Radical idea: dump your Discover / For You / Explore feed and replace it with a deliberately curated list of people whose judgment you trust. Not influencers. Not brands. People.
The algorithm is not your friend. It is optimized for engagement, which is a proxy for the thing you actually want — which is to learn, think better, and find things that are useful or beautiful. The proxy and the thing are not the same. The algorithm doesn't know that.
What does "follow people instead" look like in practice? It looks like: making a list of 40–60 people whose recommendations you have historically found valuable. Not people you agree with on everything — that's an echo chamber. People whose judgment on a specific domain you trust. Someone who curates good long reads. Someone who knows the creator economy better than the press covering it. Someone who is actually building something and writes about what they're learning.
Then muting everything else. Not unfollowing — that's a lot of work and creates social friction. Just muting. The Discover tab goes dark. What's left is the people.
The algorithm gives you what you clicked on last week. People give you what they thought was worth sharing this morning.
This isn't a new idea. It's how smart people have always navigated information overload — by building trusted networks rather than outsourcing curation to a machine with different incentives than theirs. The current moment just makes it feel urgent because the machine got very good very fast.