Medium’s Chief Architect Xiao Ma spoke at Stanford on Nov. 5th asking the question: How does technology reshape content discovery and delivery? He unpacked Medium’s on-point recommendation system, a hybrid model that joins collaborative filtering (“How can we recommend content based on your previous history and people similar to you?”) and content-based filtering (“I don’t care about others’ history or yours. I want to understand the content itself and based on that can recommend it to you.”) It’s a hybrid system, he said, one that both exploits what Medium know about its users and explores areas to see if users might like other things.” Ma contends that technology should take responsibility for the content that comes to users and said that Medium is trying to tailor intent-based experiences to deliver high-quality content and break filter bubbles.
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