Is there any evidence that the recommendation systems are actually intent on putting something you would like to see in front of you instead of some other incentive?
My YouTube subscriptions are all engineering/programming/space/guns/machining/electronics. I even see the same commenters in many of them. There is clearly a set of people with these interests that could be used to cross-pollinate interesting content. Yet my recommendations are all pop culture and sports.
Spotify is the same way but i blame my kids for polluting their model of my interests,
I’ve given up on Netflix. I can’t even find stuff i want to watch on there any more.
We had a bunch of people who worked on the recommendation system at netflix at the stat seminar. Their whole movie catalogue after hashing comfortably fits into a dataframe in R on your laptop. Even the audience-like matrix is not very big. They simply don’t have that much permanent content due to licensing issues. Parks & Rec for example is like one of their top 10 most streamed content - today - even though that thing aired like a decade ago! on top of which, its going to move to Peacock next quarter! So not only are they lagging in content contemporariness, they are losing what little they have because the networks who make the content are pulling the plug.
An unrelated problem with movie recs is that the kind of movies & tv episodes being made today have homogenized because of international distribution issues & things like metoo. Your villains can’t be clearcut russians & chinese anymore, we sell to those countries. So it has to be some amorphous bad person with ambiguous intentions, which doesn’t work so well for james bond type stuff. Many of the older shows I love, I watch them on youtube & the comments there are mostly along the lines of “this would never ever get made in 2019. this is so bigoted. this is so mean spirited. this is openly sexist racist” etc etc. These are shows from 70s-80s, so its not like we had some genetic mutation and became a different species. We are still the same people, but those kinds of movies & shows aren’t happening anymore.
Your second point is very interesting and something I hadn't really considered. I wonder how all of the DeepFake-type capabilities will allow a sort of 'dial a villain/hero' in future movies.
> Is there any evidence that the recommendation systems are actually intent on putting something you would like to see in front of you instead of some other incentive?
Something I've been wondering about recently is how infrastructure costs factor into this. Obviously videos get served from a local CDN node when possible, but I'm guessing sometimes the file you're requesting is uncommon enough that the local CDN node doesn't have it. Maybe this isn't the case with Netflix, but it's probably the case with youtube, just because they have that much more content. Adding more storage to the CDNs would cost money, and cache misses on the CDN also cost money, so does youtube have a financial incentive to bias their recommendations towards videos already cached near you?
The infrastructure costs might be low, but transit performance back to Google is terrible for many ISPs (looking at you CenturyLink), so there might be 'quality' costs to consider as well.
In my experience YouTube recommends based on watched videos (not subscriptions). The recommendations are not great, but for me they fit the topics I usually watch. Maybe you are blocking some script used to send your views to the recommendation system or something?
It's a fair point. Netflix for example has a subpar catalog to choose from (maybe 5000 titles max) and of course they are pushing their own content to the top.
By comparison the known movie/tv universe of global movies and tv selections ever made is upwards of 500K.
My YouTube subscriptions are all engineering/programming/space/guns/machining/electronics. I even see the same commenters in many of them. There is clearly a set of people with these interests that could be used to cross-pollinate interesting content. Yet my recommendations are all pop culture and sports.
Spotify is the same way but i blame my kids for polluting their model of my interests,
I’ve given up on Netflix. I can’t even find stuff i want to watch on there any more.