The Feed Algorithm Habit
A free B1-level English story for language learners, readable online in English, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
After one stressful week of watching cooking videos, Maeve's recommendation feed quietly pushes out photography, and she notices she has stopped taking photos.
Maeve had been posting photography videos to her own account for almost a year. She mostly filmed close-up shots of light through leaves and reflections in puddles. She never posted often. Still, she loved scrolling through her app's recommendation feed for new ideas whenever she felt stuck.
One rainy week during exam season, stressed and tired, she watched a few cooking videos instead. It was just a small, harmless break before bed.
The app noticed. Within days, her feed had quietly filled with cooking videos: quick recipes, kitchen hacks, satisfying knife skills. Cooking videos began appearing far more often than photography ones ever had. The photography videos she used to see constantly became rarer, then almost disappeared completely.
Weeks passed before Maeve realized what had happened. She opened her camera roll one afternoon, looking for a photo for a school project. She noticed she hadn't taken a single new photo in over a month. She used to take several a week, without even trying hard.
She mentioned it to her older cousin. He laughed and said the same thing had happened to him with fitness videos, after one accidental click. "The algorithm doesn't know why you watched something," he said. "It just knows that you watched it."
That evening, Maeve searched for photography accounts she used to follow. She watched several of their videos in a row, on purpose. She also used the feed's "not interested" option on a few cooking videos. She did this even for ones she had genuinely enjoyed.
The change wasn't instant. Within a week, though, photography videos had started appearing again, mixed in among the recipes. Maeve felt oddly proud of herself, as if she had outsmarted the app at its own game.
The next weekend, she brought her camera to the park for the first time in over a month. She photographed raindrops balanced on a spiderweb for almost twenty minutes. Her fingers grew too cold to hold the camera steady. She thought about what might happen if she let the feed quietly choose her hobbies for her. She might not notice what she was losing until it was almost gone.
