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

Once a year, spend some time taking back your algorithms

For the last few years, I’ve chosen one weekend day a year to undertake what I’ve come to call a Feeds Reboot. I try to systematically go through every subscription, every follow, every algorithmically or chronologically generated thing I see on social platforms, streaming services, and news apps, and reset or at least review the way it works. I can’t recommend this enough.

Every time I do a Feeds Reboot, I notice a huge uptick in how interesting and relevant I suddenly find the internet. Does it then spend the next 364 days slowly degrading back into a morass from which I will try and extricate myself next year? Yep! But I’m still making progress.

The point of a Feeds Reboot is to be more intentional about the internet. It’s not the same as a privacy audit, which is also a good thing to do every year; rather, it’s a way to change what you see online. Odds are, some of what’s in your feeds — the creators on YouTube, the out-there old friends on Facebook, the inescapable dance crazes on your TikTok For You page — is the result of something you commented on, liked, or just happened to watch many months or years ago. The reboot gives you a chance to start fresh, to declare to the internet that you are no longer the person you once were, and to take more control over the algorithms that run so much of your life.

My process has gotten more complicated over time and now includes three steps: the Following Audit, the Mass Archive, and a more complicated step I’ve come to call the Feeds Reboot Pro Max.