To be sure, these algorithms aren’t the only way users ever see social media content—sometimes, people search for a specific term, or they navigate to content with a link they already have. Demystifying algorithmic feeds for users and developing a general framework that could be used to describe any social media feed has been the work of my co-authors and me for the last two years. In our full paper, we explore the design of several aspects of algorithmic feeds, but if there is one concept that is key to understanding how these systems work, it is this: Algorithmic feeds are optimized around certain goals, and their outputs are highly dependent on those goals and the design choices algorithm designers make to achieve them.