I can personally vouch that Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube all do horrible horrible jobs predicting my taste. And they have got worse over the years, not better
I had just preordered novel 9 of The Expanse, and I got an email recommending something else from the same authors: novel 8 of the Expanse. A more sensible recommendation engine might have assumed that someone who preorders part n+1 of a series may already have part n. Not to mention that Amazon should have known that I already had novel 8 on my Kindle.
I guess generating personalized recommendations at scale is still too expensive. We just get recommendations based on what other customers with vaguely similar tastes were interested in.
> Not to mention that Amazon should have known that I already had novel 8 on my Kindle.
Amazon doesn't seem to understand many things surrounding the Kindle. For example, it calculates the progress reading through a book by the last page I looked at. That means if I finished a book and jumped to the introduction it'll now be convinced I only read 1% of the book. This is so dumb, and I don't know why they even do it that way - the Kindle hardware should easily be capable of precisely keeping track of what pages I looked at.
Funny thing is, your very comment is an indirect praise of the very thing they were advertising to you, and here it is being read by thousands of people. Are we so sure absurdly terrible ads don't actually beat out actually good well tailored ones? Looking through the history of radio ads, television ads, it seems like the best ads are always the stupidest. "Head on, apply directly to the forehead!" isn't so far off from "You bought a washing machine? Buy another!". The reality is, advertising optimizes to target stupid people because stupid people spend money. It is easier to trick a moron then sell a smart man something they actually want.
Yep, Spotify, Amazon, Youtube, Google etc. they all use the same three algorithms:
- the more of the same thing algorithm. You clicked this thing, would you like to click it again. And again. And some more.
- the ever popular "we've shown you this thing a hundred times now and you never clicked it; we'll just assume we are right and you are wrong" algorithm.
- the ooooh we've detected that your ip address is in Germany and predict that you are now fluent in German. Would you like some Schnitzel with you Schlager music? This one in particular drives me nuts. I have user profiles with these companies for many years, browser settings that specify a preferred language, etc. I consistently never do anything in German with them. And they'll go ... here's some German content for you. Completely useless and obviously the only criteria they use for these recommendation is location. Worse, if I travel they'll unhelpfully suggest things for those locations as well. Basically, most of their top recommendations are the same generic stuff that they serve to everybody else in the same location.
Recommendation engines are hard and these companies gave up years ago and instead routinely by pass their own AI with some simple if .. else logic. I know how this stuff works. There's a little corner in the UI for the cute AI kids to do their thing but essentially all the prime real estate in their UIs is reserved for good old if else logic, basic profiling, and whatever their marketing department wants to promote to everybody.
If user in Germany recommend generic German stuff. There's no logical explanation other than that for the absolute garbage recommended by default. If you clicked a thing, here's some more things from the same source in random order. Amazon has a notion of books being in a certain order ... so why recommend I start with part 21 of a 50 book series by an author I've never bothered to read? Maybe book 1 would be a better start ... Book series are great value for them because if I get hooked, I consume the whole thing.
Most recommendations are just variations of simple profiling (age, sex, location) that consistently trump actual recommendations combined with very rudimentary similarity algorithms. You don't need AI for any of that. I work with search engine technology, it's not that hard.
The one thing I've been consistently impressed with is TikTok. If I compare recommendations on YouTube to what I get on my TikTok FYP, it's like comparing a 5-year-old to a college graduate on a math test.
Literally to the point where YouTube never pulls me down into the rabbit hole anymore, I watch one video because it was linked from somewhere else, then I bounce.
Part of the reason they're horrible is because people don't have consistent interests. I might be interested in raunchy content right now, but I won't be a few hours later. What determines whether I'm interested in the former is outside of the control of these algorithms - they don't know all of the external events that can change my current mood and preferences. As a result of this it makes sense for people to have many profiles that they switch between, but AI seems incapable of replicating this manual control (so far).
Sometimes I want to watch videos about people doing programming, but usually I don't. When I do though, I would like to easily get into a mode to do just that. Right now that essentially involves switching accounts or hoping random search recommendations are good enough.
> Part of the reason they're horrible is because people don't have consistent interests. I might be interested in raunchy content right now, but I won't be a few hours later. What determines whether I'm interested in the former is outside of the control of these algorithms
I don't think that matters at all. People don't complain that they're getting recommendations that would have been great if they had come in an hour/day earlier or later. When you get a recommendation like that, you consider it a good recommendation.
Instead, they complain that they're getting recommendations for awful content that they wouldn't choose to watch under any circumstances.
I think it matters a lot, because that "awful content" is popular enough that others watch it. People can watch and read things they swear they would never be interested in, but this only happens sometimes. The algorithm taking cues from that is itself a discouraging factor on clicking on them.
Youtube's is actually pretty surprisingly good, in my experience. After years of use, it consistently filters out all the absolute trash I don't want to see, and recommends me things I do actually want. It's not perfect, but it often directs me to channels I wouldn't have heard of otherwise that have solid content.
It often finds a video I would like and throws it on my front page. I avoid it for awhile thinking it wouldn't be a good fit (I don't recognize the creator, bad thumbnail/title, unclear why the content would be of interest to me, etc) but find it was great and I should have watched it days ago.
If I log out of my account, the front page of the site is just awful, makes me want to throw up.
Same. For a long time they wanted me to watch angry white guys complaining about pop culture. But all I want to watch are PBS science shows and stuff about ancient history! Eventually, they gave up, and now half the videos they recommend are ones I already watched years ago.
If you go deep into all the settings you can turn all of amazons predictive jibber jabber off and turn off a ton of tracking. It has been awhile but I swear there were settings hidden everywhere. I just went back to amazon and it still seems to suggest some products based on what I just viewed so now I am wondering what the hell I even turned off.....it is actually fairly accurate now though (I looked at a timex watch and it is suggesting a very similar timex watch)
edit: My bad - it was just suggesting products I had recently previously viewed
That may make sense of you are not the average consumer. Optimizing for the most common case makes sense. I see that with Google search prediction, it's good but many times it predicts very sensible words for general use but not in the topic that I'm interested.
