TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Remains of the Day

This is the classic social media chicken-and-egg cold start problem. Every Silicon Valley PM has likely heard the stories about how Twitter and Facebook's critical keystone metrics were similar: get a user to follow some minimum number of accounts. Achieve that and those users turn into WAUs, or even better, DAUs. Users failing to follow enough acc... See more

A central challenge for any recommendation algorithm is the tradeoff between safe but somewhat boring recommendations that are similar to recommendations that worked well in the past (“exploitation”), and risky recommendations that are unlikely to be good but have a high payoff if they do turn out to be good (“exploration”). Explorat

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I refer to this as the problem of graph design: When designing an app that shapes its user experience off of a social graph, how do you ensure the user ends up with the optimal graph to get the most value out of your product/service?