4 ms·
>A lot of the issues raised recently in our industry around privacy or algorithmic bias come from the fact that as an industry tech has the hubris to believe th
by setr 7y ago
>A lot of the issues raised recently in our industry around privacy or algorithmic bias come from the fact that as an industry tech has the hubris to believe that it knows better than its users what is best for them.
I don't think this is that bad, on its own. Choice is a pain in the ass, so it's useful to have things pick for you, when you don't care to choose yourself (which is very common).
The main issue is that there is never offered a means to correct the algorithm, when it chooses something the user decidedly doesn't want. That is, there's no user-inputted feedback mechanism; they go for implicit tracking like "eyeball-time" to correct the algorithm, despite the user (me) being both able and willing to give an explicit answer. I want Netflix to give me better recommendations, and I'm willing to put in a bit of effort to support that.
But Netflix doesn't want me to help them help me.
And thats just stupid.
- webmaven 7y agoNetflix used to have those explicit feedback mechanisms via user star ratings, and even ran a contest to improve their recommendations based on the data[0], but it turns out "that explicit star ratings were less relevant than other signals. Users would rate documentaries with 5 stars, and silly movies with just 3 stars, but still watch silly movies more often than those high-rated documentaries."[1] Changing from stars to thumbs increased the quantity of data (at the expense of granularity), but didn't change the relative advantage of tracking behavior over explicit ratings. Now, your ratings may be free of these issues, but that data isn't very useful in isolation, so blame the bad data from other users for the removal of the feedback mechanism. [0] https://www.netflixprize.com/ https://www.netflixprize.com/ [1] https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/netflix-thumbs-vs-stars-1202010492/ https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/netflix-thumbs-vs-star...