So Etsy was a great place and then they "fixed" it and now it's full of Aliexpress garbage thanks to the algorithms. Thanks for telling us how ridiculous it was to ask someone to manually compose the homepage by writing a 55 tweets story.
It's also happened in the brick and mortar world, when American ideas took over Europe.
For this to change, the American age would have to end, but I'm not sure if whatever comes next will be an improvement.
... wanting to wake up every hour, 24 hours a day, to sift through pictures of shirtless men to find some beautiful furniture to put up on the frontpage?
But in startup land, where you have limited resources, somehow the ticket to make that somewhat automated by queuing up a bunch of these things at once wasn’t high enough of a priority.
Honestly the best way to have gotten that fixed was to put the developers into rotation. I bet somebody would have cooked something up after the first shift!
"The magic in the system was the person yanking 24 beautiful treasuries a day out of the sea of shirtless dudes."
That's defeatist logic. Sure, scaling with a single person doing it is likely impossible, but all of this reads to me as a bunch of technologists being utterly unable to integrate the human element into their systems. The conclusion is that a human aesthetic sense was needed -- first to filter dickpics and second to put together a gestalt page.
I can imagine ways to scale that, but it hinges on trusting the human element -- something technologists and investors are utterly incapable of.