I didn’t think so. It’s a deliberate design decision by the developers to make it really hard to compute.
This is actually something where Bluesky is doing more interesting federated things than Lemmy or Mastodon, and let’s you use your own algorithm while with both Lemmy and Mastodon you’re stuck with standard algorithms.
None of the alternative algorithms are particularly compelling yet, they’re mostly topic feeds, but who knows what’ll happen.
I thought this was missing in the text too, but it’s valve, they’re well know for treating their employees much better than other companies. Tech interns are almost always paid, even by the more exploitive companies.
I wouldn’t assume this was an unpaid intern or that they didn’t get a bonus for saving valve just because there’s nothing mentioned in the article.