You may be misunderstanding. In this case, I think people conceive of an "obvious" baseline to compare to - presenting posts of your friends in a chronological

You may be misunderstanding. In this case, I think people conceive of an "obvious" baseline to compare to - presenting posts of your friends in a chronological order. There's no inherent contradiction when people say "this simple, transparent, obvious algorithm is better". Even if implementing it would in fact result in forgoing billions of dollars.