I'd offer you one blindingly obvious explanation for why it's putrid: because it is a machine deciding which of my human relationships I should pay the most att

I'd offer you one blindingly obvious explanation for why it's putrid: because it is a machine deciding which of my human relationships I should pay the most attention to. Machines can't do that, silly. They can only promote hate speech with 100 comments and lolcat pictures with 100 likes. The only option is for them to take a back seat and present an ordering that is semantically meaningful to the human computer operating the tool -- the only one qualified to perform any kind of filtering and sorting. "Relevance ranking" in social networks is a result of engineers having zero clue what applications they're working on, but that's just typical IT people divorced from reality for you. As you said, they find it acceptable because it's written in Angular v7 and uses ML and A/B testing revealed a 3.2% increase in clicks. The idea of the software industry helping real relationships is in general hilariously contradictory (but of course there are exceptions!)