A weird epic ramble about Etsy homepages from the middle 2000’s
I think there&#x27;s something special about websites where everyone gets the same thing. Like how Wordle was so popular, or Hacker News -- I often mention to my wife some article from here, and she already read it so we have an interesting discussion. Compare that to TikTok &quot;have you seen that one? no... well they&#x27;re talking about this roman battle, but the soldiers are all birds...&quot;<p>That was a small part of the thread, but I mention it because of what he said about the power of human curation -- that the curator picked out these great treasuries from the sea of shirtless dudes. Because if you have the same frontpage for everyone, it&#x27;s feasible to have an expert just pick that instead of needing some weird flaky NN that&#x27;s expensive to develop, train, and run, and produces bland (or disturbing)  recommendations anyways.<p>(Even algorithmically-driven sites like HN benefit from that, like dang manually emailing people to resubmit interesting stories.)