I trained my algorithm like Jackie Chan to show me important cat photos

Once on a lovely summer day sprinkled with light rain, I came across the absolute repulsive abomination of a spider video on my social media feed, showing a time-lapse of a jet-black tarantula moulting. I was horrified and accidentally disgust-watched the entire thing twice before realising I may have ingrained the video into my brain, now availble for endless rewatches. It was then that I decided my algorithm required some tough love if we were to get along.

The first step was to immediately block the spider-enthusiast. An important note: the video title had the word "creepy", indicating that the original poster was not a great fan either. This begs the question, why would they even post it in the first place?

But being the avid spider-hater ever since one crawled up my leg on a terrible occasion, I knew better than to put things to rest before locking all spider-content out and inviting important cat photos on their stead.

I took it upon myself to breeze through the entirety of several spider-related video content and pressed the dislike button the instant they finished for the algorithm to get a sense of my distaste and record it. I went so far as to change my bio to "spiders make no sense existing", in the hopes of being ostracised from the spider community.

I carried my phone everywhere with me and started taking photos of cats and cat-print-shirts. Then, I promptly uploaded them to my account on GiggleDotCom and for the first time, allowing the horrible collages to store themselves on my phone.

Next, I recorded my own cat meowing for three hours straight in my friend's inbox till she went ahead and unfriended me. But a mild success awaited me as catfood advertisements began popping up on my feed every now and then. The plan was slowly working.

In between study-breaks, I looked up Ragdolls, Munchkins, Short-Hairs, and Pixie Bobs and glowed from both seeing the fluffy cat photos and the knowledge of my algorithm learning my feline tendencies. Not too long before I am inundated with videos of purrs instead of ghastly moulting business, I dreamt happily.

I set the face-lock of my phone to my cat's and liked all cat-related posts with pure devotion. I altered my language to best describe my feelings in cat-lingo. Comments like "May you live four happy cat-lifetimes together!" under marriage posts, "So happy that our cat can now sit through a bath!" under graduation posts were the only hits while "don't scratch that itch" may have gotten me restricted.

For the next round, I gathered similar minds and we all merged our database of Cat-findings before writing a Cat-anthem and posting it online. It gained a lot of views overnight and an IT firm decided to launch an entire social media website for cat-lovers to interact. Thus, I became part of a utopian dream where shrieks from having nightmares of spiders looming overhead no longer plague anybody and the algorithm knows us so well that we never leave the website, even to sleep.

Unfortunately, my efforts may have been futile, as I just typed up a word document revealing all my schemes and used the word "spider" about nine times. Oh no.

Nishat Shawrin is now an eight-legged monster with the only superpowers of night vision and extreme scrolling. Send her a photo of your cat at [email protected]