Facebook made over $500 million just by using a 30-year-old psych trick to change how their video algorithm works.
Rather than using complex AI to predict average engagement, researchers trained the algorithm to identify the single most 'memorable' moment of a video. This simple behavioral heuristic was more effective at driving long-term user retention than standard machine learning models.
Can Psychological Heuristics Enable Long-Term Optimization? Evidence from Short-Form Video Recommendations
SSRN · 6438559
Recommender systems optimized for short-term engagement often hurt long-term consumer satisfaction and retention. Yet optimizing long-term outcomes is challenging because such signals are sparse and noisy. We study short-form video platforms, where identifying videos that drive retention is particularly difficult because content is short and often passively consumed, making it hard to attribute long-term outcomes to any individual video interaction. We examine whether psychological heuristics ca