Right but if people are never going to click on stories they're not interested in then does it really matter? Can we really blame increasing silo-mind on certain demographics not seeing links that they demonstratively wouldn't have opened anyway?
Yes, I would say that just browsing a table of contents gives you an idea of what's being talked about and what's getting the most attention, even if you never click through anything. And I don't think the algorithms are that good. It's probably just sorting people into a few discrete buckets.