Clicking consciously, however, is not just a defense strategy of sorts. It emerges quite prominently in a much more proactive sense as well. Take Kate, a former school teacher who now runs a Facebook page for parents in her neighborhood. For Kate, it is vital that her posts are seen and circulated as widely as possible. In order to secure “maximum reach” as she puts it, Kate takes great care to post “consciously,” which, in her case, means using multiple pictures instead of one, always trying to choose the right words, and the right time of the day. As a page owner, Kate says, “I have completely changed how I share information to make it work best for the algorithm.”48 In a similar vein, Nora tailors her updates in specific ways to fit the Facebook algorithm. Like Michael, Nora has been observing the working of the news feed for a while, taking notes of what seems to work and what does not. As she puts it, “If I post things and they receive no likes within the first 5 minutes, or very sparse likes (1–2 in the first minute), then they’ll drop of and not get many comments or likes at all.” Over the years, Nora has developed diferent strategies for making her “posts more frequently recognized” by the algorithm.49 These strategies include posting at a certain time (“usually around late evening on a weekday that’s not Friday”), structuring the post in specific ways, making sure that other people are not shown in her profile pictures (otherwise, they are “likely to get fewer likes”) and making sure to avoid or include certain keywords in her updates.
As Gillespie (2016) has usefully pointed out, adapting online behavior to social media platforms and their operational logics can be seen as a form of optimization, whereby content producers make their posts “algorithmically recognizable.” When users wait until a certain day of the week and for a particular time of day, use multiple pictures instead of one, carefully choose their words, and deliberately use positive sounding phrasing, they are not just strategically updating their social media profiles or hoping to be seen by others. Reminiscent of Gillespie’s (2014) argument about using hashtags for optimizing the algorithm, the personal algorithm stories shared as part of this study suggest that many of the participants are redesigning their expressions in order to be beter recognized and distributed by the algorithm. Like Kate, Ryan thinks the underlying logic of social media maters a lot. As he says, “how social media works really, really impacts what I post and how I post it.” For example, posting “life events” on Facebook or using certain hashtags on Twiter and Instagram was seen by some of the participants as a particularly efective means of increasing the probability the algorithm will make them visible.
Of course, people have always developed strategic eforts to be seen and recognized by information intermediaries. As Gillespie writes, “sending press releases to news organizations, staging events with the visual impact that television craves, or making spokespeople and soundbites available in ways convenient to journalists”
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