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I have a sense that this is the dirty little secret of the spyware advertising industry, personalization just isn't that great. Yeah, putting you into a male or

I have a sense that this is the dirty little secret of the spyware advertising industry, personalization just isn't that great. Yeah, putting you into a male or female bucket, parent or child, homeowner or renter, that's worth a little bit. But, to find out your name and address and search history and how long your last bowel movement took, just to deliver an ad that's theoretically hyper-optimized to make you buy something... I just don't believe it. I don't believe that it's worth anything near what they are charging for it, except perhaps in the case of politics, which has always been an extremely efficient use of money. And even then, it's not worth a tiny fraction of the real cost it has to society.

politician 5y ago
I agree with you. I highly doubt that our economy has enough (product, message) combinations to justify the need for personalization based on more than a dozen attributes.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  I will buy X, if I need X. And once I buy X, it's done. For example, I wanted a cordless drill last week. Did the "site:reddit.com" thing (I actually have been doing that almost subconsciously now, as Google results are all trash), chose a drill, and ordered one off Amazon. Then, after that, what's the point in showing drill ads to me for two weeks?
  - bdamm 5y ago
    There's a well known effect in advertising that advertising a product to a person that has already bought that product generally increases their satisfaction with the product and the purchase, and may cause them to recommend the product to others. Probably that's what they are going for if they're doing it on purpose.
    - N1H1L 5y ago
      Could be - but at least for me it feels intrusive and irritating, not any positive feelings really
      - bdamm 5y ago
        It's not supposed to feel good. If 9/10 people have a brief negative thought about the advertising experience and nothing else happens, but 1/10 people happen to have their friend on the phone at the time and makes a referral, then overall that is a win for the brand.
    - _dain_ 5y ago
      > There's a well known effect in advertising that advertising a product to a person that has already bought that product generally increases their satisfaction with the product and the purchase, and may cause them to recommend the product to others. Do you have a link for further reading on that? That's fascinating if true.
  - artificial 5y ago
    Have you considered consumer reports? I’m of the Reddit persuasion and find it’s a good resource. Bummer everything is polluted these days.
mountainb 5y ago
Right, people radically overestimate how much a profile is worth. Someone who owns a house in a rich area is somewhat easy to identify, and you target them... along with everyone else who is also trying to reach that rich slice, so you pay more. The very high quality pieces of information can be things like "wants to buy a life insurance policy this week" or "just had a baby" or "just bought a plane ticket to XYZ," or "is in the frequent flyer program and spends more than $20,000 per year on travel." However the majority of information about people, the overwhelming majority of whom have no significant disposable income, is worthless and not worth tracking for the most part. You reach those people through traditional mass marketing means.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  It's a great point you have made. I work technically as a data scientist, but my domain is scientific data. I have quite a few GitHub packages and get recruiter calls for data science jobs almost every week, with pretty generous salary offers. And from what it seems to me, there is a giant bubble. The vast majority of companies doing "data science" jobs are things that a smart undergrad can do with a month or two of training. And this is because I believe C-suites have completely gulped down the data is oil mantra. There are entirely charlatan companies with unicorn, even decacorn valuations now being built on this mantra - for example, CRED in India. Yet, as you said, and as I believe too, most of the data is worthless.
  - mountainb 5y ago
    Right, but unlike oil, most data is worthless most of the time. For example, I'm about to list my house on the market. The real estate agents who reached out to me last year and the year before that to try to induce me to sell the house had no chance of succeeding. Now is the time if they knew the secret that I'm about the list the house that they should all be competing for my business. The only relevant piece of information is that I'm about to sell the house. That is a valuable lead that many in my region would bid on. My background information is frankly not that relevant to the value of that lead, and isn't something that is readily surfaced by the kind of deep profiling that is supposed to be going on. It can be signaled by me signing up to some kind of list that sells my lead to a zillion people at once, but is never going to be surfaced accurately to the people who can earn the most profits from it by my Youtube habits or whatever. Zillow sells the logged in user data in the market I'm buying in to the real estate agents listing the houses, but that again is not something being modeled by some kind of big data operation, but is merely the same kind of "little data" provided on things like dating websites or LinkedIn when people browse your profile. There's no modeling going on there that requires sophistication.
Kye 5y ago
