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RE: PRACTICAL THINKING. —「The parallels between technology adoption and finding an audience for your writing . . . and the science behind it」
Deep and insightful. Your article clearly shows that you're a scientist..what field, If I may ask? About the theme of your post, I would be tempted to say..that's why advertising and marketing exists. In fact nowadays the content is becoming less important than the container. This is clearly shown here by the quality of certain steemit blogs in comparison to the little feedback that they receive (and also the contrary: poor quality / hi feedback level).
Mathematics.
Positioning is a further development in advertising. Advertising is largely broken in most spaces: advertising is around 100 billion USD. If you spend even 100 million USD on advertising amidst competition, you will all the same reach far fewer people than needed to move above an existing market position in your space.
A lot of the trending, recommended, etc, platforms are really not advertising per se, which operates via search and percolation, but a system were most people don't search at all.
Almost no amount of advertising at this point will displace Coca Cola, for example, from restaurant menus, even if there appears an absolutely amazing new drink. For the soft drinks market.
But if somebody comes up with a distinguishable drink category and advertises it aggressively, they will show up on menus, right above or below Coca Cola, so long as the product is also good.
The issue is that people settle for what's easily found, and don't search. Most advertising is blocked or ignored. (Increasingly many people ignore the trending page, hence Steemit Inc moved it to the center from its previous location in the far left.)
The concept of randomly opening up one page filled by various algorithms and searching only that, whatever the outcome, because all other outcomes are discounted off is really a type of strategy in artificial intelligence called reservoir computing, and merits further discussion.
An academic type question is: You have algorithms that cover part of a torus, then reset. That is one cycle, during which you can randomly walk subject to thresholds (which vary depending on results of past random walks in past cycles) only on the covered part of the torus, until the reset. A process grows itself on the torus manifold, and we ask how many cycles can a process survive, compared to how many cycles it takes for the random walk to cover the process, or better, the entire manifold?
My grandfather used to say, "Math is the language of the universe."