Instinct’s new product recommendations are giving some users the ick

Instinct's decision to introduce human-curated recommendations is, on its face, a refreshing counter-narrative to the cold, statistical personalization that has defined the last decade of consumer tech. In a landscape where every scroll is mediated by a recommendation engine optimizing for engagement, the idea of a human editor—someone with taste, context, and a point of view—handpicking products and travel spots feels almost nostalgic. It's the digital equivalent of a trusted friend whispering a tip in your ear, rather than a black-box algorithm silently reordering your reality. But the "ick" that users are reporting reveals something deeper: the medium is the message, and the medium here is still an unsolicited interruption. Whether a suggestion comes from a neural net or a human curator, the core violation is the same—it presupposes that the platform knows better than the user what they need, and it does so without being asked. This is the fundamental tension of all recommendation systems: they only feel magical when they're right, and they only feel invasive when they're wrong. The difference with human curation is that the failure mode feels more personal, more like a presumptuous friend who can't take a hint. This backlash also signals a broader shift in user expectations. We've spent years training consumers to accept algorithmic suggestions as a cost of free services, but the tolerance for unsolicited input appears to be thinning. The "ick" is a visceral, pre-rational response—a gut feeling that the platform has crossed a line. That instinctive resistance is harder to engineer around than a simple dissatisfaction metric. It suggests that the next frontier in product design isn't better recommendations, but better consent mechanics: opt-in discovery, explicit preference signals, and a genuine respect for the user's attention as a finite resource. The irony is that Instinct likely saw human curation as a differentiator—a way to stand out from the algorithmic crowd. And in a sense, they're right: the curation itself may be excellent. But the rollout has conflated "good taste" with "welcome intrusion." The lesson for the industry is that taste is not a license to interrupt. Users don't just want better suggestions; they want to control when and how suggestions arrive. The platforms that figure out how to make curation a pull rather than a push—a resource users can draw from, not a tap that drips on them—will be the ones that avoid the ick. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/30/instincts-new-product-recommendations-are-giving-some-users-the-ick/