Showing them what who wants? The users? That’s be great, but today they are trained to show what the company wants, and the company wants to keep you on the site as long as possible to generate ad clicks.
It’s designed for making you spiral into a topic.
I know you don't like it, but this very clearly is content that people want to consume.
But that doesn't mean all content is something people want to see, because Facebook can't make money either if users only consume content that doesn't make Facebook money, so they try to avoid that scenario.
The profit-maximizing strategy is to show users a mixture of content they like (to keep them around) and money-making content, preferably all jumbled together so people can't easily tell the difference. (The same calculation is behind Google deemphasizing the difference between paid search ads and actual results.)
Include these two ingredients and you essentially get YouTube.
The big signs include quick cuts of content you had just seen in order to summarize the story till then, previews before commurcial breaks, pre-starting the next episode (starting the next one before a break), and so many more annoying things.
The worst is when you binging it without ads - there's only 15 minutes of new content for the full duration.
Because people are perfectly rational and will never do something when they aren't particularly enjoying it and know is bad for them.
We have ingredients lists on packaged processed food, but we have more than that: the ability to buy ingredients, learn recipes, make recipes, and cook.
We should have the ability to put what we choose (and omit what we don't) in our feeds.
We should have the ability to control it all, though.
It seems like we're trying to force the input to be wrong as opposed to just acknowledging that the output is wrong. Facebook is doing the same "capitalistically moral" thing everyone else is doing, building something people want so that they make money. The input doesn't have to be "theoretically wrong" for the output to still be wrong. Good intentions and all that.