• by Shirley Marschall , Featured Contributor, May 8, 2025

You know the feeling. You’re scrolling LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok… doesn’t matter. You stop for one second. Maybe a weird ad. Maybe a cringe meme.

Maybe because something happened in real life — the doorbell rang, your coffee spilled, a Slack message popped up.

It doesn’t matter why you paused, but to the algorithm, you must have loved it. And now you’re stuck.

Your feed floods with more of the same — the stuff you accidentally paused on, not the stuff you actually want.

You go from scrolling to speed-scrolling, desperately trying to escape the trap you didn’t mean to set.

Congratulations. You’ve just trained the algorithm — badly. And even better luck retraining it.

Micro-Engagement: The Wrong Signal

In the world of algorithms, every tiny action is treated as gospel.

Pause = interest.

Hover = engagement.

Slight scroll slowdown = give them more of this.

There’s no room for context. No room for: “I got distracted,” or  “I paused because my cat knocked over a plant.”

The algorithm doesn’t care why you lingered. It only knows that you lingered.

And that’s the fatal flaw.

Because human attention is messy, fragmented, full of interruptions that have nothing to do with what’s on the screen. But machine logic treats every hesitation like desire.

Escape Behavior: The Missing Metric

Here’s the irony: The clearest signal that you don’t like something isn’t pausing — it’s trying to get away.

Speed-scrolling, closing the app, or skipping 10 posts at a time with unconscious swipes.

But most algorithms don’t weigh escape behavior properly. They keep doubling down on the wrong assumption: You want more.

The result? A discovery loop that feels less like discovery — and more like a trap.

You’re not exploring new things. You’re trying to outrun your own micro-mistakes.

Optimization Gone Wrong

This isn’t just bad luck. It’s baked into the system.

What starts as a well-meaning optimization (“more discovery!”) quickly morphs into a disconnection from what users actually value.

You didn’t come to LinkedIn to see strangers’viral memes.

You didn’t come to Instagram to see endless reposts of content you hate-watched once.

You didn’t come to TikTok to get stuck in a rabbit hole you didn’t even mean to enter.

But here you are — curated by micro-mistakes, not by choice.

The Real Problem: No Way Out

Most platforms offer no easy “undo.” No instant way to say: “That wasn’t for me. Reset.”

Instead, users are forced into elaborate workarounds:

• Speed-scrolling to retrain the algo.
• Manually muting, blocking, hiding.
• Giving up altogether.

It’s exhausting. And it’s not what real discovery should feel like.

And for platforms chasing retention, misunderstanding attention isn’t just annoying — it’s a missed opportunity.

When escaping becomes harder than engaging, the platform isn’t serving you anymore.

It’s serving itself.

The Takeaway: Algorithms Need to Understand Life Happens

If platforms want to fix discovery, they need to get smarter — not just about what we pause on, but why we pause.

They need to recognize:

• Accidental pauses are real.
• Off-screen distractions are real.
• Escape behavior is a feedback signal, not a failure.

Until then, every “optimized” feed will keep getting a little bit worse — a little less joyful, and a little more exhausting.

You didn’t choose to love that cringe meme. You just looked away for one second.

But good luck convincing the algorithm.