Small podcast recommendation for you @k00b: the podcast "Land of the Giants" has a season about Facebook right now. The first few episodes are about the early days and I think this could be very interesting to you.

Tl;dr in case you don't have time: Zucc encouraged platform growth under the motto "move fast, break things" - they were rolling out changes every f-ing day. And the by far the most important software wasn't the social media or the algorithm or anything like that - surprisingly the most important code was an algorithm to segment the userbase int A/B tests which means they rolled out changes to a part of the users and not to another group of users. And then they could evaluate which of these 2 groups used Facebook more.

Maybe this could also be something for SN. e.g. the sorting algorithm how long things stay at the top and how fast new content rises can probably adjusted by tweaking one or two Integers? Maybe the perfect ratio can be narrowed down with A/B test through the userbase.