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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if another dimension is useful.

YouTube's UI prominently features search. So if my interests change and I search for something I've never been interested before, YouTube can show me a pretty good selection of videos and tune its recommendations for future viewing.

I will say, though, that all social networks seem to fail at weighting past behavior too strongly. Whenever I start a new account on a social network, I find it's recommendations are much more tuned to my interests, and those recommendations become less relevant overtime.

Biologically, I'm a new person every seven years. As a collection of varied interests, it seems like I turnover much more often than that - and I suspect the rate of turnover is different for everyone.

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Why not just give me more control? Why can't I say (soon literally) "Dear Zuck - show me news" or "Dear Zuck - show me cat photos"?

For me, FB is far too controlling. So much so that I have 10 groups that I've started to "organize" my friends and in a way build my own feed. It helps. But it still not what I want, mainly because a lot of people are not group share minded.

I don't understand why FB is spending soooo much time and effort trying to guess what I want when all it has to do is...wait for it...ask.

> Why not just give me more control? Why can't I say (soon literally) "Dear Zuck - show me news" or "Dear Zuck - show me cat photos"?

That's Google.

I suspect, but certainly can't prove, that there are two things going on... first that in order to get reasonably true answers to questions you have to provide a fair in-kind trade with the user. If you want their home location you could ask for it, in which case a lot of people will seem to come from zipcode 12345, or you can offer a solution to a problem (or preferably a set of problems) they may have that is easily solved with their correct zipcode such as "lists of X within a mile of your house." That's a bit harder to pull off when it's something like "what political party are you?" for anyone who isn't rabidly political. The second suspicion that I have is that this is a result of a larger conceit of the tech industry that they are an enlightened minority who either know or can know better than the masses (tech isn't unique in this conceit, alas).

You're conflating a recommendation/suggestion system, which uses data from an inference engine, with systems that replace explicit user intent with the results of an inference engine.

A recommendation/suggestion system should offer its opinions and the user is free to follow them or not. Replacing explicit user intent with inferred intent is over-ruling the user, saying that the system's decision-making is more important than the user's.

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