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Even though this is better than the lack of it, I find it weird that they're not using Contextual MAB and instead just went with the MAB. You've got the preference of your users anyhow, why not show the picture first that will perform best according to that specific user?

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I'm guessing the reason was that this was born out of a hackathon. E-greedy is likely the easiest algorithm to implement for a MAB problem like this. Given that they mention there's an API to specify sort order (assuming it was on a per-view basis), the specific algorithm could be swapped out for something smarter.

I think a contextual bandit algorithm would be interesting in this case, although I wonder if there would be enough data behind photo swipes to back each context meaningfully.

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