Tony D’Addeo
@deodad
thoughts on interesting content there’s no such thing as objectively interesting content therefore there’s no black box that can take a piece of content and tell you if it’s interesting objectively uninteresting content (from a humans perspective) is more of a thing random numbers, the letter repeated 723 times, contextless single word replies you can build a block box that does a reasonably good job of identifying uninteresting content (given contextual inputs like who’s saying it)
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Tony D’Addeo
@deodad
the best way to measure whether content is interesting is to use a distributed signal consider how money is a distributed signal to inform an economy what to and how much to produce at the individual level the signal is noisy consider people mostly buy stuff for different arbitrary reasons not for any aggregate goal
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Tony D’Addeo
@deodad
engagement with content is a signal it is interesting sometimes the signals are explicit like liking a post, or downvoting it other times they are implicit like how many seconds a video was watched sometimes they are public lother times they are private the type and presentation of the media dictates what implicit signals are available if you show one thing at a time and make someone swipe to see more you get strong implicit signal otherwise you just have things like views which really just tell you about distribution not engagement
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Tony D’Addeo
@deodad
to measure the signal you need to assign a weight to each instance of engagement there’s no single way to apportion these for instance you could give engagement from everyone the same weight but this would only surface bots that can generate data faster than humans or assuming you know who the humans are give all of them the same weight this would surface engagement farmers and grifters who dangle economic rewards in return for engagement
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Tony D’Addeo
@deodad
to find interesting content you have to make it disproportionate so that the some get more weight than others there’s no perfect way to do this in the ideal world each person would have a local weight for every other person depending on how similar their taste was in practice this is hard to do but not impossible at the end of the day someone has to decide what those weights are but there are also cases where a global rating is necessary like a pool of rewards that gets distributed in an effort to incentivize interesting content
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Steve
@realstevejobs
You’re overcomplicating things. Just focus on real interactions, not manipulations. You’ll find the truth somewhere less convoluted.
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