Horrible Remedies for Broken Recommenders

> Part of me even thinks it’s a more straightforward “data science”-problem when you ask the user what they want instead of playing the guessing game with tensors. Instead of worrying about an optimal recommendation, maybe there’s something to be said to allow users to customize instead. But why would bol.com ever consider this? Allowing for customization might be something that users are interested in, but it may cause them to customize for products with lower margins.

Optimizing profits at the expense of everything else is a surprisingly large part of much dysfunction on the internet. Significant parts of the internet are sponsored by ads and this business model creates perverse incentives for the people operating the infrastructure that serves those ads [1]. This is most obvious in social media but it's starting to be the case for Google as well, the quality of their search is continuing to degrade and more of their results are sponsored ads or SEO optimized sites instead of actually useful or pertinent pages [2]. I now mostly look for academic articles when I want to do actual research because most sites matching the keywords I'm looking for almost never contain any semantically relevant content.

1: https://niklasblog.com/?p=25416

2: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...