[HN Gopher] Ranking by Engagement
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       Ranking by Engagement
        
       Author : entrican
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2023-05-13 11:55 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tecunningham.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tecunningham.github.io)
        
       | nwlieb wrote:
       | Say I wanted to rank my own personal collection of songs by
       | retention/engagement-- are there any open source libraries or
       | crisp descriptions of algorithms/statistical models that one
       | could use?
        
       | dangrover wrote:
       | Loved Tom Cunningham's internal posts when I worked at Meta,
       | great to see he has public blog!
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | entrican wrote:
       | Six observations:
       | 
       | (1) Most platforms (FB, IG, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix)
       | rank content by predicted engagement: they'll show you the items
       | most likely to cause you to click, reply, retweet, etc.
       | 
       | (2) Ranking by engagement increases retention. Users shown ranked
       | feeds spend more time and return more often (higher DAU),
       | compared to users shown unranked feeds. Platforms care about
       | retention above all and thus they maximize engagement primarily
       | as a means to that end.
       | 
       | (3) Ranking by engagement hurts quality. The most-engaging
       | content often has high shares of clickbait, spam, scams, and
       | misleading headlines. Low-quality content tends to hurt retention
       | and so platforms are constantly trying to weed out engaging but
       | low-quality content.
       | 
       | (4) Ranking by engagement increases "sensitive" content. It shows
       | more nudity, bad language, abuse, hate speech, & partisan
       | politics. In many cases decreasing sensitive content has a
       | neutral or negative effect on user retention, so platforms are
       | unsure what to do about it.
       | 
       | (5) Platforms would prefer to have less sensitive content (for a
       | variety of reasons) but they also don't wish to be seen to be
       | making value judgments. As a consequence they often are slow to
       | intervene, both on quality and sensitivity, and they intervene in
       | roundabout ways.
       | 
       | (6) Incorporating explicit user preference typically doesn't make
       | a big effect on sensitive content. E.g. if you ask users survey
       | questions they often seem to _like_ the sensitive content.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-14 23:01 UTC)