The Hmm ON The Perfect Feed

The Hmm is celebrating liberatory internet usages, empowering users to take back their online and offline autonomies. With this in mind, we would like to ask: What do you want to see on your feed?

Our social media feeds have changed quite a lot over the past 15 years. What started out as updates of what our friends are doing, became information shared from accounts or pages to us as their followers. Now, “For You” content shows up on our feeds, just because algorithms suspect we’ll find it interesting. We’ve also seen feeds go from permanent to temporary, with concepts like Stories or BeReal popping up. Given that timelines are where many internet users primarily get their information today, taking a closer look at their development is essential.

We’ve noticed experienced users begin to curate their personalised For You Pages on TikTok independently by emulating what the algorithm registers as interested or uninterested behaviours. Simultaneously, we’ve seen how important moderation is, as Twitter rebranded as X and Elon Musk fired tons of moderators, amongst other staff, resulting in an amplification of hate speech, ads that make the platform “feel like a tabloid magazine” and a For You feed that hardly seems to know what you like. 

For all our fellow users of the Internet, we’ve developed a workshop in collaboration with Soyun Park and Leo Scarin of RGBdog, that will be available four times across three different locations. Through The Perfect Feed, we invite you to craft your ultimate social media timeline.

So: How much control would you like over it as a user? What would your “Perfect Feed” look like? This workshop will explore how the content in our feeds is organised from a moderation perspective, as well as the workings of the (graphic) user interfaces we use to access and interact with our feeds.