Comment by serial_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by serial_dev | Hacker News Reader

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You are not alone, if you watch three videos by Kyle Kulinski, you realize how rarely he has an original take.

But coming back to your question.

This question reminds me of a complaint that I heard from multiple people about Amazon: why is Amazon recommending me a product I just bought? Or a less generous manifestation of this sentiment "duh, Amazon is so stupid, it recommend something I bought give minutes ago".

In reality, people don't realize how often they buy the same and similar stuff again and again. You bought a usb hub for home, you like it, so you but it for the office. If you didn't like it, you may buy three different usb hubs to make sure you find a good one. You like a book, so you but the same for your sister as a gift. Bought some socks, you enjoy using them, so you buy another 10 so that you don't need to worry about socks for the next two years. You realize you love funny socks, so you keep buying more socks.

The same happens with videos. I don't mind watching a video about streams by Venkat Subramaniam every now and then. A conference talk about regex is recommended to me again?? Hmm, actually, I might watch it again because I don't remember half of it and I remember she prepared a great talk.

> In reality, people don't realize how often they buy the same and similar stuff again and again.

Yeah... this is not true for the vast majority of non-consumable products without some sort of time delay.

If you bought 20 Zebra gel pens (best pens on the market, no affiliation just satisfied consumer) you don't need 20 Zebra gel pens for a sale refraction period of at least an hour. Immediately re-advertising is a poor advertising model, conceptually, and I'd really need to see a lot of evidence that this is wrong across a wide variety of products to move away from that prior.

And like, a great salesman wouldn't offer you more of the same product but try to either expand into similar products (you like gel pens? here are some mechanical pencils) or hit you up with complimentary products (what good are gel pens without a nice squishy writing mat? and i bet you're going to need a lot of paper!).

Amazon sort of handles these things in the Amazon UI with "people who bought X also bought Y" but they really should be showing that for their ads: instead of "here are results for your recent search" (which likely shows you the thing you already got) it could do "here are things people who buy stuff near the top of your recent search also buy".

Regardless, as far as I am concerned, the best commentary ever on this topic was CollegeHumor doing the Targetted Salesman skit, where the ad engine is represented by a human salesman shoving products at you all day: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM

Well I guess statistics don't agree with you or Amazon wouldn't make that much money

Amazonians and other big techies would absolutely agree that the strategy space is undersearched, which puts your assertion's assumption at risk.

Took several years to even consider the statistical power of ad effectiveness.[0]

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26372642

So your point is that it's a comfort TV thing. We like to watch safe content we know is good.

Whilst I get that's the easy answer from YouTube perspective, I refuse to believe that there is nothing on the entirety of YouTube they can't recommend. It's just sad as a viewer to think how much I'm missing because they're recommending that "This is how empires fall" video for the tenth time.

Wouldn't an sufficiently smart algorithm segment (users, items) into reconsumable vs one-offs?

If you buy a USB hub you might like it enough to buy another.

If you buy a washer, you probably won't like it enough to buy another.

But if you're a landlord, and you buy a washer, you might like it enough to buy 10 more.

I suspect this is it. As an example, someone who bought a new washing machine yesterday is still more likely to buy it or another one tomorrow then a random person on the street. This is why you get a lot of targeted ads for items you just purchased

There are some items which I occasionally repurchase — N95 masks, HP printer cartridges (next time I swear I'll get a Brother laser printer or something), mouthwash, handwash, toothbrushes, and yes sometimes even clothing articles such as socks.

So, most "consumables".

Or, you were watching music videos and it figures you do want to see it multiple times.

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