Their recommendation engine is not harmful in all cases. I used to use Twitter to follow some machine learning/programming profiles and remember the recommendations being quite good.
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in my experience, if anybody you follow ever interacts with anything political, that quickly drowns out any other interesting content in the recommendations. If you exclusively follow people who exclusively post and interact with programming content, then maybe your recs will be okay. but all it takes is one person in your network to interact with one other topic to poison your recommendations for good.
This is the amazing duality of social networking: as soon as it becomes topic specific, the quality of discussion improves in direct corellation to how technical the topic gets. The moment the conversation is just general babble, anonymous / pseudonymous people will find things to argue about.
I sadly don’t find this to be true. The caustic subjects in all disciplines get talked about more and recommended more. I made the mistake of watching some flight videos and now get recommended crash montages all the time. I watched the C++ con talk on “OO considered harmful” and now have an inordinate amount of bullshit in my feed. It feels kind of crazy that my YouTube recommendations took such a downturn suddenly.
Yup. I'd love to live inside my own bubble filter.
Does anyone do personalization well?
I worked on team that was trying to transition from recommendations to personalization (fashion retailer with ecommerce, think Macys Nordstrom etc).
Our imagined gold standard was the expert sales person, the personalized shopper. So somehow figure out how to make a digital sales person. Like StitchFix or Trunk Club. Curation at scale.
But I couldn't even figure out how to solve my own ultimate shopping challenge: recommend a quality white t-shirt that fits.
Though I doubt it, maybe StitchFix has cracked this nut. If they (or someone) has, we need to distill their magic and apply it more generally.
(I haven't tried Spotify or Apple Music. I've heard their personalization efforts are pretty good, so I'm semi-curious.)
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Oh, and a post script, while I'm chewing on this topic.
I have a theory why quality personalization isn't likely to become the norm. I can't yet imagine how it'd displace today's biz models. Targeted advertising has sucked up all the oxygen.
It's hard to articulate the difference between personalization and targeted advertising (recommenders). One of those torturous endless discussions our teams couldn't escape.
"Personalization" is needs fulfillment whereas targeting is attention stealing. Personalization is much harder to monetize, because it relies on conversions. Whereas with targeting, the money changes hands before hand and is easier to pretend it's working.
I will clarify: I don't mean that _feeds_ are doing well with this. I just mean, when you dig down to a place where Real Discussion is happening, like a web1.0 message board or group or whatever, there's still tons of good, good-faith discussion happening. It's just not the stuff that percolates up to the top. Relying on your feed recommendations for your content is like living off of nothing but McDonalds, it's not good for you.
> when you dig down to a place where Real Discussion is happening, like a web1.0 message board or group or whatever, there's still tons of good, good-faith discussion happening
I need this. Could you share please?
Ahh sorry, I really read that wrong!
> As soon as [social networking] becomes topic specific, the quality of discussion improves in direct corellation to how technical the topic gets.
"5G spreads the coronavirus"
"Measles vaccines cause autism"
"10 scientific proofs why the earth is flat"
I mean topic specific in the sense of finding places where deep discussions are being had - like, say, a mailing list or forum for a very particular thing, scientific or programming or cars or whatever you like. Not what you see on Facebook. Social networking is not just FAANG, look in the long tail for the good stuff.
Any recommendations on whom to follow on that front?
In no specific order:
- Andrej Karpathy
- Jeremy Howard
- François Chollet
- Adam Paszke
- Thomas Kipf
- Sebastian Ruder
- Julia Evans
- Martin Kleppmann