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by jillesvangurp
2111 days ago
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With Netflix, their catalogue is small enough that I can find what I want regardless of what they suggest. They seem to have nailed the "more of the same" algorithm which is mostly looking at their weird notion of genre. For me that means it recommends me stuff I've already decided that I'm not interested in watching because they've been recommending it for months and I've declined to watch it. This seems in general a problem with recommendation algorithms: they struggle picking up on negative signals and get stuck in t a perpetual more of the same shit loop. Spotify recommendations vary depending on the context. Their profile of me is probably very confused because I listen to a lot of different things and what I listen to is mostly dependent on context and what I'm in the mood for, which spans 5 decades of music and quite a few genres. I gravitate to a lot of alternative stuff but only the good stuff (for my personal very narrow definition of good). Spotify never figured out that sweet spot. So, I've been ignoring their radio feature because I find it a mix of "I already have that in a play list" or "I hate that song, which is why I don't have it in a playlist". It only very occasionally suggests something I haven't heard that I actually like. However, I love their "users that listen to X also listen to Y" section. For me that's a main tool to discover new things. They also suggest adding songs to playlists. I've rediscovered a few tunes from the eighties that were somehow stuck in my head but that I struggled to name this way. The eighties were of course the glory days of the top 40 and I listened to it while doing my homework back in the day. I stopped listening to that stuff in the nineties when alternative music became a thing. In any case, I prefer these non personalized type of suggestions over the more of the same stuff that passes for artificial intelligence peddled by many websites. I hate how you get stuck in recommendation bubbles that way. This also dominates news websites these days, which is something I hate because it's gotten quite hard to get an overview of what is happening in the world with news websites increasingly biased by what works as click bait with shoddy AI algorithms rather than telling me what is happening. And it's a reason I like HN because here the feed is dictated by shared interest of a technical audience rather than any of our personal preferences or political opinions. That's why it works. No AI recommendations here. That's why people come here. |
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How is that even possible? They barely have anything!
> Their profile of me is probably very confused because I listen to a lot of different things and what I listen to is mostly dependent on context and what I'm in the mood for, which spans 5 decades of music and quite a few genres.
This is not unique. Probably most people are like this.
If you add shared devices like Alexa into the mix then it's even more all over the place.