[drdaeman]

> Spotify knows me better than anyone and every song on my Discover Weekly hits the spot!

I'd wish. If there is one area where AI had utterly failed it's ads. Product recommendations are always off for me. I love a joke that goes like "meatbag bought a sofa recently, must like sofas, let show them all the sofas we have" because it's silly but very true. And checking out those items leads you down to a rabbit hole where some smartass decided that if I look at something it means I'm potentially interested in more of that, so a machine must feed me more of "related products".

Spotify recommendations are 90% of time provide no value to me - I stopped bothering with their recommendations and "discover" playlists. I actually hate that they start playing music of their choice when my playlists are over. The only reason I keep a subscription is because a) they have a fairly decent collection of things I like and b) it's easy to share a playlist with my wife.

Same with Kindle book recommendations. Same with all those streaming services. Same with Steam games. Even though I spend some time there trying to tell all those platforms what I like and what I don't.

I always have to browse catalog, checking every single thing individually. Like a quest looking for a good apartment on Airbnb among the sea of places that weren't ever good for living, only crashing for the night. Hopefully there is some user-curated collection to start with - because "related" stuff automated classifiers generate are typically echo chambers full of things I'm not looking for.

The problem is, machines recommendation systems fail to understand the reasons for picking one thing over another, because they don't know much about the product they're recommending, only its relationship with other products. They don't read the book (or watch a movie), so they have no clue about its language (or actors play), tropes, and how interesting (or stupid) the plot is. They don't listen to the song so they have no clue about how it sounds like, the vocals, and certainly don't care about lyrics. And so on.

/rant

[pixl97]

Maybe you're just an outlier and AI doesn't show you good ads because it doesn't have a set of good ads that meet your needs that pay a decent amount?

Unfortunately with bulk data over populations you are going to have some members that are in the long tail. Instead the operators of the system look at the efficiency of the system over larger parts of the population, even if it has the potential to lose sales for a small part of the population.

[drdaeman]

Yeah, well, I could imagine being an outlier with some service or two - but everywhere? I'm a grumpy ass who loves to nitpick, but I don't think I'm that unique.

Even the Google Ads (which are supposed to have some magic pixie dust algorithms done by the fanciest experts in the field because that's Google's bread and butter) are typically showing me some products I couldn't care less about. It's always some random post somewhere (which could be an ad) that actually makes me interested and drives me to making a purchase, not some bullshit video banner.

> the operators of the system look at the efficiency of the system over larger parts of the population

My guess is that they look at engagement metrics, not consumer happiness or satisfaction. And even though I'm pretty much disappointed, I still use those services and still click on "related products" and even check some book samples etc. - in hope that maybe I'm wrong, and maybe this time it's a good recommendations. Very infrequently that happens, but mostly it's not what I'm interested in. So I go find some non-machine recommendations, search for those and thus remain an active user operators want on their platform.

[hnfong]

I agree most recommendation engines simply suck. (I can't imagine how they spent millions hiring Machine Learning PhDs and end up with that crap)

That said, youtube recommendation algorithms are usually sane. I suspect the depth and breadth of available videos (which are actually potentially interesting) helps, whereas for ads, the platform's primary goal is to shove unwanted stuff down viewer's throats, and if 99.9% of the people don't actually want to see the ads, they still need to pick the ones "most likely" wanting to see them, even if that probability is like 1%.

[hakfoo]

I feel like the specific case of "sofas forever" is because of a clear lack of feedback channels.

If you buy a sofa, especially at a different vendor, it doesn't send a signal back to the ad network which could be used to deprioritized the sofa ads.

There's also no trust in the advertiser relationship, so you couldn't just have an "already bought/don't show anymore" button because people would either ignore it or insist they bought everything in the hopes of poisoning data or suppressing ads.

[cwkoss]

Ad algorithms are never going to do what you want because companies which make great products don't need to advertise. Advertising is a mechanism for inducing artificial demand: the products you actually want don't need to be advertised to you because you'll seek it out at no expense to them - the market for your attention is in manipulating you into buying inferior and overpriced alternatives.

[kolar]

I can't agree more with this. Maybe 1 song out of 30 in Discover Weekly is worth to be marked as liked.