Interesting anecdote on Plenty of Fish. It’s definitely interesting how people aren’t really good at telling you what they like; empirical evidence is far better. I believe Paul Graham has an essay on a similar topic where if you ask people if they like an idea you have for a product, they are likely to say yes even if they wouldn’t actually use it. But if you ask them how much they would pay for access, or if they’d pay a certain amount, you’d get a more accurate response.

FWIW, I wasn’t suggesting pure randomness though, it’s more like probabilistic randomness. Rather than a binary threshold a post must pass to make the homepage that divides the community into curators and consumers, this would show you posts with a degree of randomness with a probability proportional to the likes it’s garnered.

Btw, I’m not sure what you meant by randomness is an underdog? Are you implying it’s a nice goal but it rarely works out in practice, perhaps because people actually do fall into natural curator / consumer buckets?

I meant “underrated” by the word “underdog”. Like we don’t randomness appreciate too much, don’t think about it. But life is full of randomness, like a strange attractor. We try to predict future…

And in retrospect, we say that we did say that. After the battle, everyone's a general. :)

But it is pure randomness…