Thinking for yourself is harder than most people are willing to admit
And it's primarily for two reasons, or so I've been able to conjure up in the 30 seconds after having that thought:
Firstly, you have to be willing to accept responsibility for the outcome, whether good or bad. This is the one everyone, everyone knows; it's so trite that I reconsidered even writing it.
Secondly, however, is our natural inefficiency in things we haven't experienced before: thoughts, ideas, methods, activities, etc etc you get the idea, I'm sure.
This seems to be one people tend to either forget outright, or underestimate severely; we like patterns, because patterns mean familiarity. If we have no pattern for any given scenario, we generally have to think harder about it, whatever "it" is. Being social, we benefit from and generally rely on filling each others' gaps.
Cue the computer.
I think algorithmic recommendations are actually quite neat as a concept, though I consider it to be severely over-applied in reality.
Maybe as a direct result or maybe as collateral damage, we seem to have forgotten about critical thinking skills, or at least trying to instill them in people. Honestly, I don't blame anyone for it, and I don't think we should, even if we could; sure, we can call people creating the platforms with these "attention span extraction machines" evil for turning our attention span into profits (that is pretty nutty, after all), but ultimately it's doing something we want to, and I don't think I could be convinced that anyone else in their position wouldn't do the same.
Realistically, our only option is ourselves; we fall back to that first requirement of thinking for yourself: accept responsibility for the outcome, good or bad.
The omnipresent, black-box algorithms do their jobs so well that we barely need to consider anything regarding their services for ourselves because the machine is just about as good as discerning our interests (as well as immeasurably faster than we are), and assuming anyone (everyone) would create these algorithms given the same power to do so, it's our fault for teaching ourselves that it's okay to stop thinking about what we enjoy, letting everything be taken care of for us.
Part of the joy is finding the cool thing to begin with.
This is also probably part of why grievance culture is so prominent right now: it's basically all many people think about.
Honestly, love harder, hate harder; if you're doing that and you're doing it yourself, for your own reasons, you're holding out pretty well against critical thought entropy. It's a real risk out in the increasingly digital world.
Anyways, no matter how many more words I type, I won't get any closer to feeling like I've satisfied getting my point across, so to save everyone a long, meandering speech about things most people are already as or more familiar with than I am, goodnight.