Frankly it should be illegal to name your software based company anything "open" if you refuse to be open source. It is intentionally misleading and harmful and creates a false sense of security and trust.

It's intentional. They all used to be better. YouTube before monetization was absolutely amazing and had the best recommendations ever. You would get lost down the YouTube rabbit hole for days. Netflix OG ratings system also generated fantastic recommendations. It was actually one of their original selling points, that's how good it was.

I'm not sure why exactly it's more profitable to push shit ratings and recommendations, but it clearly is because all these corporations have made very deliberate decisions to do so. They don't care about our user experience so long as it's just good enough to stick around. And in Netflix case, the lack of quality recommendations probably helps obfuscate the lack of depth and quality they actually offer. I'm sure it's not a coincidence their recommendation algorithm kicked ass back in the DVD rental days but sucks now that their streaming options are limited.