# I hypothesize that the chumbox gets populated by items that intersect along
the lines of author or…

Medium’s particular chumbox is less offensive than outbrain/taboola, and tends
to limit itself to mostly articles that genuinely will be…

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I hypothesize that the chumbox gets populated by items that intersect along
the lines of author or tag, ranked by some sort of ‘hotness’ metric (some
combination of time since publication, number of recommends, and comments),
and that if there are fewer than three items above some arbitrary threshhold
cutoff the remaining items are populated using the same mechanism as reading
roulette (i.e., hotness plus user’s followed / interacted with tags &
authors). I might be way off base, though.

Medium’s particular chumbox is less offensive than outbrain/taboola, and tends
to limit itself to mostly articles that genuinely will be interesting to
people who read and were interested in the articles. As a result, I wonder if
they’re doing something with recomendation-engine-style statistics; after all,
they have not only view statistics but read statistics for all articles, not
only tags but suggested tags (along with the training data they use to compute
suggested tags from content), and full interaction graphs. They have all the
information they need to get really excellent suggestion targetting, and
(because there’s nothing remotely resembling monetization) there’s no real
incentive for people to spend a lot of effort trying to game recommendations.

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [December 28,
2016](https://medium.com/p/3ae28e7fe085).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/i-hypothesize-that-the-chumbox-
gets-populated-by-items-that-intersect-along-the-lines-of-author-
or-3ae28e7fe085)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.