How fast and strong are your signals?
A challenge
Are you scrolling social media feeds during the day, searching for little nuggets of information to consume before scrolling off to the next one? If you are, I've got a fun little exercise for you to try out. Take a stop watch. Write down on a paper what you consider to be actual valuable information. And then open your feeds network by networks. Compare the chronological feeds vs algorithmic feeds. Use a stop watch to measure how long it takes you to find actual strong signals and how much time passes between each finding. While you are at it, just write down really quickly what topic each signal was in.
What's the point? Well, I think it's a great exercise to reflect on time spent vs value gained from our media consumption habits. I did that and wanted to write a little blog post on it. And by the end of it, I couldn't help but feel that this might be a valuable exercise for anyone to try. While I've shared my findings below, I should note that these first two paragraphs were added in AFTER I finished 99% of the blog post.
That said, on to the original post
Time to signal
Yesterday I wrote about grabbing an iPad mini to support my long form reading habits. I mentioned how I was distancing myself from slop scrolling. One metric I'm using to concretely measure the value of this is something I call Time To Signal (TTS. I am very clever /s). The idea is, how much time does it take for me to receive a signal vs noise when I'm on a platform. Especially with the algorithmic feed.
The interesting thing about all the platforms is that the time to first signal can be pretty small on average with some extreme spikes towards larger times thrown in. Usually within the first 3 posts, you get something that's worth knowing. I opened X today and discovered immediately a YouTube channel of a dude trying to vibe code their way to a million USD. It's obnoxious of course and as other commenters point out, there's a chance they reach million in YouTube revenue first, but it's interesting and something I'd want to see mentioned in a newsletter that aggregates happenings from around the AI world.
But I digress.
While the time to first signal is short, the time to signal for the 2nd instance and each instance thereafter progressively becomes longer and longer. 15 minutes can go by sometimes without hitting a real signal.
This got me thinking. What if I tried to compare the TTS of each platform including email newsletters and RSS feeds? And while I have shared the findings below, I also feel like I happened upon some insight on how signals hit differently depending on the context they are in. All of that below, but first, the comparisons.
The comparison
Threads - Algorithmic feed
Time to first signal - 1 minute 38 seconds. I'm an avid lover of animation and hitting this post showing a clip of "outtakes" from the original Lion King was amazing. I never knew this existed. Now it's burnt into my head.
Next signal - Honestly, 9 minutes in and I just had to say forget it. It's not that the posts are bad. But they are pringles chips laced with Ajinomoto. You'll have a lot while gaining nothing from it.
Threads - Chronological
7 minutes in, and I called it a day. Tbf, some of the stuff I saw was already on the recommended feed which may mean I need to run this experiment again. That said, there are differences in the posts I look at on the chronological feed. Updates from indie game devs reminding me of how many days till their launch. Key dates from the McLaren F1 team for 2026. It's less pringles on steroids. And in a way I like it like that. If I wasn't running this experiment, I'd have peaced out in 1 minute knowing that it's a bit quiet right now.
Of course, this might all just be cope to try and convince myself the chronological feed is somehow better. Reality is that it can be pretty hit and miss on threads. Probably a good indicator that I need to prune my feed again. Or, just invest in lists properly like I used to with Twitter
X - Algorithmic feed
9 minutes in. Nothing. Absolutely blooming nothing. The pringles are super juiced up though to optimize for a platform that does payouts.
X - chronological feed from curated lists
If this were my first look at the curated feed for the day I'd say I got signal pretty quickly. The same video about the vibe coding guy is currently close to the most recent post. Outside of that, my infosec list is pretty strong in signal but most infosec folk I used to follow have moved off from X.
Mastodon
Within the first minute. This post on DOS game preservation is an absolute gem. Made me think about a topic I don't usually think about. Also made me want to jump into the DOS gaming topic and see what else I could learn about its preservation efforts.
The next signals came in pretty quickly too. News about a US and Israeli made security tool ban in China, a study on security issues in vibe coded output, and a study on the longevity of EV batteries .
That said, what I struggle with here is how quickly topics shift. But I'll get to that in a bit. Point is that Mastodon remains one of my highest signal sources from my scroll feeds.
