This is a failure of imagination. On a federated network where you can have your own server/pod (think PeerTube or Diaspora) you absolutely can have a custom r

This is a failure of imagination. On a federated network where you can have your own server/pod (think PeerTube or Diaspora) you absolutely can have a custom recommendation algorithm. And for news you can have custom filters in your RSS reader that trim the feeds you are subscribed to to only the desired articles and apply a custom order. And even in a Cloud/SaaS scenario like Youtube, one can imagine a settings page where you can configure each recommend view in some domain specific programming language using an API. Imagine something like IFTTT but for configuring your preffered recommendations views. Notice that something you do not want is beeing recommended to you? Just open settings and tweak the algo. This is just like feeding a custom comparator function to a built-in sorting function using dependency injection. Of course, this would not be in the platforms interest and will probably never happen. It really is not that hard to imagine if you have the mindset that you should be able to control your own computation instead of being at the whims of a corporation.