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by Xevi 2003 days ago
It feels like it's a self-fulfilling spiral of bad music. The more I listen to the recommended music, the more of the same crap keeps getting recommended to me. Even if I skip them.

I remember that Spotify actually had pretty good recommendations when I first started using it at the start of this year, because I had only listened to the songs I actually liked so far. But now I'm lucky if I find one decent song out of a hundred recommended ones.

1 comments

Seems there is exactly the same sort of discussion on another HN thread about poor recommendations from YouTube, also leading into a spiralling decline to more and more rubbish
Yeah. I've commented about this in the past. I have two YouTube accounts in different languages. One has great recommendations. One is terrible.

I wonder for the one with terrible recommendations if I fell into a particular failure spiral: YouTube tried to give me some new stuff for a period, but I happened to not like any of it. The AI noted I was just clicking suggestions from my subscriptions. It eventually tried different recommendations. I didn't like those either, and clicked videos I'd seen before from my subscriptions. Eventually the AI decided I only like watching videos for channels I'm subscribed to, and now doesn't recommend me stuff outside of that. Even when I branch out into a new area, it no longer suggests related channels or anything like that.

It's not just media. Every year or so I reinstall the Swype keyboard and it works great. But after about a month or two it 'learns' from my jokey misspellings or starts learning a lot of my more obscure vocabulary and starts muddying up the very basic level of Swyping I actually want it to do.

It works great when it types out phrases as I swype and I go back and edit in whatever jokes, memes, or 10 dollar words I want to include. It starts to suck when it starts trying to include those into its predictions.

There's like a sweet spot of machine learning beyond which the machine gets more annoying than helpful.