This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. If you use ML to... See more

Media sites like Reddit, Twitter, and HackerNews are entropic, optimized for novelty, and “random”: the user is pulled into several different directions that limit their ability to progress at any one thing