I liked the variety; it made browsing feel less competitive. And witnessing strangers go on about some mundane subject that mattered deeply to them was oddly engrossing. The new occupants of my News Feed were giving me a break from personalization that I didn’t know I needed.

According to Ethan Zuckerman, the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, most of today’s social networks are predicated on bringing people’s offline relationships online. And since offline networks are shaped by homophily—people’s tendency to cluster with others who are like them—social networks, too, tend to surround users with the types of people they already know. Homophily is an ancient human instinct, but Facebook’s algorithm reinforces it with industrial efficiency.

What I was trying to do, then, was stop Facebook from doing what it is inherently good at, and hack it to give me the reverse: serendipity, surprise, heterophily. Soon I started to wonder: Were there other, better ways to do this?

Throwing the algorithm off my scent got easier when I enlisted the help of other algorithms. I did this with a tool called Noisify, which populates one’s Facebook search bar with random words. Cathy Deng, a programmer in San Francisco, built Noisify after the 2016 election, when people she knew seemed obsessed with political “filter bubbles.” “It feels very limiting to be like, ‘The entire world exists on this axis of left-versus-right,’ ” she told me. “The way I was seeing it was: The world is so much richer than that.”

Installing Noisify supercharged my pursuit of novelty. The tool has directed me to corners of Facebook that feel like mini-vacations from the usual onslaught of life updates and political news: pages devoted to intellectual-property rights, items for sale in small-town Maryland, and the apparently beloved 20th-century organist Virgil Fox.

This approach to browsing can work on other social-media platforms, too. “Every month or so,” says Crystal Abidin, an anthropologist who researches internet culture, “I selectively follow a bunch of accounts—sometimes to do with a specific country or demographic of people or culture—on Instagram, in a bid to change up my feed.” To achieve the same effect on YouTube, she’ll binge-watch random videos.

Abidin’s browsing is often for research purposes, and she wants to be able to survey a wide swath of the digital landscape instead of just the slice of it that social-media platforms tailor to her personal characteristics. She finds it useful to scroll through images on Instagram with hashtags that “are basically not very viable, because there are too many posts archived in them,” like #japan or #babies. She says it’s “bewildering, sometimes fun, but also really scary that there’s just so much out there I would never be able to discover.”

Max Hawkins, a 28-year-old programmer, elevated the goal of subverting algorithms to a way of life. After graduating from college in 2013 and getting a job at Google, Hawkins grew restless and sought ways to make his life more interesting. He built a tool that had Uber drop him off at random locations around the Bay Area. Then he built a tool that picked random publicly listed Facebook events for him to attend.