The problem of course is what the algorithms are generally tuned towards. Imagine instead a sort of open source algorithm where you're in control of how you want to tune your goals.
I often dream of this, the highest technology with in depth behavior analysis, but in service of each individual user instead of the tech overlords and its army of advertisers.
I still think RSS is a great way of encapsulating data in a format that's almost equally human- and machine-readable, regardless of how "smart" you want your aggregation to be.
Maybe I lack imagination in how RSS could help me beyond being a collection of articles unified under a common GUI.
If you want to provide details on how you use it I'd be glad to read it.
The most obvious thing would have been advertising -> enshittification. Otherwise, they needed some other form of profit -> improvement -> more profit solution.
The economics of these systems is a first level problem, inextricable from the good they do.
For me that is the answer as to why everything doesn't run through Tor. You can't scale for demand if demand doesn't reliably contribute at least as much value to its own supply quantity and quality.
Kind of like how now there's not just reddit clones all over, but you can basically spin your own.
To work for our personal interests, and only us (i.e. no third party), we need to pay for the resources directly, whether its hardware or a cloud service. Whether we contribute to an open algorithm or pay others to work on the algorithm.
We can certainly provide our own hardware and innovation.
But most people don't want to manage these things themselves, they want a service.
Another reason for the cloud/provider solution, is that a lot of these services have functions that are amortizable across users: i.e. crawling, indexing, correlation analysis, etc., that precede making individual recommendations.
Either way, if people don't contribute in proportion to their demand for service quality, scale and innovation, the system is going to either die, or get subsidized by third parties who find the resources to be highly competitive by using us.
> We can certainly provide our own hardware and innovation.
I.e. our own hardware for running software.