Field guide · Information diet
What is an
information diet?
Your information diet is the mix of topics, sources, and viewpoints you encounter over time. It includes articles you seek out and items that arrive through feeds, search, newsletters, friends, podcasts, and video. Looking at that mix can reveal useful gaps, but it cannot tell anyone what you believe.
OffFeed field guide · Published October 7, 2026
How can you examine your information diet?
Start with a week you can remember. List the sources you actually opened, the topics they covered, and how each item reached you. Keep “I follow this account” separate from “I saw this post” and “I read it.” A subscription is only a possible route to a story; it is not evidence that the story appeared on your screen.
Then ask three different questions: Which subjects came up repeatedly? Which sources contributed most of what you read? Which worthwhile subjects did you rarely encounter? These are observations about a sample of your week, not a score of your curiosity or the quality of your judgment.
Why do topics and sources both matter?
Ten articles about different subjects from one publisher produce a varied topic mix but little source variety. Ten publishers covering one event create the opposite pattern. Keep those dimensions separate. When a claim matters, open its original study, public record, or other primary source and compare how independent sources describe it. A different viewpoint is useful only when it is supported by evidence.
What can a quick assessment tell you?
It can provide a starting estimate of your interests and habits. Optional lists of followed X accounts and YouTube subscriptions add clues about available sources. Neither reveals your ranked feed, reading time, offline conversations, or every story you chose to open. OffFeed therefore calls its output self-reported topic signals, with optional follow and subscription clues. Its twenty categories and ten questions are product choices, not a validated measure of someone’s knowledge or ideology. The exact weighting is published in our methodology.
How do you broaden the mix without adding noise?
Choose one subject adjacent to something you already care about. Find a credible source that reports on it regularly. For an important story, read the original evidence when available, then compare an independent account that uses the same evidence. Save a small number of useful discoveries instead of adding endless feeds. Revisiting the mix after a few weeks is more informative than chasing a single “diversity” number.
What does research add?
Research on online news shows that platforms, social connections, and reader choices can all affect what people encounter. Their relative roles depend on the platform and the population studied. For example, a 2015 study of Facebook users examined distinct stages from friends’ sharing to feed ranking to clicks; it found reader choices played a larger role than ranking in limiting exposure to cross-cutting political content in that setting. It does not establish a universal rule for all topics or platforms. See the filter bubbles guide for the evidence and limits.
Source
- Bakshy, Messing & Adamic, “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook”, Science (2015). The linked record includes the original study abstract and DOI.