Will a Facebook-style news feed aid discovery or destroy serendipity?

I found this article very interesting - but was surprised that it did not mention Academia, to which I subscribe. While I suppose Academia is not strictly speaking a search engine, it does provide extremely useful suggestions about publications which relate to one's academic interests - even if it is sometimes rather repetitive.

There is already a real disaster, without need of algorithms. Academics slavishly hew to what the editors of key journals think is relevant and write in the style that these editors prize. Indeed, this is explained to newly-minted researchers at their first academic posts. The imperatives to publish in highly-regarded journals exerts a greater selectivity and conformity than any of the citation algorithms are likely to produce. Focusing on citation algorithms in this situation is equivalent to the phrase letting the tail wag the dog.