The "fyp video tiktok" trend, basically people talking about and reacting to their For You Page and what it's serving them and what that apparently says about them as a person, has been going strong for a while and I've been living in TikTok comment sections enough during this rollout to have genuinely strong opinions about it. So here's me putting those opinions somewhere longer than a caption.
Your FYP is a psych eval you didn't consciously consent to. I mean that seriously. The algorithm is not randomly assigning you content. It's building a model of you based on every interaction you've had: how long you've watched certain things, where you paused, what you rewatched, what you scrolled past in two seconds, what you commented on in the middle of the night when you were being emotionally honest, what you liked at 3pm on a Tuesday when you were bored versus what you liked at midnight when you were in your feelings. It is building a profile of you that is, in some ways, more accurate than what you'd tell a friend about yourself, because it doesn't have access to your self-censorship the way your friend does.
This is interesting to me. It's also a little bit scary. But mostly it's interesting, because I think most people are not actually reading what their feed is telling them about themselves, and they should be.
Reading Your FYP as Data
Pull up your FYP right now and look at it. Not the content you went looking for, the stuff that just appeared. Ask yourself some questions. What's the dominant emotional register? Is it mostly funny? Aspirational? Anxious? Comforting? Angry? What topics cluster? If you see a lot of content about a particular subject (relationships, money, health, a specific hobby, a particular kind of aesthetics) that's not random. That's a pattern the algorithm identified in your behavior.
Now ask: does this represent who you WANT to be, or who you actually are right now? Because those two things aren't always the same, and your FYP will tell you the truth where your self-image might lie to you. I've talked to people whose feeds are wall-to-wall aspirational productivity content, the 5am routines, the hustle optimization, the "what I eat in a day as a person who has transcended the limitations of the human body," and when I ask how their days actually go, it's nothing like that content. Their FYP represents aspirational self-image, not current reality. The algorithm fed them what they engaged with enthusiastically, which is the version of themselves they wish they were. That's not bad, necessarily, but it's worth knowing.
My FYP during the recording period of HEATHEN HYMNS was genuinely unhinged. It was a mix of music production tutorials, late-night insomnia content, faith-deconstruction videos, extremely niche indie rock fan edits, and cooking videos I watched in full despite never cooking any of the recipes. The algorithm correctly identified that I was awake at wrong hours, deeply in a creative process, emotionally processing a lot of stuff about faith and identity, and also apparently compelled by watching people make pasta in real time as a stress-relief mechanism. Accurate on all counts. Slightly embarrassing to say out loud but accurate.
Training Your Algorithm on Purpose
Something a lot of people don't do: you can actively shape your FYP through deliberate behavior, not just passive scrolling. And if you're using TikTok for any purpose beyond pure entertainment, if you're a creator, a professional, someone trying to learn something, this matters.
The most direct tool is the "Not Interested" button. Underused. Criminally underused. Every time you see something that doesn't reflect the feed you want, long-press and hit "Not Interested." Do it consistently. Do it for whole content categories that are dragging your feed somewhere you don't want it. I spent about a week doing aggressive feed hygiene a few months back when my FYP started serving me a lot of content that was making me feel worse rather than better, certain kinds of comparison content, certain kinds of outrage content, and within about ten days my feed had shifted noticeably.
The second tool is watch time. If you want more of something, watch it all the way through. Rewatch it. Comment. Save it. Every one of those signals tells the algorithm: more of this. If you half-watch something and scroll away, that's a negative signal even if you didn't hit "not interested." Your behavior is the vote, not your intention.
The third tool is search. When you search for something on TikTok, you're not just finding content. You're training the model on what you're interested in. Deliberate, targeted search behavior shapes the FYP over time. I've used this specifically to make sure music production and independent artist content stays in my feed even during periods when I'm posting more lifestyle stuff, because the posting behavior alone isn't enough to tell the algorithm what I want to consume versus what I want to create.
The Feed Hygiene Talk Nobody Wants to Have
Okay, I'm going to say the thing that is slightly preachy but I believe it: if your FYP makes you feel bad about yourself consistently, that is information and you are allowed to act on it.
