Generally if they keep a feature it means that the majority of people were more engaged by it, so the algo feed is probably increasing engagement across the board but alienating a few users.
This. When companies start looking at features and changes through the lenses of a metric, everything follows that metric. I'm sure that drives more engagement, therefore it's enforced on everybody.
Unfortunately they're not measuring abandonment or annoyance. Metrics like these are the short-term gain investors of today tech, always looking into the today and ruining the tomorrow.
It's not so specific as alienating a few users, it's removing an intuitive UX feature in exchange for the ability to control the order of the content you see, which can increase engagement.
