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Alternatives to the news feed taken as a default; the “attention economy”

It is common nowadays for social technology to include a “feed” of some kind, most usually as the landing page upon logging in. One can without difficulty produce some conventional arguments in favor of this design choice: “It increases user engagement”, “It increases ‘visibility’” (the awareness that other people are active), “It increases the likelihood of questions getting answers”, and much more.

That said, I have a longstanding vendetta, if you will, against the immense power technology companies have had over our lives, including the way software user interfaces have sometimes been designed to *induce* a particular usage pattern - even, sometimes, compulsive use, as is the case with the addictivity of Facebook. Software design which hijacks human psychological fallibility in order to trigger use patterns that may not be fully conscientiously elected or voluntary has been termed “dark patterns”.

I can expand on this later but am currently tired.

1. What if we rejected the idea that the landing page should be a news feed of content, by default? Sure, it’s an option. But is it mandatory, or indispensable? I’ve seen users claim Codidact is “like Wikipedia”, which I love. But then, there must be many other options for what you actually see when you log in, and how you browse. What if it was more static, more bookishly informational? What if you saw the tag taxonomy, and instead could browse subjects, as one did in libraries in days of yore?
2. Resisting the status quo of the “attention economy”. It is widely taken for granted now that software should kind of pull you in with red notification badges and pings and push notifications and so on. What about an intellectual site promoting quiescence and a much more placid user experience? 
3. What if, if this is almost like a collaborative knowledge base generation tool or framework, the landing page was your “dashboard”, which is not at all a collection of your content, but instead a collection of tools a power user can use to contribute to contributing more knowledge to this site? Sort of like your Google Cloud console or something, a page focusing on useful functionalities, organized.