3 ms·

Right? Recommenders are almost counter productive for me in most cases. I want a recommender to remain broad, not give me increasingly niche recommendations a

Right? Recommenders are almost counter productive for me in most cases. I want a recommender to remain broad, not give me increasingly niche recommendations a la youtube. About the only halfway decent recommender system I've interacted with is the various forms of curated lists on Spotify. They seem to actually take a decent stab at it with related but sufficiently different and interesting content. For all Facebook knows about me they've always been exceptionally bad at advertising to me, which is remarkable considering what they've got. Google is only very marginally better. Actually, now that I think about it, Amazon's 'customer's also bought' is also pretty bad at the recommendation itself since it not uncommonly recommends incompatible things! ...but it does often succeed at getting me to think more about what else I might need and sometimes leads me to buying other things. At least it's not always recommending the same thing, but rather related things, which is probably a much better way to advertise.

nradov 7y ago
Likewise Pandora does a decent job of picking songs for me based on what I previously liked. It's not perfect but far better than random.
- _blu 7y ago
  it's easier to recomment things you probably like than things they want you to like/may like
mojuba 7y ago
> For all Facebook knows about me they've always been exceptionally bad at advertising to me Because it's not Facebook really, it's the advertisers who choose targeting criteria. You as an advertiser have a myriad of options. For example if you've built a competitor to X, you can target users who've visited X recently, aged N-M, residing in countries A, B and C, and so on. There are options with broader interests too. Poorly targeted ad means poorly selected criteria by the advertiser (or sometimes just advertiser experimenting) and consequently money wasted. Facebook doesn't care though. Then there is retargeting/remarketing (target bounced traffic) already mentioned here is probably the stupidest looking invention that actually works.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  But they are also really really bad at curating content I like to see. Like even worse than the advertising actually. My feed is just garbage and has been ever since they switched over from being chronological. But I sometimes get on a wild hair about some particular person, and I'll look at their page directly and see actually interesting content on their page that was never shown to me. Facebook's only real guess is then to just say: oh! You must like this person, let me show them, all the time.". The reality is, I'm interested in stuff like when a biased person I don't like shares a more neutral or inclusive opinion, or someone does something interesting. Facebook is just unuseably bad at selecting for that. Their algorithm just pushes really shallow crap and buries anything with substance or depth. I keep it around just to stay in touch with hard to contact people.
radarsat1 7y ago
What I've always assumed, but now this thread has me doubting myself, but what I've assumed is that these systems, even though they appear to suck at specifically targeting me, must somehow be pretty good on the average, still netting big profits overall even though they don't seem to live up to the promise of getting me to buy stuff. But if everyone has this impression, maybe it doesn't work? I mean, I assume companies like Amazon and Facebook would be pretty good at least at optimizing the total rewards from using recommendation systems, but maybe you can't tell from your own anecdotal use. I have no idea. I'd love to see an analysis that includes aggregate numbers.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  I think you've got the nail on the head. It's sort of the tragedy of the commons, which in terms of recommenders is a really easy thing to accidentally optimize for. For example, pop music is popular. In the early days, recommenders would just recommend pop music because on average that was a decent recommendation. We've come a long ways since then. Well, everyone but Facebook has.

nradov 7y ago

Likewise Pandora does a decent job of picking songs for me based on what I previously liked. It's not perfect but far better than random.

_blu 7y ago
it's easier to recomment things you probably like than things they want you to like/may like

mojuba 7y ago

> For all Facebook knows about me they've always been exceptionally bad at advertising to me Because it's not Facebook really, it's the advertisers who choose targeting criteria. You as an advertiser have a myriad of options. For example if you've built a competitor to X, you can target users who've visited X recently, aged N-M, residing in countries A, B and C, and so on. There are options with broader interests too. Poorly targeted ad means poorly selected criteria by the advertiser (or sometimes just advertiser experimenting) and consequently money wasted. Facebook doesn't care though. Then there is retargeting/remarketing (target bounced traffic) already mentioned here is probably the stupidest looking invention that actually works.

Enginerrrd 7y ago
But they are also really really bad at curating content I like to see. Like even worse than the advertising actually. My feed is just garbage and has been ever since they switched over from being chronological. But I sometimes get on a wild hair about some particular person, and I'll look at their page directly and see actually interesting content on their page that was never shown to me. Facebook's only real guess is then to just say: oh! You must like this person, let me show them, all the time.". The reality is, I'm interested in stuff like when a biased person I don't like shares a more neutral or inclusive opinion, or someone does something interesting. Facebook is just unuseably bad at selecting for that. Their algorithm just pushes really shallow crap and buries anything with substance or depth. I keep it around just to stay in touch with hard to contact people.

radarsat1 7y ago

What I've always assumed, but now this thread has me doubting myself, but what I've assumed is that these systems, even though they appear to suck at specifically targeting me, must somehow be pretty good on the average, still netting big profits overall even though they don't seem to live up to the promise of getting me to buy stuff. But if everyone has this impression, maybe it doesn't work? I mean, I assume companies like Amazon and Facebook would be pretty good at least at optimizing the total rewards from using recommendation systems, but maybe you can't tell from your own anecdotal use. I have no idea. I'd love to see an analysis that includes aggregate numbers.

Enginerrrd 7y ago
I think you've got the nail on the head. It's sort of the tragedy of the commons, which in terms of recommenders is a really easy thing to accidentally optimize for. For example, pop music is popular. In the early days, recommenders would just recommend pop music because on average that was a decent recommendation. We've come a long ways since then. Well, everyone but Facebook has.