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Sibyl – Prediction Service at DoorDash (2020)
- hobs 5y agoI see posts like this and just think that as far as I can tell DD's recommendations are: Ads Ads Ads Shitty place nobody would want to eat Shitty place nobody would want to eat Shitty place nobody would want to eat Shitty place nobody would want to eat Oh look something interesting
- netizen-936824 5y agoDoordash: Hey try this new place! lists taco bell
- woodruffw 5y agoI have the same experience as you, and it's one of the main reasons why I try to call places for takeout instead (or use a local app). I (idly) wonder whether they're optimizing for the wrong(?) things: throwing a bunch of garbage up front maximizes the amount of time that I spend in-app, which is probably one of their key metrics. What they don't(?) realize is that I'm spending all that time filtering through the dreck, and so the metric is really measuring my frustration and not my engagement.
- luxurytent 5y agoRelevancy is hard!
- tyingq 5y agoThe "Shadow predictions" bit is interesting. They could set that up in a way to score it versus actuals...where the shadow implementation automatically becomes the live one once it's better than the incumbent.
- monkeydust 5y agoI'm yet to have the 'wow' moment from any recommendation service.... Netflix, Amazon, Deliveroo... At best I get the 'meh why not'. It's obviously a hard problem to solve.
- loceng 5y agoIf they had the full catalogue of all movies and series ever made then it'd easily be much easier to actually make more relevant recommendations, but their catalogue is actually shrinking as they have less old content they've been able to renew since those content owners have been starting their own streaming services.
- postexitus 5y agoAmazon, the book store has everything published under the sun and still cannot recommend something better than "oh, here you go, this is sci-fi as well!".
- loceng 5y agoThey arguably don't have your view history though, though their relatively new streaming service will be likely changing that slowly.
- Zababa 5y agoMy view on this is that recommendation services are made to try to funnel people to the same thing. While they sell some kind of "hyper personalization", they're just another kind of classic marketing. Especially for Netflix. Talking about series you watched seems to be a big part of watching series, so pushing people to watch the same stuff works better.
- o_____________o 5y agoTry TikTok for a few weeks, genuinely
- ec109685 5y agoTikTok is optimized to get as much signal as possible from users, as well as they were smart about getting some signal from the videos themselves: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/9/18/seeing-like-an-algorithm https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/9/18/seeing-like-an-algo... Something like Amazon gets very little signal after you bought something whether you really liked it or not.
- wdb 5y agoSibyl, was also the name of the Delphi clone for OS/2 :)
- Forge36 5y agoI just cancelled my membership (was free with a credit card i already had). They offered a "free membership" for 10 months "at a $120 value" (which used to be $60 a year), however I couldn't figure out how to activate it. I can't figure out what the value is over other services/direct from restaurant. Like another poster, most of the suggestions were bad. "Do you want dairy queen?" Or "quick you can order free from Kwik Trip in the next 10 minutes". The post makes the suggestions look good. My top recommendation is the cheesecake factory. Followed by McDonalds. Who are they targeting? Who is getting McDonalds delivered?
- decremental 5y agoI get McDonald's delivered all the time. Can't beat 13 minute delivery for coffee in the morning.
- woodruffw 5y agoDo you order anything besides coffee? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why would you wait 13 minutes for someone to drop off $1 of distinctly average coffee? (I say this as someone who has ordered McDonald's through DoorDash before.)
- dfsegoat 5y agoIt's a $12 minimum order where I am anyway. So you pay $12 whether you have $12 of items or not. So, I am guessing GP has a couple egg-mcmuffins in there somewhere.
- decremental 5y agoYep. I get egg mcmuffins with my distinctly average coffee.
- vorpalhex 5y agoMy coffee routine only takes 8 mins from whole beans to v60 pour over, most of that the kettle warming.
- sepiasaucer 5y agoPeople are commenting on the quality of Door Dash predictions, but that isn’t what the article is about. The article is just about the architecture for high speed/throughput of prediction requests. I would be interested in knowing how much improvement they saw by using C++ or Kotlin. Also, I don’t really understand what compute service is actually used to run the model predictions in this framework.
- bradknowles 5y agoWait, so they are actively encouraging Sybil attacks? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
- iratewizard 5y agoI think it's a coincidence. Sybil is reference to the book / movie about multiple personality disorder. Both deal with multiple personality systems.
- woodruffw 5y agoI assume it's a reference to the ancient Greek prophetesses[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibyl
- bastardoperator 5y agoI predict they'll get my order wrong or leave something off despite charging me and deliver my food cold.