It's always fun watching an ad system try to figure out nonbinary people. Spotify ads can't decide whether I'm a successful businessman or Spanish-speaking housewife.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  It's always fun checking Google's ad settings and seeing what they think I'm into. Apparently now I'm into baseball, flowers, boating, celebrities, country music, credit cards, geology, event ticket sales, fishing, and windows OS. Among a couple hundred other things. It even gets some rather basic facts (marital status, company size, education) wrong. I seriously wonder how they generate this profile?
  - tomrod 5y ago
    > I seriously wonder how they generate this profile Poorly!
  - hnburnsy 5y ago
    Check your Google ad settings here... https://adssettings.google.com/ https://adssettings.google.com/
    - mcv 5y ago
      There's not a lot there for me. Just some generic whether I want to see alcohol and gambling ads on youtube.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - chillfox 5y ago
      Well... It actually got some categories right, but I don't really feel that's very impressive considering that it put me in every category by the looks of it.
    - arvinsim 5y ago
IMSAI8080 5y ago
I think you're right. I'd like to see an analysis of the effectiveness of personalised advertising based on tracking versus ads based purely on local context. The latter being if you're on a web page about birds then you get ads for bird seed and bird houses. No tracking involved.
suzzer99 5y ago
It works great for negative political ads though.
DebtDeflation 5y ago
>to find out your name and address and search history So that you can continue to show me ads for a washing machine for months after I purchased a washing machine.
- artificial 5y ago
  Surely you mean your new washing machine buying hobby?
  - lillecarl 5y ago
    I haven't consumed significant amounts of ads in a long time, only some logos in sports and the occasional visit to family or the rare times adblock fails (YouTube premium user too). So I can only imagine how hilarious that must be.
ryanbrunner 5y ago
I think the fact that most recommendation algorithms have seemingly converged on what seems like a really poor and naive implementation - fixation on very recent activity - shows that the sort of deep personalization touted is mostly BS. Both YouTube and Amazon heavily personalize by recommending primarily the 3-4 things that I've interacted with in the very recent past.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  This is not true. For example every time Summoning Salt uploads a video, which happens every few months, it will show up on my recommend feed because YouTube knows I'm willing to watch their ~1 hour documentaries even though I'm not subscribed to them.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    This could (probably isn't) be a very quick implementation with a heuristic like 'if percentage of viewed videos from channel x (essentially per channel viewed) > threshold ==> show new video from channel x on homepage next time user appears. Make it fancy and use a multi armed bandit and call it machine learning/AI/data science.
  - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
    Youtube seems to be a rare exception here in that people actually feel like its algorithm is useful. However, even then, their algorithm mostly seems to devolve to "what creators have you usually watched videos from" and (usually directly after you watch such a video) "what videos did other people who watched that video watch?" Basically the same principle as PageRank, just with a lot less spam to deal with.
- fomine3 5y ago
  I believe YouTube recommendation is most well working one, so some people getting into echo chamber.
- earth_walker 5y ago
  What it proves is that despite all that personalized data they have, it's the naive implementation that gets them the most clicks per dollar. So the question is this: if they're not (and never were) using that data for what they say they were, what are they doing with it?
georgemcbay 5y ago
Just anecdote, but... The most common pattern I see relating to personalized advertising as someone being advertised to is that I will often see an ad for something I just bought (or some competitor to it) repeated relentlessly for a couple of days after buying it and this is after not seeing any related ads during the days prior where I was actually doing some research into the product space. Maybe I'm an outlier but they seem to miss the window of relevance on me often enough that I notice it as a commonly repeated pattern.
- adamc 5y ago
  Same experience. What's even more mystifying is that often it is for items that no human would be likely to be buying many copies of in a short span of time (high ticket items, or items where you probably don't need more than one).
  - gwd 5y ago
    Exactly. If I just bought some power tool for a home improvement project, I am the least likely person in the country to want to buy that exact same power tool the next day.
    - jamiek88 5y ago
      Not if you hate it and want to return it. In fact there’s a calculation to be made - what percentage of people return or dislike their drill? Because that subset of the population is probably more likely to be looking to buy one than any other. A return rate of say 1% may lead to more people looking to buy a drill who have just bought one in the last week than people looking to buy their first drill.
      - gwd 5y ago
        > In fact there’s a calculation to be made - what percentage of people return or dislike their drill? If that's true, they left something out of their calculation: What percentage of people will install an adblocker as a result of feeling like they're being hounded for a few weeks? This scenario was mentioned specifically by Tim Cook when he introduced the Safari anti-tracking features.
xhevahir 5y ago
Does it really work so well in politics? I've read in various places that a lot of political advertising in America functions basically as a means for channeling donors' money to a few K Street firms belonging to party insiders.
- dboreham 5y ago
  And to Rupert Murdoch.
sbcd 5y ago
