[sam_lynx]

Part of what makes YouTube’s recommendation algorithm so powerful is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be very good. I scrolled through my recommendations just now and only found one video after scrolling through fifteen that I was interested in watching — but that’s fine, since it’s easy to decide if you might like a video based on its title, thumbnail, and creator.

However, if YouTube was as good at recommending books as it was recommending videos, I would never use its book recommendation algorithm. You necessarily have to get almost every book recommendation “correct” for it to be seen as actually useful by the user.

[SamBam]

How does that follow? I can't imagine that there are any book recommendations -- be they your friends, the Book Review section of your favorite newspaper, or whatever -- that gets things right for almost every single review. That's absurd.

When I see a book recommendation, I read the associated review (if it has one), read other people's reviews, look at the author and the blurb, and, yes, even the cover.

That tells me much more than a YouTube thumbnail, with only a little more time (but of course I'm going to put more time into choosing a book that might take me two weeks to finish). Indeed, my initial filter is probably much the same as a YouTube thumbnail: I skim past many recommendations based on the genre and author alone.

I think if the Times Book Review always wrote reviews in which 1 out of 15 of them made me thing "I need to get that book," I'd be amazed at how much they "get" me. I wouldn't bother with anything else. Every 15 recommendations lands me another "must-read?" Sign me up!

The problem listed in the article is that Goodreads is no where near 1 out of 15.

[sam_lynx]

Hm, I change my mind, you are correct.