Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
Why are all of the algorithms shitty? Netflix and Amazon and Facebook and even Google (ads, not search) were supposed to be able to tell us what we want even if we didn't know. But they're all crap. They're great at serving you ads for the thing you just bought for months, but none of them do what they think they can do.
It works for search, but nowhere else.
And Facebook and Twitter get substantially worse the farther they move from just showing things chronologically.
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For any two-sided platform with discovery (the above, eBay, Etsy, Uber, Lyft, etc.), the search function can optimize for the user, the supplier, or the platform itself. When these businesses are new and worrying about creating value, they tend to optimize for the user's experience. So when it was young, Google was awesome. As they mature, they tend to get market power, because the network effects (or returns to scale, etc.) tend to protect them from direct competition. So they don't worry as much about pleasing the user, who now has nowhere else to go. Instead, they tend to optimize for whatever makes themselves the most money. This plays out differently in different contexts. For Google, it means that they want to show you ads instead of natural search results. You can think of this as Google's way of trying to extract money from the other side of the market for sending traffic instead of sending that traffic for free through natural search results. Google still works pretty well when you are trying to find some piece of information that isn't commercial at all.
Facebook is ferociously committed to keeping you engaged, which means that you stay on FB and click on stuff. This is why all the political stuff on Facebook is so histrionic, and why Facebook is not only uninterested in weeding out fake news, but would rather not do that.
I once said to someone who worked at eBay, I spent all this time telling Amazon what books I like but the recommendations I get back in return are all the same current stuff that I see everywhere else. And she said, that's because they're taking promotional money from the publishers to recommend their books. Amazon would rather pocket that money than give me better recommendations.
I can't speak to Netflix. I love Twitter because it is less susceptible to this sh*t. Which is also probably why it has never been as lucrative.
