4 ms·

> They must have got pretty good people working with this and enough data to get their models right. You seem to be taking this an an axiom and running with it

• zorked 8y ago
  I worked previously at a recommendation systems company where we also generated this sort of recommendation. It looked incredibly shoddy to us too, but what we found out was: - yes, people who just bought a lot of batteries are actually more likely to buy more batteries soon. same for people who just bought a fridge. - these recommendations may cause some sort of "burn out", where people stop looking, responding, or decide to unsubscribe. But this wasn't much worse than other recommendations. including the awesome ones. - the loss from burnout was greatly outpaced by the wins in actually targeting the right users Yes, these are bottom-of-the-barrel recommendations. But they work. And people don't care that much even if they disagree. Maths said so. I think this is a similar story to the complains on non-literal searches in search engines. People think they want one thing, but they want something else.