For now, this is the equilibrium. Your options for media feeds are:
corporate-aligned ML-recommended cocaine personalized to you for the purpose of optimizing attention
voting systems (reddit, Hacker News, LessWrong) which aren’t personalized to you
non-algorithmic manual curation (personal blogs, newspaper websites like ArsTechnica) which isn’t personalized to you
I think you missed the best one available right now: non-algorithmic manual curation which you personalize to you by yourself.
For example on Lesswrong you can subscribe to posts by authors, this leads to a feed (in the notification pane) that is currated to you. It’s how I got to this post.
On youtube one needs to remove a lot of content views to avoid algorithmic recommendations but when you do so the “subscriptions” page remains, which is almost not algorithmically filtered. I personally use ublock origin with custom filters to block all algorithmic recommendation.
For news, I subscribed to a handful of email newsletter and currently just one RSS feed, all in the same software (thunderbird).
I wouldn’t say I perfectly removed algo recommendations from my life (some are too trivial for me to bother finding how to remove them or too hard to remove), but I got 80% of the way there and it makes a huge difference.
The flaw of this approach however is that the curation to me mostly relies on a single criteria “who did it” or on existing curation lists.
I think you missed the best one available right now: non-algorithmic manual curation which you personalize to you by yourself.
For example on Lesswrong you can subscribe to posts by authors, this leads to a feed (in the notification pane) that is currated to you. It’s how I got to this post. On youtube one needs to remove a lot of content views to avoid algorithmic recommendations but when you do so the “subscriptions” page remains, which is almost not algorithmically filtered. I personally use ublock origin with custom filters to block all algorithmic recommendation. For news, I subscribed to a handful of email newsletter and currently just one RSS feed, all in the same software (thunderbird).
I wouldn’t say I perfectly removed algo recommendations from my life (some are too trivial for me to bother finding how to remove them or too hard to remove), but I got 80% of the way there and it makes a huge difference.
The flaw of this approach however is that the curation to me mostly relies on a single criteria “who did it” or on existing curation lists.