I'm not talking about content that challenges you or makes you think. I'm talking about content that you watch anyway even though it leaves you feeling worse every time. The comparison content where you spiral. The drama content that gets you riled up without any productive outlet for that energy. The diet culture content that you know is designed to make you feel inadequate so you'll buy something. You know the type. We all have our version of it. And the algorithm will keep serving it to you as long as you keep watching it, because from its perspective, engagement is engagement. It does not know that you're watching something with a kind of compulsive self-punishment rather than actual interest. It just sees that you watched it.
This connects to something I've been thinking about post-rollout. During HEATHEN HYMNS press season I've been on TikTok a lot more than usual, which has been amazing and overwhelming in equal measure. Fan content, reactions, people sharing what specific songs mean to them, that's beautiful and fills something up. But the ambient scroll, the mindless FYP time, can get toxic fast if you're not paying attention. I've had to be deliberate about my own feed hygiene in ways I wasn't before the album came out.
The thing about parasocial media is that the algorithm doesn't care about your mental health. It cares about your screen time. Those two things are often aligned, because people use social media for genuine connection and entertainment and those things can be genuinely good for you. But they're not ALWAYS aligned. And the places where they diverge are where you need to be the adult in the room, because the app is not going to be.
What My Current FYP Says About Me (Apparently)
Since we're doing confessional FYP readings: right now my For You Page is heavy on post-album-release indie artist content, other musicians talking about the rollout experience, release-week anxiety, how fan reactions feel. It's giving me a lot of "calm cottage" aesthetic content, which I find deeply funny because nothing about me is calm cottage, and yet apparently my watch time on those videos has been high enough to train the algorithm that I want this. The answer is yes, I watch seven-minute videos of someone tending a small kitchen garden in soft light because it is the most relaxing thing I can consume after a press day. Don't judge me.
It's also giving me a lot of content from people who found HEATHEN HYMNS and are posting about it, which means my FYP has started to fold fan activity about my own album into my regular feed. That is genuinely surreal. I'll be scrolling and suddenly see someone in a completely different city lipsyncing to something I made in my closet, and the algorithm just put it on my FYP like it was any other video. I have not adapted to this. I don't think I'm supposed to fully adapt to it. Every time it happens I still stop scrolling and watch the whole thing.
That's the FYP telling me something true: the thing that matters most to me right now is whether the work connected. And apparently the algorithm knows that too.
A Practical Guide to Auditing Your Feed Right Now
Alright, here's a quick practical section because I know some of you read this and thought "okay but HOW do I actually fix my feed, give me the steps." Fair. Here they are.
Step one: spend ten minutes this week using "Not Interested" aggressively. Every video in your FYP that doesn't serve you, doesn't make you laugh, doesn't teach you something, doesn't make you feel good, doesn't connect you to something meaningful, long-press and dismiss it. Don't just scroll. Dismiss. Signal the model.
Step two: actively search for things you want more of. If you want more original music content, search for it. If you want more craft tutorials or cooking or hiking or whatever fills you up, search for it deliberately. Spend a few minutes watching those results all the way through. You're writing a new chapter in your behavioral data.
Step three: be intentional about when you're scrolling. The time-of-day data matters. What you engage with at 11pm when you're exhausted and emotionally porous is weighted in your model. If your midnight scroll keeps pulling you toward content that makes you feel inadequate or angry, that pattern will compound. Try to notice when you're in a scrolling state that's being driven by an emotion rather than genuine interest, and either log off or redirect toward something that actually serves that emotion rather than inflames it. I'm not saying don't feel things online. I'm saying be the one choosing what you feed those feelings.
Step four: every few months, do a following audit. Not TikTok-specific, but applies there too. Who are you following? Are those accounts still giving you what made you follow them? Unfollow things that have shifted in a direction you don't want. Your feed is a garden. You have to weed it sometimes or it turns into something you don't recognize.
None of this is magic and none of it takes your autonomy back completely from the machine. But it puts more of the decision-making in your hands, and that is worth something. I love you. Go audit your feed. It knows things.