Friends: Bot Apocalypse and The Waltz Algorithmic

The retro-throwback design of Horse Drawing Tycoon 2 is also designed to be extremely resilient to a modern day problem: most of the people on the internet are not real. Even me.¹

Which means that instead of having everyone post in a shared, common space and using a great chonk of linear algebra to try and decide which items are most likely to maximize your retention, HDT2 uses an older, technique, from the MySpace era: we only show you content from people you follow. If you don't follow anyone, you don't get any content, and you have a lot of control over exactly what you see.

If you've selected any other person, you can find this lightly overcomplicated relationship page.

What's important here is trust - that's how much you believe this person is a real, non-impersonated entity. That's separate from interest - which represents how much you want this person to show up in your hrseFeed™️. "their rebroadcasts" measures how likely it is that things that they share show up in your feed.

So, for example:

• Your Aunt May - high trust, low interest

• A Cool Internet Creator You've Never Met - low trust, high interest

• They Post Cool Things But Constantly Rebroadcast Just The Dumbest Shit - high interest, no rebroadcast interest

You can also decide whether or not this relationship with them is publicly visible: if there's something you love but you don't want to publicly admit to following, you can set your relationship to private. Friends won't know you follow them. They won't know you follow them. Your secret is safe².