[seanhunter]

Feels like there are two things going on:

1. Randomness is inherently counterintuitive and humans in general really struggle to comprehend its ramifications. Read “Fooled by Randomness” or a million other things about this.

2. When a lot of people see something which offers a random sample they expect a random shuffle. In particular if you’re making any kind of playlist thing and you have a feature which does random samples not random shuffles people will hate your feature and you’ll feel superior because you’ll think they are wrong but actually you are the one who is wrong. You need to build a shuffle of some kind. Changing your sampling strategy to be “less random” thinking that it will coincide with peoples’ intuitions is making it even more wrong than before.