> I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too.
This is what I don't understand. There is SO much -good- data about us, but recommendations everywhere, by and large, are terrible. You'd think that with all the tracking, with all the pushback on privacy protections and whatnot, that we'd be getting -something- out of it. But I go to Amazon and it tells me "you just bought a printer? here's 10 more printers you might be interested in".