Your question is Design O(1) Popularity Retrieval. Take a moment with it on the right.
Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).
Design a content management platform like Tinder/Bumble where users can like or dislike objects, and you need to retrieve the most popular object in O(1) time at any instant.
Clarify how popularity is defined, including whether dislikes reduce popularity and whether results are global or scoped. Explain the data model, update path, consistency guarantees, failure handling, and how you would evaluate an optional ML-based popularity or abuse-detection component.
