Methodology
How SelfTrace works
SelfTrace looks at your posting history and notices patterns — what you wrote about, how your voice shifted, which topics correlate with engagement, and where your self-image and your visible trace might not line up.
It doesn't access any platform's algorithm. It can't see what was shown to you or how your posts were ranked. It works entirely with what you wrote — the visible trace, not the invisible infrastructure.
What we look at
Recurring phrases and themes
What you return to — the formulations, ideas, and framings that appear in multiple posts across time.
Topic range
How spread out your subjects are each quarter. A narrowing range means fewer topics over time.
Vocabulary evolution
Which words became more or less frequent across your posting history, and the character of that change.
Tone
Approximate measures of assertiveness, emotionality, formality, and urgency. Directional signals based on word patterns, not precise measurements of emotional state.
Engagement patterns
Whether topics that received more response correlate with what you posted more of afterward. Correlation, not causation.
Self-descriptions
When you describe yourself in posts, we track how those descriptions evolve. Which self-framings persisted, which emerged, which faded.
Persistence
What you kept posting about despite low engagement. Evidence of expression that didn’t depend on external reward.
How certain are we
You'll see small colored dots throughout:
Green — directly from your data. We counted this.
Umber — a pattern we noticed. Plausible, not certain.
Gray — one possible reading. You might see it differently.
What we can't see
We can't prove causation. If your topics shifted toward what gets engagement, we can show the pattern but not prove the engagement caused it.
We can't see algorithms. We don't know what was shown to you, how your posts were ranked, or what was suppressed. The invisible infrastructure remains invisible.
Some of what we surface will feel meaningful. Some of it may be noise. You are the only one who can tell the difference, because you are the only one who knows what it was like to be you during the time this data covers.
Your privacy
Private by design
All analysis runs entirely in your browser. When you use a demo profile, nothing is sent to any server. If you connect a social account, only the connection handshake passes through our server — your content is fetched and processed locally, then released when you close the tab.
We built it this way because what this product shows you is personal in a way most apps never are. It's not your preferences or your purchase history — it's a picture of how you've been becoming yourself. That should belong to you and no one else.