>I have a sense that this is the dirty little secret of the spyware advertising industry, personalization just isn't that great. Personalized adverts and recommendations can be incredibly, horrendously dumb. Here's what I see when I hit amazon's homepage at the moment : A "buy once again" column that features blackout curtains I bought 3 months ago (no, curtains don't need to be replaced every months, amazon.), USB cables I bought multiples of in the same time frame, a wireless charger (I already bought two before). An entire line dedicated to showing me backpacks (I bought one less than a year ago) An entire line dedicated to headphones (I recently bought wireless IEMs) An entire line dedicated to watches (same) I don't get it. Supposedly the best and brightest work at firms like amazon and google to brainwash us to buy stuff, but classic, random, non-targeted advertisement is more likely to make me discover products I'd buy than targeted advertisement because the latter only shows me things after I don't need to buy them anymore! Here's what I would expect actually intelligent targeted advertising to do : After buying a smartphone, recommend accessories (cases, screen protectors, USB-C dongles, chargers, whatever) Here's what targeted advertisement actually does : show me smartphones ads everywhere I go after I already selected and BOUGHT a smartphone. No, I don't need to buy another smartphone weeks after a recent replacement, amazon! The same sort of phenomenon can happen after google locks on searches I did to buy something. I can't wait to see the internet advertisement industry crash and burn, it's overvalued nonsense.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  A "buy once again" column that features blackout curtains I bought 3 months ago no, curtains don't need to be replaced every months, amazon.), Disagree there. About 75% of the things I buy on Amazon are repeating purchases that I nevertheless don't want to be automatically scheduled. It used to be a real pain in the neck to reorder something manually, so I'm glad they made that easier. But yes, in general, Amazon is full of low-hanging fruit that's been neglected on the tree for a decade or more. Buying clothes from Amazon still manages to be a worse experience than going to the mall, for instance, which is really saying something.
deckard1 5y ago
> personalization just isn't that great Data analytics truly feels like a bubble. Netflix has achieved the dream of movie studios going back more than a century now. They have the talent, the money, and more than two decades of data. Netflix knows what you watch, when you stop watching, how often you watch, which movie covers work best. And yet, it's hard to look at Netflix as anything more than a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Netflix should be putting out nothing but hits. A dozen Breaking Bads or Game of Thrones. Yet they are not. In fact, they do not even have a single show that is to the level of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Wire. HBO and AMC are running laps around Netflix. Meanwhile, Netflix is making live action Cowboy Bebop and cancelling it before people even know it existed. I'm really curious what the data said about funding that particular project. On one hand, you have the cult following of the anime that will absolutely tear a live action version to shreds. On the other hand, you have to convince the uninitiated into viewing a remake of 23 year old anime. Then there is the personalization. The fact that there is a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix catalog than watching content tells you everything you need to know about how little people trust Netflix recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout line. Oh, and, their top 10 feature is currently the biggest recommendation feature on their site. And it's not even personalized! If that's not a complete admission of defeat I don't know what is.
- htrp 5y ago
  > Then there is the personalization. The fact that there is a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix catalog than watching content tells you everything you need to know about how little people trust Netflix recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout line. They may also be optimizing for revenues as opposed to recommendation quality (homegrown content being cheaper than licensed)
  - naravara 5y ago
    Part of this might just be account switching issues though. If I’m watching for myself I can usually find what I want quickly. The problem comes when I’m trying to browse with my wife to find something we can both live with. At best it gives the my preferences and the Union of me + wife’s preferences (and vice versa on her account.) But what we’d really want is a separate recommendation feed that shows the intercept of me + wife’s preferences. But most people are lazy and won’t account switch for different contexts like that anyway, so there’s just no way they can keep the profile data as clean as it needs to be for a television.
marcosdumay 5y ago
From the behavior of ads (that I imagine are highly optimized), all that knowledge is useful for front-running an specific TV model all over your internet once you decide to buy a TV. It seems to be completely useless for anything else, and specifically harmful for product discovery, that is the one way ads add societal value.
DryLabRebel 5y ago
I don't think it's really a secret. It's pretty straightforward to understand that when the vast majority of your sites income is generated from ad revenue, that data is being used to optimize for generating ad clicks, etc., rather than actually giving users the best/most relevant/useful/desireable information for their purposes.
Der_Einzige 5y ago
My experience working in a similar domain (NLP summarization, which leverages methods like text rank which are identical to pagerank but for text summation) is similar. Personalized page rank is not significantly better at summarization in my experience, even "queryable" summarization, but that also could be a pure implementation problem or a problem of hyperparamater selection...

