Recommendation Systems

as a network scales, it is inevitable that you need a way to sort & rank content.

web 2.0 solved it by ranking for popularity but a better approach could be to have a minimal quality threshold but not to try to rank things above that - so the search is not maximization-driven and leaves more room for serendipity.

h/t ken stanley

Today most algorithms that recommend or suppress content act purely on the basis of inferred popularity. They look at how much time people spend engaging with a piece of content, and boost it to more people if the numbers look good. The content itself is almost purely a black box. Some algorithms try to classify content with tags like “food” or