The Unclicked Like: On the Moment a Recommendation Engine Lost My Trust

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the rain had just started. I was scrolling through the endless river of a video feed, a passive spectator to a parade of clips I had, in some small way, trained the algorithm to show me. Then it appeared: a short, beautifully shot film about a luthier restoring a century-old violin. The light in his workshop was soft, the grain of the wood seemed to glow, and the gentle scrape of his tools was a kind of ASMR. I was captivated.

As the video ended, the familiar trio of icons appeared. Without thinking, my thumb moved to press the ‘like’ button. It was a reflex, a tiny digital nod of appreciation. But my thumb stopped, hovering a millimeter above the glass.

A cold, clear thought cut through the autopilot: If I like this, what will it show me tomorrow? Not more luthiers, I suspected. Not more quiet craftsmanship. The machine doesn’t understand nuance; it understands correlation. It would see ‘woodworking’ and serve me aggressive tablesaw tutorials. It would hear ‘classical music’ and flood my feed with flashy teenage prodigies. It would detect ‘calm’ and push meditation app ads. My ‘like’ would not be a bookmark for me; it would be a command for it.

In that suspended moment, my relationship with the feed inverted. I wasn’t a reader curating my experience; I was a trainer conditioning a beast. Every click, every second of watch-time, was a data point it would use to narrow my world, to sand down the interesting, rough edges of a thing into the smooth, predictable dowel of a ‘content category.’ My genuine appreciation for this singular, beautiful video felt dangerous. To engage with it was to risk corrupting the very ecosystem that delivered it.

I pulled my thumb back. I did not like it. I did not save it. I simply closed the app and listened to the rain instead. The act felt strangely subversive, like refusing to speak a password. It was the smallest of rebellions: the protection of a quiet joy by denying it a digital footprint. I had chosen to let the moment remain a moment, not the seed of a future feed. I had, for once, opted out of the conversation, leaving the algorithm to guess in the dark. And in doing so, I felt a sliver of my own curation power return.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: