Reclaiming my profile

Back in the day, before Facebook had a user-hostile home feed and was generally less problematic, folks would earnestly spend time to fill out their profile page. I'm talking the whole shebang, not just name and hometown but notable quotes, favourite movies, favourite books etc. You would even join a few public groups to show what tribes you're proud claim as your own.
The result was a mildly thrilling perusal of profiles of new friends you just met. "Of course they love that band I do too! So cool".

However, what I'm realising is that the real joy came from the journey of reflecting on how you wanted to forge your online profile. What are my top 5 books? Who is my favourite artist right now? You get the jist.

I want to recreate my profile based on who I am now. Things like TV series and movies that I enjoy come up in conversation all the time so it would be great to point people to a reference for where they can explore more on a particular theme they were interested in. Similarly it would be great to use it a seed for my socially-sourced recommendation "algorithm". In fact, I wouldn't be opposed to it being the source of recommendations from actual content algorithms, as long as I'm in full control of that seed profile.

There's probably already a patchwork profile(s) of "me" in a bunch of advertiser data warehouses but it's going to be horribly distorted by my diluted online activity, and tailored to serve commercial needs above all else. It's time to reclaim my "likes".