There’s an upper bound to SNR for non-algorithmic feeds. You can of course rely on human curation but then you rely on unpaid labor or you’re back with ads again. Podcasts went very much that way, for instance.

I think non-algorithmic is a great baseline, HN and certain other communities are proof that it still works. There’s also a benefit of “everyone having seen the same stuff”, leading to interesting meta-conversations. This is the same “lost shared experiences” of only having one tv channel that old timers talk about, and it’s very real.

That said, there’s nothing inherently bad or destructive with algorithmic curation. What sucks is that we have no insight or control of them. If there was an open marketplace of curation algorithms, we’d be in a pretty good place.