Isolate the algorithm
to see what it changes.
Narro is user-curated social media. A user adds the profiles they already follow on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and Narro shows only the posts from those specific profiles, newest first by when Narro collected them. Nothing is ranked, recommended, or inserted, and there is no advertising.
That makes some comparisons possible that are hard to run today: across platforms, over months instead of a single lab session, or against the same accounts' ordinary, algorithmic feed.
Narro shows a participant only the posts from the accounts they already follow on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, or LinkedIn, newest first by when Narro collected them, with nothing ranked, recommended, or inserted. The same no-algorithm setup works on each of the six platforms, on its own or mixed into one feed. That turns what the algorithm changes from a guess into something you can measure, and compare across platforms in one study.
You can build a feed for Instagram, another for TikTok, another for LinkedIn, each with the same setup and no algorithm. That lets you test whether an effect shows up on more than one platform, instead of being stuck with whichever one happens to give you API access. Platforms aren't linked to each other: adding someone's TikTok doesn't pull in their Instagram. Each feed only shows posts from the specific profiles you add to it.
Which accounts someone follows and how a platform ranks their posts are normally stuck together, so you only ever see one bundled with the other. Narro is the same accounts, delivered chronologically instead of ranked, which gives a study something to compare against a participant's ordinary, algorithmic feed of those same accounts.
WILO, short for Where I Left Off, marks the last post a participant read and picks up from exactly there next time. Paired with a feed that has a real end, that means a participant does not skip or re-read posts between sessions, so exposure stays consistent across a study that runs for weeks instead of one lab sitting.
Every Narro feed also has a plain RSS 2.0 URL. That's a standard, auditable way to archive a feed over the course of a study or run it through your own text or image analysis, without building a scraper.
The public feed view turns a feed into a link. A participant, a class, or a collaborator can open it and see the posts without creating an account or handing over platform credentials, which makes recruiting easier and consent conversations simpler.
We'll follow up to talk through configuration and the academic rate.
Just want to look around? Try Narro yourself
A social network is the accounts a person chose to follow. On top of it, platforms add a ranking, recommendation, and advertising layer. On every major platform, the two are bundled together.
Narro separates them. That's the whole idea behind user-curated social media: keep the accounts, with no algorithm. Ranked versus not ranked is the exact comparison most algorithm studies want to test, and now it's a feed you can build instead of a theory you can only model.
Not a researcher? See the other reasons people use Narro