politician 5y ago

I agree with you. I highly doubt that our economy has enough (product, message) combinations to justify the need for personalization based on more than a dozen attributes.

N1H1L 5y ago
I will buy X, if I need X. And once I buy X, it's done. For example, I wanted a cordless drill last week. Did the "site:reddit.com" thing (I actually have been doing that almost subconsciously now, as Google results are all trash), chose a drill, and ordered one off Amazon. Then, after that, what's the point in showing drill ads to me for two weeks?
- bdamm 5y ago
  There's a well known effect in advertising that advertising a product to a person that has already bought that product generally increases their satisfaction with the product and the purchase, and may cause them to recommend the product to others. Probably that's what they are going for if they're doing it on purpose.
  - N1H1L 5y ago
    Could be - but at least for me it feels intrusive and irritating, not any positive feelings really
    - bdamm 5y ago
      It's not supposed to feel good. If 9/10 people have a brief negative thought about the advertising experience and nothing else happens, but 1/10 people happen to have their friend on the phone at the time and makes a referral, then overall that is a win for the brand.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    > There's a well known effect in advertising that advertising a product to a person that has already bought that product generally increases their satisfaction with the product and the purchase, and may cause them to recommend the product to others. Do you have a link for further reading on that? That's fascinating if true.
- artificial 5y ago
  Have you considered consumer reports? I’m of the Reddit persuasion and find it’s a good resource. Bummer everything is polluted these days.

mountainb 5y ago

Right, people radically overestimate how much a profile is worth. Someone who owns a house in a rich area is somewhat easy to identify, and you target them... along with everyone else who is also trying to reach that rich slice, so you pay more. The very high quality pieces of information can be things like "wants to buy a life insurance policy this week" or "just had a baby" or "just bought a plane ticket to XYZ," or "is in the frequent flyer program and spends more than $20,000 per year on travel." However the majority of information about people, the overwhelming majority of whom have no significant disposable income, is worthless and not worth tracking for the most part. You reach those people through traditional mass marketing means.

N1H1L 5y ago
It's a great point you have made. I work technically as a data scientist, but my domain is scientific data. I have quite a few GitHub packages and get recruiter calls for data science jobs almost every week, with pretty generous salary offers. And from what it seems to me, there is a giant bubble. The vast majority of companies doing "data science" jobs are things that a smart undergrad can do with a month or two of training. And this is because I believe C-suites have completely gulped down the data is oil mantra. There are entirely charlatan companies with unicorn, even decacorn valuations now being built on this mantra - for example, CRED in India. Yet, as you said, and as I believe too, most of the data is worthless.
- mountainb 5y ago
  Right, but unlike oil, most data is worthless most of the time. For example, I'm about to list my house on the market. The real estate agents who reached out to me last year and the year before that to try to induce me to sell the house had no chance of succeeding. Now is the time if they knew the secret that I'm about the list the house that they should all be competing for my business. The only relevant piece of information is that I'm about to sell the house. That is a valuable lead that many in my region would bid on. My background information is frankly not that relevant to the value of that lead, and isn't something that is readily surfaced by the kind of deep profiling that is supposed to be going on. It can be signaled by me signing up to some kind of list that sells my lead to a zillion people at once, but is never going to be surfaced accurately to the people who can earn the most profits from it by my Youtube habits or whatever. Zillow sells the logged in user data in the market I'm buying in to the real estate agents listing the houses, but that again is not something being modeled by some kind of big data operation, but is merely the same kind of "little data" provided on things like dating websites or LinkedIn when people browse your profile. There's no modeling going on there that requires sophistication.

