The "FYP edit" trend has been everywhere and I am HERE for the conversation, even if I want to push it a little further than most people are going. The concept is simple: you take a hard look at what's actually on your For You Page and you aggressively curate it, not-interested, block, don't-recommend, refresh, rebuild. You treat your algorithm like a garden instead of a weather system. You decide what grows there.
I did a full FYP edit about three months ago and I want to tell you honestly what I found, what I cut, and what showed up in the space I made. Because the "fyp edit" conversation usually stops at "I unfollowed toxic accounts and now I only see cottagecore and recipes," which is cute but surface-level. What I discovered doing this was more interesting than that. My algorithm was showing me a portrait of my anxiety and I had to sit with that before I could actually fix it.
What Was Actually on My FYP (Honest Inventory)
Before I started cutting, I spent about a week just paying attention. Not watching with intention, watching like a journalist, like someone cataloguing evidence. What TikTok had decided I was, based on my behavior, was a specific and not entirely flattering picture.
A lot of "indie musician struggle content," the kind of video that says "if you've been posting for two years and nobody cares, this is for you." I watched those. A lot of them, tbh. I'm not immune to the dopamine of feeling seen in my specific anxieties and there's a whole genre of creator content that is essentially professional commiseration, watch-time optimized validation for people who are trying and frustrated. I get why it exists and I get why I watched it and I also get that it was keeping me in a headspace of "this is hard and maybe pointless" rather than "this is hard and let's get back to work."
A lot of deconversion content. Which, look, I make that content sometimes. I care about that conversation. But there's a version of it that is basically repetitive outrage theater: here's another bonkers thing a pastor said, here's another church abuse story, here's another bad-faith Christian nationalism talking point. I agree with the politics. I was watching it anyway. But after a certain point it was giving me information I already had while keeping my cortisol elevated. That's not research. That's just marinating.
And then there was the stuff I was most embarrassed about: comparison content. Studio tours of artists with proper budgets. Music video breakdowns of people my age who'd blown up. Not aspirational, not in a healthy way. In the compulsive way, the way you pick at something that's already sore. I wasn't watching these because they inspired me. I was watching them because some part of my brain wanted to feel bad about where I am and TikTok was happy to oblige.
The Purge (Using "Not Interested" Like a Scalpel)
I went aggressive. I want to be specific because I think the advice to "just hit not interested" is too vague, you have to decide what principle you're working from or you'll just be in the same place in a month. My principle: if a video made me feel worse about myself, my work, or the world without giving me anything actionable, it went. Not-interested. Not maybe. Gone.
I cut almost all the musician-struggle content. Not because struggle isn't real, it's very real, I am currently living it, but because I was using that content as permission to stay stuck. There's a difference between community and complaint. I wanted the former, what I was getting served was mostly the latter.
I cut the ambient outrage stuff. Not the substantive commentary, I kept the people who make me think, who bring receipts, who explain things I didn't know. I cut the outrage-for-its-own-sake, the stuff designed to make me feel superior or scared rather than informed. There's a lot of that. It masquerades as being engaged with the world. It's mostly just advertising for a feeling.
The comparison content went completely. Every studio tour, every "how I blew up" video from someone my age, every "I got a million followers in six months" breakdown. Not forever, maybe, but for now. I know what my studio looks like. I know where I am. I don't need to measure it against someone else's highlight reel five times a day. That's just self-harm with extra steps.
What Bloomed in the Space
Here is the part that surprised me. When I cleared out the noise, my FYP didn't go quiet, it shifted. The algorithm is weirdly responsive to explicit curation signals. When I consistently marked certain things "not interested," the recommendations adjusted within a few days in ways that felt almost uncanny. Like the app had been waiting to show me something different and I just had to ask.
What came in: woodworking videos, which is how I ended up building that pedalboard shelf I wrote about last week. Music theory content I hadn't been seeking out, weird modal harmony stuff, production breakdown videos from engineers I respect, bedroom producer experiments. Books. So many books. I don't know when I started watching BookTok but it happened and I'm not mad about it. I am currently building a very ambitious reading list that I will discuss more in a future post.
More importantly: the music content that came in was about the craft of making it, not the business of selling it. That's a huge distinction. For a while my feed had drifted toward the latter, views, algorithms, conversion rates, how to go viral, how to pitch your music. Real talk: I don't find that stuff inspiring. I find it deflating because the frame is always commercial, always transactional, always about what's wrong with your approach. The craft content, someone explaining why a song modulates in a weird key at the bridge, a drummer obsessing over snare tuning, a bassist talking about the specific tone they spent six months finding, that stuff lights me up. That's why I started. That's who I am. My feed didn't know that anymore. Now it does.
Your FYP Is a Self-Portrait (And You Can Edit It)
The thing I keep coming back to: the algorithm is not neutral and it is not random and it is also not a force of nature you have no control over. It is a machine learning your behavior and then feeding it back to you in a loop. Your FYP is, in a very literal sense, what you have been telling TikTok you are. It's built from your pauses, your replays, the two-second hesitations before you scroll past something. It's a data portrait of your subconscious attention patterns. And your attention is one of the most precious things you have.
I'm recording a record right now. In a very specific creative season where what goes into my brain matters enormously because what goes into the brain eventually comes out in the work. The songs I'm wrestling with, one of them in particular that I've been stuck on for weeks, are drawing on everything I've been reading and listening to and watching. That's just how creativity works. Garbage in, garbage out. But also: gold in, gold out. The FYP edit isn't vanity. It's resource management. It's protecting the inputs.
I posted about this on @vixenraefr and someone commented: "but isn't curating your feed just creating a bubble?" It's a fair question. My answer: yes, obviously, all feeds are bubbles. The question is whether you're in a bubble by default or by design. A default bubble is shaped by engagement optimization, it will always drift toward whatever makes you most reactive, most anxious, most likely to keep scrolling. A designed bubble is shaped by your actual values and what you're trying to build. Neither is perfectly neutral. One is your choice.
The other thing I want to say is that curating your feed is a skill that takes practice, not a one-time fix. I've had to re-edit twice since my big purge. Things drift. New things get recommended. You mark them not-interested or you don't and gradually the portrait shifts again. You have to keep coming back to the question: is this what I actually want in my head? That question, asked regularly, is probably the most useful media literacy practice I know.
Your brain is the medium. The FYP is the editor. You get to fire the editor and hire yourself. I recommend it, with full acknowledgment that you will have to do it more than once and the algorithm will still sometimes serve you something absolutely unhinged at 1 a.m. But at least it'll be unhinged content you chose. That's something.
Go edit your FYP. Come back and tell me what you cut and what bloomed. I am genuinely, deeply nosy about this and I'll be reading every comment.
And if you've never done this kind of audit before and you're a little scared of what you might find, I get it. I was scared too. But what I found was mostly just a map of my own anxiety, and once you see it laid out like that, you have actual options. You can stay in it or you can start building something different. That choice being available to you at all is worth something. Use it.