[bru_]

This is so dumb... One paragraph they're introducing the concept of "small data", the next paragraph they're talking about how getting the swipe information for huge numbers of users helps them train their collaborative filtering algorithm...

Ultimately it's a big data hype article... GASP we can infer your preferences from your behavior... Written by someone with a Medium tagline of "Sassy futurism. Tech and words."

[glutamate]

That is not at all dumb. Doing the preference learning for a huge number of users lets you set up a prior over the preferences that includes correlations between different attributes. Then you use the population prior together with the data for the individual to get the posterior for their personal preferences, which will then take into account the correlations revealed in the population data. This is what we do with http://findmelike.com where we perform the Bayesian update over the user's preferences after every user interaction.

[bru_]

Ha ha... I'm not against learning preferences at all... I think you misunderstood my comment