Kye 5y ago

It's always fun watching an ad system try to figure out nonbinary people. Spotify ads can't decide whether I'm a successful businessman or Spanish-speaking housewife.

foxfluff 5y ago
It's always fun checking Google's ad settings and seeing what they think I'm into. Apparently now I'm into baseball, flowers, boating, celebrities, country music, credit cards, geology, event ticket sales, fishing, and windows OS. Among a couple hundred other things. It even gets some rather basic facts (marital status, company size, education) wrong. I seriously wonder how they generate this profile?
- tomrod 5y ago
  > I seriously wonder how they generate this profile Poorly!
- hnburnsy 5y ago
  Check your Google ad settings here... https://adssettings.google.com/ https://adssettings.google.com/
  - mcv 5y ago
    There's not a lot there for me. Just some generic whether I want to see alcohol and gambling ads on youtube.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - chillfox 5y ago
    Well... It actually got some categories right, but I don't really feel that's very impressive considering that it put me in every category by the looks of it.
  - arvinsim 5y ago

IMSAI8080 5y ago

I think you're right. I'd like to see an analysis of the effectiveness of personalised advertising based on tracking versus ads based purely on local context. The latter being if you're on a web page about birds then you get ads for bird seed and bird houses. No tracking involved.

suzzer99 5y ago

It works great for negative political ads though.

DebtDeflation 5y ago

>to find out your name and address and search history So that you can continue to show me ads for a washing machine for months after I purchased a washing machine.

artificial 5y ago
Surely you mean your new washing machine buying hobby?
- lillecarl 5y ago
  I haven't consumed significant amounts of ads in a long time, only some logos in sports and the occasional visit to family or the rare times adblock fails (YouTube premium user too). So I can only imagine how hilarious that must be.

ryanbrunner 5y ago

I think the fact that most recommendation algorithms have seemingly converged on what seems like a really poor and naive implementation - fixation on very recent activity - shows that the sort of deep personalization touted is mostly BS. Both YouTube and Amazon heavily personalize by recommending primarily the 3-4 things that I've interacted with in the very recent past.

charcircuit 5y ago
This is not true. For example every time Summoning Salt uploads a video, which happens every few months, it will show up on my recommend feed because YouTube knows I'm willing to watch their ~1 hour documentaries even though I'm not subscribed to them.
- sdoering 5y ago
  This could (probably isn't) be a very quick implementation with a heuristic like 'if percentage of viewed videos from channel x (essentially per channel viewed) > threshold ==> show new video from channel x on homepage next time user appears. Make it fancy and use a multi armed bandit and call it machine learning/AI/data science.
- Jweb_Guru 5y ago
  Youtube seems to be a rare exception here in that people actually feel like its algorithm is useful. However, even then, their algorithm mostly seems to devolve to "what creators have you usually watched videos from" and (usually directly after you watch such a video) "what videos did other people who watched that video watch?" Basically the same principle as PageRank, just with a lot less spam to deal with.
fomine3 5y ago
I believe YouTube recommendation is most well working one, so some people getting into echo chamber.
earth_walker 5y ago
What it proves is that despite all that personalized data they have, it's the naive implementation that gets them the most clicks per dollar. So the question is this: if they're not (and never were) using that data for what they say they were, what are they doing with it?

georgemcbay 5y ago

Just anecdote, but... The most common pattern I see relating to personalized advertising as someone being advertised to is that I will often see an ad for something I just bought (or some competitor to it) repeated relentlessly for a couple of days after buying it and this is after not seeing any related ads during the days prior where I was actually doing some research into the product space. Maybe I'm an outlier but they seem to miss the window of relevance on me often enough that I notice it as a commonly repeated pattern.

adamc 5y ago
Same experience. What's even more mystifying is that often it is for items that no human would be likely to be buying many copies of in a short span of time (high ticket items, or items where you probably don't need more than one).
- gwd 5y ago
  Exactly. If I just bought some power tool for a home improvement project, I am the least likely person in the country to want to buy that exact same power tool the next day.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Not if you hate it and want to return it. In fact there’s a calculation to be made - what percentage of people return or dislike their drill? Because that subset of the population is probably more likely to be looking to buy one than any other. A return rate of say 1% may lead to more people looking to buy a drill who have just bought one in the last week than people looking to buy their first drill.
    - gwd 5y ago
      > In fact there’s a calculation to be made - what percentage of people return or dislike their drill? If that's true, they left something out of their calculation: What percentage of people will install an adblocker as a result of feeling like they're being hounded for a few weeks? This scenario was mentioned specifically by Tim Cook when he introduced the Safari anti-tracking features.

xhevahir 5y ago

Does it really work so well in politics? I've read in various places that a lot of political advertising in America functions basically as a means for channeling donors' money to a few K Street firms belonging to party insiders.

dboreham 5y ago
And to Rupert Murdoch.

