this would be using “an algorithm,” but it clearly is. After spending a few hours comparing my subscription account in Claude, GPT, Grok, and Gemini versus a new account I created – the results are remarkably different. However, looking carefully through their EULAs, I can clearly see that it is remembering your searches in order to improve results.
Embracing Algorithm Influence
I could go on, I have thought of several more algorithms influencing what I see and experience all day long. This does not come as a surprise; I think we all sort of suspect that this is going on and, in most cases, wholeheartedly embrace and accept that it is happening. Probably makes our life easier in some fashion. I realized the other day while listening to the radio (this ancient technology where we use a special band of frequency to transmit broadband channels to receivers called radios) that I actually enjoyed the experience – even the commercials. This was because I innately knew that this was non-curated content. I was hearing what everyone else was hearing – and that was somehow relieving.
Conclusion: Accountability for Information
This brings me to an important conclusion. If I find myself complaining about all the misinformation and lies being peddled toward me, then I really only have one person to blame – myself. I essentially am getting what I pay for. You pay for lies – you get lies!
