I clicked one link, out of curiosity, and suddenly every feed decided this was my new identity. Not a passing curiosity, but a defining interest. Overnight, my news shifted from a mix of topics to a narrow stream of stories I never asked for.
That’s the real issue with personalization. It doesn’t just show you more of something. It quietly pushes everything else out. The algorithm interprets a single click as a permanent preference.
And the feed that follows isn’t really about you. It’s about the simplest version of you the algorithm could build based on what you paused on, what you scrolled past, what you clicked once at 11pm on a Tuesday.
It feels like the feed is responding to you. It’s not. It’s responding to a pattern. And once that pattern locks in, you stop seeing the things you didn’t know you wanted to see.
That’s what bothers me most. Not the content itself. The narrowing. The removal of everything that didn’t fit the box I got sorted into.
I don’t want a feed that knows me. I want a feed that lets me wander. One that exposes me to different points of view, not just more of the same one.