So... two thoughts. Thought one is that while personalisation can be really desirable to those who really desire it, it isn't desirable to most people for most

So... two thoughts. Thought one is that while personalisation can be really desirable to those who really desire it, it isn't desirable to most people for most things. Most people gravitate towards the easiest, quickest to understand option. There's a trade off between powerful, personalised approaches and easy mass market approaches. It's not an absolute conflict, but it's often there. For a mass market entertainment app like netflix... personalisation is rarely going to "win." Thought two is that controlling users' experience, the content they see, how they see it, when... that stuff is power. I don't think FB, for example, would be the company it is today if they didn't seek and guard the power of UI. The power to choose what goes in users' feed and control over how they interact with it. You can think of an app as a tool that users use to do what they want. Users manipulate the app to achieve their goals. You can think of it the other way around. An app is a tool for manipulating users to achieve the app's goals. Ultimately, the web era of software lends naturally to the latter. You design an ecommerce check-out UI. The goal is sale completion. No one is going to design a check out UI for user power. They're going to design it for sale completion. Social software (like FB, or even HN) is similar. The app has goals and it needs users to behave certain ways to achieve it. FB wants reactions, shares and whatnot from users. It wants lengthy scroll sessions and habit building. HN wants good submissions and comments, for HN's definition of submissions and comments. Social software does not want users doing whatever they want to do with the software, which might be flame wars, joke memes or spam. That's the paradigm.