"It's that time of year again where apps confidently tell us who we are. This year, Spotify informed me that I'm 78 years old in Spotify years (I'm 33 in human ones). I personally thought my affinity for Chapel Roan would have shaved off a decade or two but I guess not! Strava had thoughts about my running habits. YouTube summarized my viewing habits and decided I was an Adventurer, whatever that means."
"At a high level, most of the systems I mentioned learn about us through our behavior. Some of that behavior is subtle, like how long we linger, what we skip, when we hesitate. Some of it feels more intentional like likes, follows, comments, subscriptions etc. In most cases, we're not carefully declaring who we want to be to our products."
"Over time, we learn that these implicit behaviors function as levers. If we want less of something, we skip it. If we want more, we engage. We adapt ourselves to these janky systems. It's a very narrow kind of control because we don't know the weight of each actions on our experience. Then once a year, we're handed a polished summary of who the system thinks we are. But there are better ways to explore this."
Year-end app summaries infer personal profiles by analyzing user behavior, including explicit actions (likes, follows, subscriptions) and subtle signals (linger time, skips, hesitations). Users adapt to these systems by changing engagement to influence outputs, but this provides narrow control because the influence weight of each action is opaque. Annual polished summaries present a concise identity constructed from opaque signals. Ground News aggregates news sources and provides a My Media Bias feature that returns media consumption data in a structured, legible format, showing sources read, ideological distribution across the political spectrum, and potential blind spots in consumption.
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