Episode Details

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, Twitter) are misaligned 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 hot "human". These algorithms are well aligned with their corporat 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 its 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 is:

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The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 18th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YuXcbWRTjmvr4QF7u/llms-are-about-to-disrupt-algorithmic-media-feeds

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.