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I've been signed up to The Sample for a few months now, getting one newsletter a day. Each newsletter includes a link to rate it from 1 star to 5 stars. I con

I've been signed up to The Sample for a few months now, getting one newsletter a day. Each newsletter includes a link to rate it from 1 star to 5 stars. I consistently rate the newsletters I receive at 1 star! About 5 good newsletters have been delivered over this time, these have been rated from 2 to 5 stars but I haven't received more of that type. The recommendation system seems fairly ineffective, I just receive junk each day. Or would this be reflective of the state of newsletters (98% junk, 2% good)?

jacobobryant 5y ago
Sorry to hear that. It's possible there's just not much in the corpus that matches your interests. Re: the algorithm, it should start improving faster soon. I'm in the middle of a large refactoring, and I've recently been joined by someone who will work solely on the algorithm after that. (I'm spread pretty thin myself). FWIW the average rating is 2.5, which does seem kind of low, but still indicates that you're probably an outlier. That being said I've been relying mainly on regular newsletter engagement metrics to judge how effective the recommendations are, since rating can be a little unreliable (people are more likely to rate something when they've had a bad experience). Lately we've been at 46% open rate and 16% click-through rate.