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I regularly chat about obscure music with people who are essentially strangers to me, I don't know their real names, locations, etc, but we share a lot of youtu

I regularly chat about obscure music with people who are essentially strangers to me, I don't know their real names, locations, etc, but we share a lot of youtube links to music videos that have a few thousand views, averaging maybe a few views a day. I believe this connection is picked up and reflected in our youtube recommendations, evidenced by recommendations that have nothing to do with music but seemingly relate to the interests of the people I share music recommendations with. For instance, one of these friends recommends the song National Pastime - Pictures On Your Wall and sends me a link to it on youtube (~4k views over 7 years.) We probably both watch it at the same time, and might have been the only two people to watch it that day. For the next day or so, youtube recommends gameplay videos of f2p gacha-shit, which I utterly despise but know that person has an interest in. And they probably get videos about submarines and airplanes in their feed, because that's the sort of thing I often watch.

filoleg 4y ago
Pretty much this. The least obvious at the time, but looks extremely obvious in retrospective. You and your friend are tightly linked on the social graph. Your friend starts watching a new show and keeps googling and watching stuff about it and talking about it with other people online. While the system won't recommend to you every single thing your friend watches and likes, it knows that for some of those the likelihood of your tastes matching is high. E.g., you might not like horror movies unlike your friend, so the algo wont be recommending them to you, despite your friend watching those. But the algo knows you both like crime dramas, so as soon as your close-social-link-connection-friend starts watching and googling and talking about Breaking Bad, the algo thinks you might like it too, so you start getting suggestions for it. It is kind of silly, but it is indeed scarily way more accurate/effective to predict recommendations that way, as opposed to doing very invasive stuff like actually trying to listen to mic or correlate locations or whatever else (not even mentioning that on modern phone OSs it is somewhere between very difficult and pretty much impossible to do in a legitimate way). Tldr: if you have close social connections whose certain media tastes match yours in some specific niches, don't be surprised that when one of those social links starts watching and enjoying something in those specific niches (and googling about it and talking about it to others online and etc.), you might get recs for that type of content too.

filoleg 4y ago

Pretty much this. The least obvious at the time, but looks extremely obvious in retrospective. You and your friend are tightly linked on the social graph. Your friend starts watching a new show and keeps googling and watching stuff about it and talking about it with other people online. While the system won't recommend to you every single thing your friend watches and likes, it knows that for some of those the likelihood of your tastes matching is high. E.g., you might not like horror movies unlike your friend, so the algo wont be recommending them to you, despite your friend watching those. But the algo knows you both like crime dramas, so as soon as your close-social-link-connection-friend starts watching and googling and talking about Breaking Bad, the algo thinks you might like it too, so you start getting suggestions for it. It is kind of silly, but it is indeed scarily way more accurate/effective to predict recommendations that way, as opposed to doing very invasive stuff like actually trying to listen to mic or correlate locations or whatever else (not even mentioning that on modern phone OSs it is somewhere between very difficult and pretty much impossible to do in a legitimate way). Tldr: if you have close social connections whose certain media tastes match yours in some specific niches, don't be surprised that when one of those social links starts watching and enjoying something in those specific niches (and googling about it and talking about it to others online and etc.), you might get recs for that type of content too.