Seems like a mode of thinking that is appearing everywhere, not just on social media. Go to MOD Pizza. You can order any toppings you want--your favorites. Yet many if not most people will go through the menu of preselected toppings combos to see if there's one they'd like. This makes no sense to me.
Sometimes I just want to eat some food without making 50 decisions. I'm not a chef, I don't know what pairs well together. If picking my own toppings, I will end up getting a plain pepperoni pizza. If there is a pre-built combo that looks appealing, it gives me the opportunity to branch out a little more and maybe find something new I like.
I'm happy places exist that let people be a little more creative, or allow me the same if I'm in the mood, but it's not something I want all the time. I really like places where I can simple order a #4 without any substitutions and my order is done. Growing up as a picky eater, I caught a lot of flack as a kid for substitutions; my orders never felt easy like other people. I like when my order can be easy.
Interesting because I've always been the picky eater (in Western food) which is why ordering exactly what I like is especially appealing. You must have grown very weary of the substitution process.
That... does not seem analogous. MOD isn't giving you a personalized set of combinations they think you'd like, with the top recommendations happening to include some sponsored ingredient. It's like every other pizza shops since the dawn of pizza shops: fixed toppings menu or a build-your-own option.
Choices take energy. If there are curated defaults it's often more pleasant to save that energy for something else. And most people don't have a sole "favorite" choice that they'd go to every time vs trying variety. Heck, you could even spend more energy on deciding whether or not to go somewhere else entirely.
Algorithmic content feeds are a much more important battle to fight, but "spend more effort on every single other decision too" is not gonna put people in a place to want to be more selective. It'll tire them out more and make them more likely to just put on the default idiot box feed.
Freedom of choice isn't that freeing if you don't have time/money to actually permute through all the options to find what you like.
This is the actual reason why the door is continually held open for propaganda and centralized control. Decentralizing everything struggles with inefficiency problems.
The first person to really discover and popularize this was Edward Bernays — who invented Public Relations to help corporations and politicians weaponize this inefficiency. He kicked off the "Mad Men" of 20th century New York.
The introduction to Bernays's book "Propaganda" lays this out very clearly:
We will keep giving up control to centralized forces until we can share information freely and efficiently about what choices lead to better/worse outcomes in a decentralized way.
It is easier to communicate a pre-selected option (maybe with a change or two) than to order from scratch sometimes.
But ordering pizza and getting news have different stakes anyway, so I think these problems should be handled differently. It is reasonable to offload pizza topping decisions, but we should try to learn a bit about the actual positions/competencies of our elected officials.
If I'm going to MOD Pizza, I'm going because I want to eat something quick and easy. I'm not necessarily going there to maximize my pizza-eating experience. I honestly prefer picking something from the menu and maybe adding some extra toppings.
In general, I don't personally enjoy having to make decisions about particular ingredients when I go somewhere to eat. It's mental energy I don't want to have to expend. Not having any dietary restrictions, I personally prefer somewhere that offers a fixed set of items. I'd also say that when I was younger, I was afraid of making the wrong choices and didn't know what some ingredients were whenever I'd go somewhere that did have choices, so that added a little bit of anxiety.
The combinatorial space is huge, and when I scan through the _curated_ list, I expect the establishment to provide some options from that space that are Actually Good. Maybe something I wouldn’t usually go for calls out to me. It’s an idea generator.
There’s this concept of “babble and prune” (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/babble-and-prune) and I argue that for food (and probably most opinions…) the prune aspect is where your personal taste gets most expressed. So they are doing you a service by pre-babbling a set of options for you prune.
Maybe this framework can shed some sense :)
In other words: I’m just trying to get a good pizza, man, I’m not some kind of pizza artist.
This reminds me of the 90s trend for applications to boast about their customizable user interfaces, which meant you could drag panels around or choose what should appear on which menu ... but none of them provided a good user interface. Saying "you can make it any way you want it!" excused the devs from putting in any design effort.
