> Are they, or instead they will help keeping you in your comfort cage?
I’ve been paying close attention to what YouTube shorts/tiktok do. They don’t just show you the same genre or topic or even set of topics. They are constantly in an explore-exploit pattern. Constantly trying to figure out the next thing that’ll keep your attention, show you a bunch of that content, then on to the next thing. Each interest cluster builds towards a peak then tapers off.
So it’s not like if you see baking videos it’ll keep you in that comfort zone forever.
But you're describing the engagement cage, while I'm just pointing that you need to be careful not to escape from it just to get trapped inside the comfort cage.
Huh? "Explore" means to show the user new content. "Exploit" is to show more of the same content. You can say the HN algorithm does both as well: the front page shows a variety of topics allowing you to explore but the upvotes "exploit" shared interest by bumping it higher in page rankings.
I’ve been paying close attention to what YouTube shorts/tiktok do. They don’t just show you the same genre or topic or even set of topics. They are constantly in an explore-exploit pattern. Constantly trying to figure out the next thing that’ll keep your attention, show you a bunch of that content, then on to the next thing. Each interest cluster builds towards a peak then tapers off.
So it’s not like if you see baking videos it’ll keep you in that comfort zone forever.