Content discovery is broken.
Android’s news feed shows the same 5 stories. There’s an entire industry dedicated to helping you find new content on Netflix. Medium only recommends more of the same content you’re already reading.
This is partly because most content is crap. It’s derivative, verbose, and designed more for search engines and recommendation algorithms than actual people.
But there’s also a bigger discovery issue at play.
Today’s AI is bad at navigating the line between novelty and your current interests. While a person might understand that their friend likes Game of Thrones not for its fantasy setting but for its political thriller overtones, most of today’s algorithms default to the lowest common denominator: “people like you.”
Collective sorting was a useful stepping stone. But it’s time for something better.