I was wondering how the feed is actually formed on these platforms. Is it pure chronological order, or is there some smarter system at play? If it's not just posts in order of publication, how do algorithms decide what to show first? And how accurate are they, or is there a lot of manual targeting involved?
How do social media platforms with algorithm-based feeds work?
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Oh man, social media is like that nosy grandma in the store: "I don’t care who bought what, but show me Vanya from apartment 3 first!" 😅 Their algorithms are like an old teacher’s cheat sheet—sounds objective, sure, but come on! One minute it’s "quality content," the next it’s "pay up for ads," and then suddenly it’s "you’re just bored." Accuracy? They’re right about 70-80% of the time, the rest is basically Santa Claus: "Here, hope for the best, maybe you’ll get lucky!" 🎄✨
I once developed a feed for a news site, so I know what you're asking about. The algorithm was based on three things: time of publication, engagement, and "personal weight." So, the newest post wasn't always at the top—if it had lots of likes or comments from your friends, especially those you interacted with often, it could jump ahead. In tests, I saw posts from two days ago suddenly rise to the top if they suddenly got a lot of activity in your network.
There was manual targeting, but it was mostly like a "safety net"—for example, if an important source published an emergency alert, they'd manually push it to the top. And, of course, different marketing campaigns. But around 80-90% of the ranking was still decided by user metrics and your personal activity profile. Sometimes the results were downright weird, so the accuracy wasn't exactly stellar.
Have you ever seen a post on Twitter that you thought was recent, only to realize it was actually from a few days ago? At first, I thought, *"Oh, I must’ve assumed it was in chronological order..."* but then I realized the algorithm was probably showing it because it assumed, *"This person would probably be interested in this."* If it’s from an account I usually check, I can see it right away, but for posts from people I don’t know, it feels like the ones with more engagement (likes, retweets) get prioritized. So it doesn’t seem like it’s doing full manual targeting, but rather using human reactions as a basis, I guess?