Hijack your feed
Inventing a more humane way to scroll.
I consider feeds to be the “operating systems” of this generation — hubs for almost everything the average person will do on a computer.
For many people, especially those with limited attention spans and/or executive function capabilities, a break from the need to constantly be weighing decisions (Where do I go? What do I do?) feels especially welcome. I don’t need a reason to pick up my phone because I know I’ll find a reason the instant my screen turns on. I don’t need to think, I don’t need to decide— all I have to do is scroll.
It’s kind of wonderful… in theory.
The luxury of not having to make any decisions is also a curse. Because decision making is intentionally left out of the typical social feed experience (…at least for now), we have very little control over what goes into our feeds other than the people we choose to follow (or friend). And even then, we are still at the mercy of the all-mighty algorithms that are constantly trying to predict what (ads) we might want to see next.
And so, even though we live so much of our lives on feeds now, it often feels like the feeds are the ones feeding on us. We know now that the unregulated use of persuasive technology in the context of social media feeds has helped usher in an age of addiction, surveillance capitalism, techno-fascism, and (newly emboldened movements of) white supremacy. Given everything that’s happened, it’s no surprise that the feed now carries a somewhat negative connotation — evoking images of gluttonous consumption and, to some, a lack of discipline.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads” — Jeffrey Hammerbacher
Despite all of social media’s sins, I am against “ScreenTime” style interventions. Asking people to abstain from social media works about as well as asking teenagers to abstain from sex — it’s just not going to happen, and it places the responsibility (and shame!) on the wrong folks.
Instead, I’m interested in looking at interventions that take place at the paradigm level. There’s obviously something about feeds that human beings are drawn to… what if we could reinvent the feed as a place that makes space for human intent and self-fulfillment, without losing the mechanisms that make Feeds special in the first place?
Early Concepts
At some point in the past year, I came to the realization that Mercury OS, the speculative operating systems prototype I released in 2019, boiled down to intelligently assembled feeds of modular interfaces. Sensing an opportunity, I modified the concept into something more realistic — a to-do list application that generates a feed of interactive modules based on your tasks.
However, after a few months of prototyping, I came to realize that a feed filled only with the promise of “more work” is a feed I will never return to. It’s the same reason why todo lists never worked for me — I have no interest in looking at a list consisting only of things I don’t want to do. (If I wanted to do something, I would have done it already so it wouldn’t be on the bloody list!)
There was something missing. A sense of reward. A dopamine hit. A —
And that’s when it hit me.
Social media feeds like Twitter are explicitly designed to give people feelings of reward and accomplishment. What if, instead of creating a brand new feed to be productive in, we simply brought productive moments… into social feeds?
Enter Hijack Your Feed.
Introducing Hijack Your Feed
A project in collaboration with Omar Rizwan and Jeff Dlouhy
Hijack Your Feed is a browser extension that replaces ads in your Twitter feed with tasks from your Reminders, rendered as visually striking, interactive posts.
It runs on Safari and synchronizes with the Reminders App that comes preinstalled with every Mac.
Unlike my earlier concepts, Hijack Your Feed (in Omar’s words) “seamlessly fits into the way you already work — the Twitter feed you already scroll through, the Reminders app you already use — rather than requiring you to adopt a new habit.”
A hijacked post that catches your eye could serve as a moment of inspiration to jumpstart a project, a gentle nudge towards chores you may be avoiding, or a simple reminder to buy more cat food.
Be your own influencer
You don’t need any design or development skills to create hijacked posts — Hijack Your Feed automatically generates them based on a wide variety of preconfigured styles.
We wanted hijacked posts to feel almost like ads that you’re intentionally “selling” to yourself, and even designed them to be deliberately distracting in the same ways that real ads would be.
Many of the styles we included are interactive — we wanted hijacked posts to feel playful, and for users to have fun fidgeting with them.
Inspired by their real ad counterparts, Hijacked posts also come with “CTA’s” (Calls to Action). Unlike real ads however, Hijacked CTAs will not link you to sketchy websites selling knock-off Naruto merchandise. Instead, clicking on a Hijacked CTA will remove the task from your feed, while also marking it as complete in your Reminders App without the need for a manual context switch.
Scaling the Speculative
The version of Hijack Your Feed that we dropped represents a single thread in an entire tapestry of ideas that we’re excited to explore.
What other kinds of interesting interactive experiences outside of ticking off tasks can we hijack into a feed?
One lightweight and playful example that we toyed around with is a “doomscroll countdown clock” that ticks as you scroll through your feed and keeps track of how long you’ve been on Twitter. It acts as a playful “Call to Action” to “save yourself” by exiting Twitter and doing something else with your time (if you so desire). It’s like an emergency escape hatch — for when you don’t *want* to be distracted by Twitter but find yourself scrolling through Twitter anyway.
Are there experiences that might feel more ergonomic within the unique context of a feed? Tasks like… replying to spare emails, perhaps?
What about experiences that aren’t “productivity” centric? In what ways can we play to or subvert the expectations of interactions that can exist in a feed?
(Just for fun) Is there a world where multiple feeds can coexist at once? A choose-your-own-adventure style feed where you can scroll into and out of diverging paths?
And finally, it should go without saying that we’re already thinking about ways to Hijack other feeds in interesting ways…
…as well as how Hijack Your Feed could one day scale into Hijack Everything.
Learn more about Hijack Your Feed
Download on the App Store. We’d love to hear what you think!
