[eklitzke]

Personally, I mostly dislike news personalization. For instance, I always log out of reddit unless I'm actually going to post something or add a comment, because of the personalization issue. My selection of techy-related aggregators like reddit and HN are enough personalization for me.

The problem for me with personalization is that it's annoying to always see the same set of things. For instance, I'm mostly a Python programmer. But I've found that if, for instance, I'm subscribed to the Python reddit, I get too much Python-related content in my news feed. That's not really my focus -- I'm really a programmer first, and a Python programmer second. I'd rather see interesting programming things -- regardless of the language or focus -- than I would in seeing Python-related content.

As anohter example, I've found the same is true with political stuff, which I've mostly tried to handle using RSS feeds. I can subscribe to political content that I'm interested in, but then I find that I just end up reading the same things and viewpoints over and over again. I'd rather read political content that's interesting and well written -- regardless of its political stance -- than I would read political content related to some sort of viewpoint or interest. That's the value of a "logged out" reddit/hacker news, or the front page of a newspaper; I'll see the most important things first, and then do my own seletion of whether or not I want to read the stuff contained therein.

One interesting sidenote is that reddit basically dropped the personalization filter thing a long time ago. You may recall that they used to have a "recommended" articles tab, which was supposed to learn about what you were interested in based on your voting history, and then by clicking on the tab you'd see the top articles that it thought were relevant to you. AFAICT this feature no longer exists, and now they just have the sub-reddits system where you get a simple mix of content from subreddits you're subscribed to. I'm not sure exactly why they dropped that (it never worked very well), but that might be something to ponder a bit.

[ggchappell]

It seems to me that what is really going on here is that the personalization is lousy. The point of personalization, one hopes, is to show you what you want to see. But you say the personalized version does not do that. That being the case, the personalization has completely failed. Which might answer the OP's question about why people don't like personalized feeds.

On the other hand, it could be that you are upvoting not things you want to see, but things you agree with. Tragically, many people do. In that case, it's your own fault (or the fault of anyone who does such upvoting, and dislikes the results); the personalization algorithm is doing it's best, but it's getting bad data. And since upvoting based on agreement is so common, this also might answer the OP's question.