Honestly, there's nothing inherently wrong with providing a limited and selective set of information to people. The problem is the tendency towards broader and

Honestly, there's nothing inherently wrong with providing a limited and selective set of information to people. The problem is the tendency towards broader and broader aggregation. Once upon a time, people got their news from approximately 3 "kinds" of places: - newspapers, locally managed, locally printed, locally distributed - radio, somewhere between locally and nationally managed, recorded, broadly distributed - television, probably regionally or nationally managed, maybe locally recorded, also broadly distributed. And for these things they had between several and tens of choices to select in to their preferences, interests, and alignments. They got to self-select the 'algorithm' they viewed information through. There was obviously an algorithm here, and in spite of golden-age glasses it was a racist, sexist, deeply problematic algorithm, but it was at least chosen by people in your community. Now though? Everything gets sucked up into some megacorporation's orbit through a rolling katamari of companies. We have facebook and twitter and things that will eventually be bought by facebook or twitter and approximately 2-3 companies that own every newspaper, radio station, and television station on the planet. There's no choice here anymore. Your algorithm is chosen by someone else, and if by some chance an upstart comes along to break out of that monotony it's inevitable that they'll be sucked up into the katamari eventually for the sin of being successful at bucking the trend, and then they will be just like everything else within a year. So you can do your best to provide a fresh, reasonable algorithm that does some good and helps people find something. But in the end, no matter how hard you try, it's gonna end up just like everything else and be a slushy mass of stuff that makes people angry to get money out of them.