LLMs will soon disrupt algorithmic media feeds

lsusr
Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:17:01 GMT

I predict that LLMs are about to disrupt algorithmic media feeds, and that this will start with a startup that curates blogs for you.

Big Media is Misaligned

If you look at a list of the world's top 10 websites, half of them are media websites. Of these 5 media behemoths, 4 (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter) are misaligned [1] media feeds. By "misaligned media feed", I mean a website where the primary user interface is you go to the homepage and a giant machine learning algorithm shows you what you are most likely to engage with.

These media behemoths are fundamentally misaligned with user values. Note that I wrote "user" and not "human". These algorithms are well aligned with their corporate owners' target metrics. For example, YouTube's recommendation algorithm is well aligned with its targets of clickthrough rate and watch time. The problem is that media websites' values are unaligned with user values. Consequently, big media peddles the media equivalent of crack cocaine. That's why it's so easy to find ragebait on X/Twitter, and why thumbnails are so important to YouTube videos.

For now, this is the equilibrium. Your options for media feeds are:

corporate-aligned ML-recommended cocaine personalized to you for the purpose of optimizing attention

voting systems (reddit, Hacker News, LessWrong) which aren't personalized to you

non-algorithmic manual curation (personal blogs, newspaper websites like ArsTechnica) which isn't personalized to you

What all of these have in common is that none of them curate based on an individual user's declared preferences. That's about to change. As of recent developments in LLMs, it is now possible to curate media feeds based on declared preferences. I should be able to tell YouTube "I don't want to see any more YouTube videos about Donald Trump news" and have that obeyed. Right now YouTube does not have that feature.

So, who will implement this? In the long run, I believe that YouTube/Facebook/Instagram/etc. will implement a feature like this. But I believe that this domain will be pioneered by startups due to a conflict of interest: A system where big media peddles cocaine is solidly in the short-term financial interests of big media. (Especially since LLM curation is surely more expensive to run than the current recommendation algorithms.) They will change eventually, but won't change until threatened. The only question is how soon all of this happens. Probably first a LLM personalized media feed startup takes off, and then YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and X/Twitter will scramble to catch up.

Where will this start? Probably with long-form writing and probably not with short-form video. Especially because there isn't a good way to get a personalized feed of blog articles right now. I can open up YouTube and get a feed of personalized video recommendations, but there's no [2] equivalent personalized feed for blogs. Personalized LLM media feeds won't be isolated to blogs, of course. That's just where I predict the revolution will start.

Misaligned cocaine media feeds will continue to exist, of course, just as literal crack cocaine exists, but I predict that in the future they will be considered vices, the way candy and soda are considered vices today. In the future, LLM-curated media will be considered the "good for you" option.

Imagine a world with no ragebait, no clickbait, and no <whatever else you don't like> in your media feeds. This world is already possible. The only question is how long until someone finds the time to vibe code an aligned recommendation algorithm.

1. The not-obviously-misaligned-to-maximize-attention media behemoth is reddit. ↩︎

2. Perhaps Substack's home page is an exception. I don't know as I don't use it. ↩︎

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