The problem is the economics of the Internet today. Most sites are ad-funded. They need to maximize pageviews and time on site. The recommender is a huge part of accomplishing that, and it simply won't be tuned to any metric other than maximizing revenue. The solution would be to reskin popular sites with recommenders that had other objectives, such as retrospective satisfaction with time spent. Unfortunately sites know that if they give up control of the UI through an API that is open, they will lose money when people do things like this.
I really think we're entering a crisis here where sites and apps that are engineered to maximize corporate metrics are leading people down horrible paths of addiction, and psychic stress as they spend their mental energy resisting temptations constantly thrown at them.
Thought just occurred: would I be willing to pay a subscription to have the recommender tuned to remove revenue maximisation and site-addiction maximisation? Would anyone?
I've made plenty of "remove ads" in-app purchases on my phone. This isn't too different. And it might actually result in a truly useful experience.
There may be public relations problem - users these days understand that ads pay the bills and don't see them as a moral compromise but try to explain to your users that they can pay premium to get relevant recommendations instead of "spam".
I've said the same thing many many times, I can't remember the numbers but the monetization of facebook data per person (If I remember correctly from something I read a year back, I'll try to look and add it to this comment) is less than 20$!
I would be very very willing to pay for Facebook to simply not be tracked, especially at such a reasonable price. I know that won't happen, but I'd really love such a thing.
It's only so low, because those are averages. The people willing to pay the twenty bucks might be exactly the ones that drive up the average, so they don't want to lose them.
That incentivizes using adblockers though, and given that ads are pretty much YouTube's entire business model, that would be nice for you but terrible for the business.
However, they do charge money per month for YouTube Red which removes ads, and a better recommendation system for Red subscribers might encourage people to buy it.
I really think we're entering a crisis here where sites and apps that are engineered to maximize corporate metrics are leading people down horrible paths of addiction, and psychic stress as they spend their mental energy resisting temptations constantly thrown at them.