Personal information firehose

Adam Wiggins · 13 Jan 2026 · adamwiggins.com ↗

2 korrents from this piece

Adam Wiggins did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Manually configured filtering rules mostly fail because a person's preferences change over time and the rules require ongoing upkeep.

Their wordsExplicit filtering rules (e.g. rules features in many email clients): mostly a failure. It's too much work to set up and then manage these, especially since a given person's preferences will change over time.
Our reading
Social media recommendation algorithms are only partially designed to serve the people using them.

Their wordsThe weak point of social media algorithms for end users is that they are only partially designed to serve us.