Is composition associative? Check!

Let’s characterize these ordered sets as categories. A preorder is a category where there is at most one morphism going from any object a to any object b. Another name for such a category is “thin.” A preorder is a thin category.

A set of morphisms from object a to object b in a category C is called a hom-set and is written as C(a, b) (or, sometimes, HomC(a, b)). So every hom-set in a preorder is either empty or a singleton. That includes the hom-set C(a, a), the set of morphisms from a to a, which must be a singleton, containing only the identity, in any preorder. You may, however, have cycles in a preorder. Cycles are forbidden in a partial order.

…and they are typically sorted: chronologically: newest items are displayed firstthrough data: most popular, trending, votesalgorithmically: the system determines what you see through your consumption patterns and what it wants you to seeby curation: humans determine what you seeby taxonomy: content is displayed within buckets of categories, like Wikipedia Most media entities employ a combination of the above.

Literally everyone is just following orders from the machine.

An example would be three commas, my main use case for it has been the market orders