"Rotten bananas, sold for $5000!"
This is the essence of what tiktok, twitter, youtube, and other recommendation systems do.
There's been some discussion about how stacker.news should orient / organize itself to grow further. This post is about how explosive growth actually does happen, virality, which is probably not common knowledge or obvious.
"The Algorithm" is not mysterious. Here it is: Twitter doesn't try to show posts that you'll like— it tries to show you posts that are overvalued. They are mediocre but have tons of likes. This makes you want to tweet. Because if "Rotten bananas are being sold for $5000", and you have fresh bananas, whoa! You're rich! But then you tweet and it doesn't get as many likes as you were led to believe.
It is a general rule. Show people 1% good content, 99% overvalued content. This makes people sell their bananas on your site. It also makes people a little crazy. But that's how you do it. Why did Trump become viral? Because he trolled. It isn't inherently evil, it just forces attention on you.
Twitter, tiktok, etc, are troll systems. This is why people "quit twitter" saying it's hurting their health. Walking around in a market where rotten bananas seemingly sell for $5000, while your fresh bananas barely sell at all, will make you lose your sanity.
Stacker.news can leverage this as well: don't optimize for "getting people to zap" or "showing people good content", optimize for showing people content that has more zaps than quality. Overvalued content. This will lead to people creating content of their own. And becoming a little crazy.