Designing a Constrained Exploration System: Instagram Engineering

Oh that makes a lot of sense.

Somehow, I managed to permanently set my advertisements to Vietnamese, which I don't know how to change. What's weird is that Google also started doing this to me too.

It gave me an idea. I call them canaryprofiles. Basically the same idea as creating fingerprints or initial seeds of a cold start engine. What you do is you create a bunch of accounts that are explicitly interested in certain topics and post specific content. Then you follow/unfollow them to set a flavor for your timeline. It helps kick the recommendation engine out of feedback loops, I was stuck getting recommend only Billie Eilish content for like 3 months. (I was experimenting with what happens when you follow nobody and it seemed to permafrost my cold start recommendations, surprisingly every single post on my TL was Billie Eilish).

Zoomers do this too with pods, I think they all sign onto the same account so it can't track them as effectively?