Episode
From Hacker News to TikTok - How Algorithms Learned to Hook Us
CoRecursive: Coding Stories · Mar 2, 2026 · 42 min
Corey told me about his AI cat reel problem. He found these AI-genearted cat videos hilarious. Who makes these? He kept sending them to his wife. Then he tried to stop watching and he couldn't. So I went down the rabbit hole of how social media algorithms actually work. It starts simple. Upvote, downvote, sort by time. But by 2017 Facebook has a metric that quietly reshapes what two billion…