The year is 2025. Non stop scrollers deliver our feed, but we are fed with crap: manipulative, sensational, low quality content. Despite the capability to evaluate and personalize content, today’s systems reward controversy, aggression, and divisiveness. I’m reminded of a book title from the early 2000s: Don’t Make Me Think. Today, it feels like we’ve descended into a UX philosophy of Make Me NOT Think—a deeply troubling trend. I am looking at you Aza Raskin, the inventor of the endless scroll. Now it is time to invent something humane.
We urgently need:
- Content quality evaluations and sorting (high quality relevant content comes first)
- Filtering of low quality, destructive content
- Customization options for feed
- Direct access to our own events (and other important data)
Good content quality evaluations and sorting
It is possible to evaluate each post using at least two dimensions: quality of content and relevance of content for the individual. So before showing, evaluate posts and sort them so the highest quality and most relevant comes first!
Filtering of low quality, destructive content
Low quality and or destructive content should instantly get to spam posts. If your feed is finished, you can go to your SPAM folder, but why would you?
Customization options for feed
We are not just physical beings—we are what we give our time and attention to. That includes the moments we spend consuming digital content. A part of our mind is naturally drawn to fresh, automatically delivered posts—but that doesn’t mean the feed should be left on autopilot.
It’s time to let users take control of what they consume. Feeds should learn and adapt based on what is interesting and BENEFICIAL to the individual—not just what triggers engagement.
For example, based on my usage, each month I have to see 200 points of advertisement:
- I want to know what this means.
- I want to know how much I have seen.
- I want to be able to block certain types of advertisement.
- I want to be able to buy these points, so that for a while I don’t see any advertisements at all.
Direct access to our own events (and other important data)
This is how it looks like today, June 2025:
This is how it should be:
Zsolt Balai, the author of this article is a software developer and prompt engineer. He would like to publish gamified learning apps and maybe contribute to better social network software. He believes it is possible to create social interaction platforms that are much more beneficial to people.
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