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Discussion on: Dumb algorithms make us dumb

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Ben Halpern

Readers will only read about what they already know and endless repetitions of that
Content producers will only create content that already exists, with less and less randomness each time in order to better reach their audience

As the builder of a newsfeed algorithm for dev.to this is definitely something I've thought about. I don't have all the answers, but I promise we're trying to do it right and we'll publish any really good insights we have on the subject.

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Rémy 🤖

Well I'm posting this on dev.to and not Facebook right? Thanks guys :)

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Ben Halpern

Actually, as we get out of the "just build anything that won't totally fall apart as we try to scale" phase and into the "slightly more dedicated time and energy to the feed" phase, I feel like we'll definitely come away with some interesting insights and compare/contrast approaches with the Facebook properties.

At the time I feel a bit too scatterbrained to be able to distill our approach/strategy into logical sentences.

There's no timeline for this but it's still on the table IMO 😄

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Rémy 🤖

Well I think that the feed does a good job, there is several entry points (chronological, popularity, tags, etc) which bring some pseudo-randomness into what content you are presented and I find that it is good. I've stumbled into a lot of things I would've never been looking for this way!

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Ben Halpern

Yeah, the stumble is key. So much of software development is non-linear and if you aren’t stumbling into new insights along the way you’re not gonna learn much.

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Mihail Malo

Henlo, Benus. Do you haz any counterpoint to my commint there. Pls say yez. Pls have comint.