I don’t think this response is dismissive: it’s a technical explanation of what is happening. Understanding it helps us find a solution.
Netflix (of Facebook) rates content along embeddings, and highlights content along embeddings that users engage with. If a given user engages with clips featuring people in bikini, that system won’t pass the judgement (one that the author is passing, a judgement you dearly regret, ‘Lest…’) — but one that the commenter didn’t pass. No one in that process (at Facebook, Instagram or Netflix Tech team) is choosing to make things sluttier, or asks someone to bend over a little more (Netflix being a film and series producer too, I’ll reserve there).
Given that context, if, like the author, you believe that the content should not engage along certain dimensions then there’s several possible takes:
* a paternalistic approach to downgrade dimensions that are deemed unhelpful; that would have been popular in my Catholic school, less so on Hacker News, I’d expect;
* a empowering approach that either:
* name the dimensions and let users downgrade them; that’s harder than one would expect for many reasons, but roughly: naming is power and embeddings are not human-legible;
* let users downvote some recommendation, even if they’ve engaged with it.
Both Facebook and Netflix but also YouTube, Google Search engine, all have strangely avoided building those negative feedback for click-baits. It many ways, it’s a mystery to me, especially as someone who built so many recommendation systems. I’ve always used implicit or explicit negative feedback, to just engagement and the recommendations were meaningfully better.
I’d love to hear from people who have explored that approach if there have encountered issues implementing them. I can share two details that are not sufficient but I hope are relevant:
* The biggest problem at Facebook has always been that Likes were performative: your friends saw them, by design; people refused to use them as a way to improve their recommendation because of that. When we discussed a drop in posting, or when the five other reactions where debated, there were several suggestion to make a parallel form of Like invisible. I’ve seen those ideas being shot down repeatedly; I was never told why. I assumed there was a fear those would cannibalise the public Likes, and those drove a lot of engagement opportunities, but that was speculation on my part.
* Most effort to understand recommendations (“Why am I seeing this?”) had an abysmal engagement rate. So much that maintaining it wasn't worth the effort.