The pink elephant you can't forget is that the feeds on most services are not designed to benefit you, but to benefit the company. So for instance Facebook enga

The pink elephant you can't forget is that the feeds on most services are not designed to benefit you, but to benefit the company. So for instance Facebook engaged in substantial research manipulating peoples' emotions by making their feed either more positive or more negative, and seeing how this affected their posting and sharing trends. This one was widely reported (search for 'facebook psychological experiment') and demonized. I think there are a couple of important takeaways from it. First Facebook wasn't just doing that out of academic curiosity. They're manipulating their users to maximize their benefit. And the more important point is that that behavior is, all but certainly, something most of every company that also relies on advertising is engaging in. Letting you see what you want to see is not their goal, except if that coincidentally coincides with you being more likely to stay on their service and provide more personal information to them. And we might intuitively expect these two goals to be aligned, but this is improbable. Consider casinos. It's not wins that keep people gambling - almost nobody wins in the longrun in most games. Instead it's a complex system of addiction including near wins, and visual-audio manipulation that keeps people dumping their money in the machines. And so too with Facebook, it's that small rush of interaction, likes, and so on that also keeps people 'playing'.