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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

> I think the issue is with the discoverability of those communities.

Honestly, I think this is why we don't see fatter tails than we see today. Google, YouTube, Netflix, and even Spotify push us into bubbles. Many of us are drawn in because on the exploration/exploitation scale it is high on exploration. But as we use the service more they focus more and more on exploitation. I remember awhile ago reading a blog my netflix (?) how it is actually easier to satisfy customers with wide variety of tastes and love the exploration paradigm. Maybe the next step is to figure out who is who or when someone is in a exploration mood. I'd assume that's common given that everyone jokes about scrolling around on Netflix for 15 minutes only to leave.

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>Maybe the next step is to figure out who is who or when someone is in a exploration mood.

Why try and read people's minds when you can just make it an option? Half the problem (with so much modern tech) is algorithms trying to 'figure out' stuff like that. Just ask the user. And stop feeding back so much user behaviour into algorithms, it always converges to zero.

I would presume you'd want to have that explore option use different algorithms. When in the exploration situation you still want to narrow down what kinds of topics people want to find and not just a random assortment. You're always going to have to "read people's minds" to some extent because there's too much information and too many options out there. You should probably increase this exploration value as the user continues to scroll.

Also, if someone is scrolling and scrolling you'd probably want to increase your exploration hyperparameter as time goes by. So thus we're pretty much automating what is done above by user behavior. You don't really need to read someone's mind because they are already explicitly telling you that what you've presented to them isn't what they are looking for (otherwise they would have clicked it by now).

Though, for convenience I think you could find clear patterns in certain behaviors. For example, I'm one of those people that like to fall asleep to a show that I've seen a few times already. It is pretty easy to predict that. You can sure predict that if I'm opening Netflix late at night that I want to watch Star Trek.

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