What we talk about when we talk about The Algo

They involve not only the code itself, but also hundreds of hours of conversation, back-and-forth, the results of A/B tests for millions of users in re-ranking the feed, changing it, constantly shaping it to the best version of what the company thinks it should be.

These gray-area business logic questions where recommender systems become just as much of an art as a science, continuing to generate potential content for recommendation, blending it, filtering out negative or prohibited content on the platform to get to a “good” feed of engageable content.

Aside from all these decision-making conversations, you have hundreds of organizational changes happening that quietly shape the feed, but that are never documented anywhere.

Because, then the question becomes, now that we have some candidate Flits, how do we insert those Flits amongst the chronological Flits that birds are already receiving? Should your feed be entirely chronological? 50% chronological and 50% algorithmic? Mostly algorithmic? What if you have more than one algorithm, one that shows you the most relevan... See more