Why does there have to be a critic? What's wrong with a recommendation feed of content you may like?

The current feeds are all based on surface level signals/labels. That's why "opinions from someone you trust" e.g. social media, user reviews and message boards are still a thing, and that's the role a critic essentially served.

0. Critics aren't necessarily negative.

1. Seemingly no one has ever made a recommendation feed that's actually as interesting and insightful as human experts.

2. You probably don't want a feed of content you "like" as a fan in some hobby. You want a lot of content that's interesting, which can be a very different thing entirely.

3. Critics can highlight aspects and context you missed, or help you vocalize and understand your own reactions to a work.

4. Other people have different opinions. To really participate in a community you need to be exposed to those opinions and engage with them.

A lot of intellectually rich works like Paradise Lost and Kant are best read alongside the commentary and reactions to their work. You're missing out if you're not reading the reactions to "the ones who walk away from Omelas" for example.

I mean the theory behind it is that they are effectively the same thing, it's just that the critic will have more explanatory power. The whole point is that you don't know what you don't know.

Most of this is based in movie reviews, since that is where I think critical reviews shine the most. Even if there is an algo that has perfect, zero variance with the consumer, there is still a genre/style/mood distinction that you will change from night to night. The algo is effectively a black box in terms of these extremely subtle mood variations, but a critic with zero opinion variance will -- ideally -- have a blurb about why the film is good, which should correspond to the ideal viewing setting and mood that the film ought to be consumed in.