sbcd 5y ago

>I have a sense that this is the dirty little secret of the spyware advertising industry, personalization just isn't that great. Personalized adverts and recommendations can be incredibly, horrendously dumb. Here's what I see when I hit amazon's homepage at the moment : A "buy once again" column that features blackout curtains I bought 3 months ago (no, curtains don't need to be replaced every months, amazon.), USB cables I bought multiples of in the same time frame, a wireless charger (I already bought two before). An entire line dedicated to showing me backpacks (I bought one less than a year ago) An entire line dedicated to headphones (I recently bought wireless IEMs) An entire line dedicated to watches (same) I don't get it. Supposedly the best and brightest work at firms like amazon and google to brainwash us to buy stuff, but classic, random, non-targeted advertisement is more likely to make me discover products I'd buy than targeted advertisement because the latter only shows me things after I don't need to buy them anymore! Here's what I would expect actually intelligent targeted advertising to do : After buying a smartphone, recommend accessories (cases, screen protectors, USB-C dongles, chargers, whatever) Here's what targeted advertisement actually does : show me smartphones ads everywhere I go after I already selected and BOUGHT a smartphone. No, I don't need to buy another smartphone weeks after a recent replacement, amazon! The same sort of phenomenon can happen after google locks on searches I did to buy something. I can't wait to see the internet advertisement industry crash and burn, it's overvalued nonsense.

CamperBob2 5y ago
A "buy once again" column that features blackout curtains I bought 3 months ago no, curtains don't need to be replaced every months, amazon.), Disagree there. About 75% of the things I buy on Amazon are repeating purchases that I nevertheless don't want to be automatically scheduled. It used to be a real pain in the neck to reorder something manually, so I'm glad they made that easier. But yes, in general, Amazon is full of low-hanging fruit that's been neglected on the tree for a decade or more. Buying clothes from Amazon still manages to be a worse experience than going to the mall, for instance, which is really saying something.

deckard1 5y ago

> personalization just isn't that great Data analytics truly feels like a bubble. Netflix has achieved the dream of movie studios going back more than a century now. They have the talent, the money, and more than two decades of data. Netflix knows what you watch, when you stop watching, how often you watch, which movie covers work best. And yet, it's hard to look at Netflix as anything more than a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Netflix should be putting out nothing but hits. A dozen Breaking Bads or Game of Thrones. Yet they are not. In fact, they do not even have a single show that is to the level of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Wire. HBO and AMC are running laps around Netflix. Meanwhile, Netflix is making live action Cowboy Bebop and cancelling it before people even know it existed. I'm really curious what the data said about funding that particular project. On one hand, you have the cult following of the anime that will absolutely tear a live action version to shreds. On the other hand, you have to convince the uninitiated into viewing a remake of 23 year old anime. Then there is the personalization. The fact that there is a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix catalog than watching content tells you everything you need to know about how little people trust Netflix recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout line. Oh, and, their top 10 feature is currently the biggest recommendation feature on their site. And it's not even personalized! If that's not a complete admission of defeat I don't know what is.

htrp 5y ago
> Then there is the personalization. The fact that there is a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix catalog than watching content tells you everything you need to know about how little people trust Netflix recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout line. They may also be optimizing for revenues as opposed to recommendation quality (homegrown content being cheaper than licensed)
- naravara 5y ago
  Part of this might just be account switching issues though. If I’m watching for myself I can usually find what I want quickly. The problem comes when I’m trying to browse with my wife to find something we can both live with. At best it gives the my preferences and the Union of me + wife’s preferences (and vice versa on her account.) But what we’d really want is a separate recommendation feed that shows the intercept of me + wife’s preferences. But most people are lazy and won’t account switch for different contexts like that anyway, so there’s just no way they can keep the profile data as clean as it needs to be for a television.

marcosdumay 5y ago

From the behavior of ads (that I imagine are highly optimized), all that knowledge is useful for front-running an specific TV model all over your internet once you decide to buy a TV. It seems to be completely useless for anything else, and specifically harmful for product discovery, that is the one way ads add societal value.

DryLabRebel 5y ago

I don't think it's really a secret. It's pretty straightforward to understand that when the vast majority of your sites income is generated from ad revenue, that data is being used to optimize for generating ad clicks, etc., rather than actually giving users the best/most relevant/useful/desireable information for their purposes.

Der_Einzige 5y ago

My experience working in a similar domain (NLP summarization, which leverages methods like text rank which are identical to pagerank but for text summation) is similar. Personalized page rank is not significantly better at summarization in my experience, even "queryable" summarization, but that also could be a pure implementation problem or a problem of hyperparamater selection...