OK let’s try this: ———————- Pretend you’re 5 and the algorithm is a smart robot that picks which toys (posts) to show you in your toy box (For You feed). The robot doesn’t just count how many times people already played with a toy (likes, reports, etc.). Instead, it looks at you and guesses: • “How likely is this kid to like this toy?” • “How likely is this kid to report this toy as yucky?” • “How long might this kid play with it?” Those guesses are little numbers between 0 and 1 (probabilities). The “weights” are like special multipliers the robot puts on those guesses: • A like-guess might get multiplied by a small number (like 0.5). • A report-guess might get multiplied by a big negative number (like –234). Then the robot adds all those multiplied guesses together to give the toy a final “yay or nay” score and sorts the toys by that score. Why the numbers look so big and why people get confused Reports almost never happen, so the robot’s “will you report this?” guess is usually a tiny number (like 0.0001). To make that tiny guess still matter a little bit in the final score, they give it a big multiplier. People sometimes look at the big number and think “1 report = 468 likes!” 
That’s wrong. It’s not counting real reports or real likes. It’s only multiplying the guesses the robot made about you. If the robot thinks you’re the kind of person who almost never reports anything, even a big weight on “report” barely moves the score. The whole thing is personalized to how you usually behave. The people who wrote the code even put big comments in the GitHub repo so no one (and no other robots) gets confused about this again. That’s the whole idea in kid words: the weights turn the robot’s personal guesses about you into a ranking, not a simple “count the hearts and flags.”