Yeah, you’re describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user’s previous likes. I’m saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.

But also, you’re right. Here’s an article from 1994 describing Visicalc as a “Killer App” from the late 1970’s, that prompted people to buy personal computers.

“Killer rap” was pretty popular in the 90’s too.

It’s because Al Gore invented the internet, so they are known as Al Gore Rhythms.

Windows is the first thing I can think of that used the word “application” in that way, I think even back before Windows could be considered an OS (and had a dependency on MS-DOS). Back then, the Windows API referred to the Application Programming Interface.

Here’s a Windows 3.1 programming guide from 1992 that freely refers to programs as applications:

Common dialog boxes make it easier for you to develop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. A common dialog box is a dialog box that an application displays by calling a single function rather than by creating a dialog box procedure and a resource file containing a dialog box template.

Um excuse me the preferred term is “AI agent” if you want outside investment

Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.

Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.

One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?

It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.