is our "taste" getting watered down?

and why having (ambitious & talented) friends is important!

Apr 13, 2026

On Wednesday night, I was in a room full of marketers and designers where someone asked whether our taste is getting watered down.

A room full of people whose job (in some form) is to have taste. People who get paid to make judgment calls about what’s good, what lands, what’s worth making. And the question still hung there.

So, is it?

Every other week, there’s a LinkedIn post with another hot take on how streaming flattened film, how AI is dissolving voice, how the feed has collapsed our attention spans. I’m not going to write that one.

I actually do not like how taste has been phrased and how often it’s been thrown around, but I think the honest answer is that we’ve stopped noticing the difference between taste and preference (and intuition). Those are not the same thing.

I’ve solo-traveled a lot in my 20s and noticed that the things I love most are the ones nobody recommended to me. These discoveries feel different. They feel mine.

But a lot of what I watch and listen to is also shaped by my colleagues, friends, and family. Without them, my playlist and watchlist would be very monolingual, and it would be very sad, because language can unlock so many worlds.

Is taste something you develop, or something that happens to you? What happens to your taste when you stop exercising it? And what happens when the people around you stop exercising theirs? Especially in marketing?

The algo may have ruined taste (and marketing?)

Every major platform (Spotify, Netflix, Instagram, TikTok, Google) got dramatically better at giving you what you already like. The recommendation (and feedback) engines got sharper. The friction of encountering something unexpected got systematically reduced.

Has that damaged how we develop taste?

Taste doesn’t improve by consuming more of what you already like. It improves through contact with things that require effort to appreciate. Taste isn’t passive.

And the algorithm, by design, eliminates the gap between encounter and comprehension. It finds you things adjacent to what you already like, which means it makes sure you’re never confused, never challenged, and never left with the experience of not getting it yet.

The result is that your preferences become more and more refined (and less and less developed). You get better at articulating what you like. You don’t get better at liking better things. Preferences, on the other hand, are more passive.

Every recommendation engine is, in one sense, a taste-smoothing machine. It is extraordinarily good at its job — and its job is, in structural terms, slightly hostile to the development of taste. You can’t develop preferences you’ve never been surprised into.

I know this firsthand: every Christmas, I’m genuinely excited about Christmas romantic comedies that have no differentiated plot. They’re basically the same film every year, slightly rearranged. I’m a sucker for them. I don’t think I have good taste in Christmas movies. I just like the spirit. And the algorithm knows this about me, and it keeps feeding me, and I let it (but should I???)

Life without an algo

If you want to test this theory on yourself, pay attention to the areas of your life that have no algorithm.

Trying new things as an algo

Here’s what I notice in myself: the spaces where my taste stays sharpest are the ones where I have no algorithm. Cooking. Dance.

These are the two places where I try new things constantly — new techniques, new styles, cuisines I’d never make, choreography I can barely follow. There’s no “you might also like” in a kitchen. There’s no personalization feed in a studio.

Especially when you’re not cooking off recipes you got on Instagram or dancing routines off TikTok. You just encounter the thing, and either it teaches you something, or you fail and try again.

The result is that my opinions about food and movement are the ones I trust most. I know why I believe them. I’ve earned them through repeated contact with discomfort.

The categories where I’ve gotten lazy (where I let the algorithm or other people curate) are the categories where my taste has gotten blurry. I couldn’t tell you exactly why something is good. I could tell you it was “good.” That’s not the same thing.

Friends that shape your life (and taste)

This brings me to the thing I actually believe is the most underrated input to taste: your friends (and network).

Specifically: The ones who are making/building things, thinking seriously about things, embarrassingly passionate about things you might not care about yourself. The ones who will text you about a documentary at 11 pm because they just finished it and need to tell someone.

The best creative work tends to cluster geographically and socially. This is not a coincidence. The generation of Silicon Valley founders who built the companies that now run our lives was all embedded in dense social networks where people were in constant friction with each other’s ideas. That friction raised everyone’s floor. It’s why I love being in San Francisco.

Your talented friends are a calibration mechanism that no platform can replicate. When a friend who has real taste tells you something is bad, that note lands differently than a review, a ranking, or a star rating. It comes with context about why they believe it, which means you can agree or push back with real arguments. That exchange is where your taste develops. Not a like count.