YouTube
I can't quite measure this separately between algorithmic vs chronological. For my following feed, the value is pretty instantaneous. But my algorithmic feed opens up with several of the channels that I follow. Really, all my algorithmic feed is doing is delivering the most engaged videos from my following list. Either way, given how I've followed folks on YouTube, the TTS is near zero consistently.
YouTube shorts and Instagram
These are productivity traps. The TTS is near infinite and you should never use them.
Also, a note on the chronological feed of Instagram. Given the nature of Instagram, I find that folks who make content for the platform tend to consistently devalue themselves by making things easy to consume while removing so much value from the overall topic. Even within the art sphere and DIY sphere, everything is just fast cuts and time lapses. There's very little time to actually absorb anything and learn something of value. It's a pringles chip even when it tries to be valuable. Funnily enough, short doesn't have to mean Pringles like. Tom Scott is/was a great example of this. But even his videos were typically at least 5 minutes long. There's a certain bar which once you drop below, the content becomes Pringles almost 100% of the time.
For that reason, I just don't touch Instagram at all anymore
Newsletters
Time to first signal and everything thereafter? Instantaneous. Every single thing in there might as well be defined as signal. Between this and social media feeds, there is absolutely no comparison.
RSS
Time to first signal and everything thereafter? Also instantaneous.
Not all signals are built equally
I think this is a topic worth exploring as well. When I discuss signals purely based on a timing perspective, it's assuming that all signals are equal. A signal is a signal. Anything else is noise. But as with most things I prefer to break stuff down into spectrums over binary conclusions. To me, signals are context dependent too. You could fill my social media feed with posts that are purely signal. You could make it all about the topics that I'm interested in. The problem would be this
- Signal 1: A post about cybersecurity findings for the day
- Signal 2: A post related to animation history
- Signal 3: A post about indie games launched over the past week
- Signal 4: An LLM coding manual
- Signal 5: Another post about indie games being launched
- Signal 6: A cybersecurity post sharing free courses launched
And so on. However, if I was to open email, I'd find the following:
- An email categorizing all the cyber security findings over the past 48 hours to 1 week
- An email categorizing all the LLM/AI related news for the past X period
- An email categorizing all the indie game news for the X period
And so on. The point is, that with social media feeds, even the highest quality ones, I'm jumping from one topic to another. Over time I may have gained the same signals as I did from email. But the nature of it hopping from one topic to another means that I am damaging the quality of each individual signal because my brain is hopping tracks every 2-5 minutes (more likely to be every 30 seconds on a social media feed). I don't have scientific backing for this, but I can feel the effect that each type of consumption has on my brain. The social media feed gives me that drippy dopamine effect. But the newsletters have an effect closer to reading a magazine. You are reading information. Taking time to synthesize paragraphs. Connect different pieces in your head. Each signal builds on the previous one and eventually creates a much higher quality effect.
I find that RSS feeds get past the topic jumping a little bit due to the fact that it's long form and most RSS feeds I follow require at least 5-10 minutes of attention per post. YouTube videos are also great because all the videos are easily over 10 minutes of length for the most part so it's a single focused topic which I watch and usually, I don't have time to jump to another topic so it all just sits with me for a while.
Overall, I'm finding that even with a strongly curated feed, we are probably breaking our brains a little by trying to consume it all through a firehose that spits is out indiscriminately.
Also, it's worth noting that I haven't even touched on the other sources of long form information I consume such as The Economist (got it on a great bundle deal), Wired, and 404media. I don't really end up with FOMO given that whatever is important is going to get surfaced through any of the mediums I use and usually I discover well curated hidden gems too. Not just mainstream stuff. Meaning, I don't think I lose much value in choosing slow media over fast ones.
A final recommendation
As mentioned at the start of the post, I wrote in a couple of paragraphs at the top just before writing the final bit of this post. I would highly encourage folks to run this experiment themselves even if you don't have newsletters or RSS feeds to compare to. There seems to be value in knowing just how much time you potentially lose every day trying to find signals.
At the same time, I'd say, consider replacing fast media with slow. Especially if you do find that your TTS is longer than you expected.
An update: It turns out that I've written on this topic before on Threads too. I do think the thread has aged well.
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Posted on January 19 2026 by Adnan Issadeen