> Namely, tracking the duration a user is probably giving their attention to a given item,
I pay a lot of attention to classes of things I don't want to see at all.
I pay a lot of attention to classes of things I don't want to see at all.
If they think that the length of time I spend on a post is 100% correlated with the amount that I want to see it, they really don't understand people at all. It's an embarrassingly shallow model of how how humans behave.
It's a trade off. Viewing rates give back feedback 100% of the time. Asking users for a thumbs up or down gives feedback almost none of the time, and still might not be accurate.