The alternative is a like count, which is a popularity score dressed up as a quality signal. It tells you what many people may think. It doesn’t tell you what a person who has thought carefully thinks.

We see this a lot on social media. People are doomscrolling and liking things without thinking them through. I’ve heard of startups reaching out to everyone they know in their network to like content, such as a Series A announcement. But what if they hadn’t? Aren’t these likes just fake?

We’re in a time when people may like something, but that doesn’t mean they connect with something, and it definitely doesn’t mean they’ve given it a thoughtful ponder. It’s important to differentiate that.

The back-and-forth with friends you trust is a better signal of whether something is good.

Agency as an algo

One thing I’ve noticed about people with strong taste: they tend to be high in agency when encountering new things. I know, there are way too many tech bro tweets about this.

Usually, it means someone who takes initiative, doesn’t wait to be told what to do, and figures out a path. I want to use it slightly differently: high-agency taste means you’re the one deciding what you encounter, not the system.

You’re actively going to find the thing rather than waiting for it to surface. You’re watching the film on purpose or traveling to the place because you have a reason beyond “it came up.” You’ve done some research.

Sometimes, this requires, somewhat inconveniently, that you have people in your life who can point you in the right direction. The friend who tells you to watch a film you’ve never heard of, for reasons specific to what they know about you. The person who invites you to a dinner where you’ll eat something that confuses you.

But these don’t have to be passive experiences. Taking a recommendation doesn’t mean you’re not thinking.

You can also do this without these relationships. It just requires that much more agency. Whenever I’m learning a new language, I look for movies, books, food, and people who speak that language.

The activities that protect taste are, in retrospect, obvious:

Watching films you have and wouldn’t have picked,
Listening to new and old music,
Eating food that offers comfort and discovery,
Traveling,
Hiking somewhere you can’t get a signal

There’s probably a lot more. But in one sentence, it’s noticing what’s in front of you and making your own call on what it means to you.

So, is it even about consumption, though?

“So be more intentional about your media consumption.” I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s not really about media at all.

It’s about the difference between preferences and taste. Preferences are what you already like. Taste is the capacity to evaluate things you’ve never encountered.

Preferences are shaped by what you’ve been served. Taste is shaped by friction.

The algorithm is extremely good at giving you more of what you prefer. Your favorite news outlet, too. They don’t develop your taste.

It’s about trying new things, discomfort, surrounding yourself with great people, and having agency.

Connections > algos

When did something last genuinely surprise your taste? And who put it in front of you?

If you’re reading this and someone comes to mind immediately, tell them that. It’s underrated. And if you’re the person who plays that role for someone else, keep going.

Do you remember the last time something stopped you?

Stopped you like: A meal that made you think about the person who made it. A conversation with a friend that changed your mind. These connections are so important!

I’ve been thinking about how rarely that happens now. And more importantly, whether that’s the algorithm’s fault, or ours.

Is tech a monolith?

I moved to San Francisco partly because I wanted to be around people who were building, making, and thinking seriously about things. That hasn’t disappointed.

But I notice (in myself and in people I respect) a drift toward the well-curated over the genuinely surprising. Eventually, you’re not as sure anymore about what you actually like versus what you’ve absorbed from the ambient agreement of people around you.

People who don’t live in San Francisco often treat SF as a monolith of techies. But the answer isn’t to become a contrarian. That’s just algorithmic thinking inverted, still dependent on the mainstream as its reference point.

And if tech is a monolith, what happens to marketing in tech?

This week, I came across a post from Trevor (who leads marketing at Profound) recapping his team’s event. The recap’s reference to Michelin-starred restaurants is spot on.

Not from other marketing events. Not from industry benchmarks. From hospitality. From people who sweat every detail of a guest’s experience because the standard they hold themselves to exists somewhere entirely outside their category.

The best marketers are pulling from film, from food, from architecture, from anywhere but the thing they’re supposed to be looking at. And it shows in the work.

Which made me wonder: how often are the rest of us doing that?

The best practice for now is to stay in touch with things that require your own judgment and with people who are doing the same!

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