As for monetisation, I've thought about this a lot - and I don't think the time wasting is needed to create a good product. Google Search certainly isn't fueled by dopamine hits, and from an ads standpoint, our users are saying exactly what they want to see every morning.
Then, it'd be nice to know how I could tweak the algorithm and its config values, so it would find such articles, thereafter.
And to dry-run the algorithm to verify that now it does indeed find that article.
(You don't have a website yet?)
I have an MVP and real userbase which I spent time growing. Now I have a platform to experiment with the grander idea here.
That being said, I'm not willing to link to this yet because it's tied to my public persona and not yet my full time job.
Mind you, there's a lot of people (myself included) who want to keep up to date on what others find interesting at the moment.
The popular/news sections of Reddit are also more heavily based on non-vote signals, like FB.
I also think that allowing the user to track the changes made to this algorithm along with some metrics ( like how much time user spent on topics, time wasted etc) would provide a helpful feedback loop.
Basically a giant filter through which you consume the firehouse of FB/reddit.
Although it works for me, I've no idea how practical this is on a wider scale. Would you use something like that?