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Comment by chockchocschoir | Hacker News Reader

> Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn’t showing you what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.

I think that the common complain is not "it isn't showing what I personally want" VS "it isn't showing what people generally want" but rather that the algorithm is often not tuned to "what X want" at all, but tuned to "what brings company most money". For example, YouTube recommendations are biased towards channels that have monetization activated, as YouTube earns more money that way, while ignoring channels the viewer (at large, or personally) would enjoy more.

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Most of the comments here are incredibly dystopian - automation is bad, rehire the editor you've replaced at 75% of the salary, stop pushing engagement, what brings the company most money, megacorporation pushing slushy mass....

Jesus!! Man, didn't know recsys invokes such vitriol.

There are dozens of news apps on smart TVs these days. Under the covers, it's pretty much the same deal - in go the raw feeds. Editors always do a first pass. Recsys algos do the 2nd pass. Ranking algos come in next. Personalization is usually last. Out comes the news. Viewers then have their say with thumbs up & downvotes. Those get fed back into personalization. On & on it goes...

Its not magic. Its not perfect. But its how pretty much every smart tv news app works under the hood. There's dozens of them. Pick any one of them that works well on your TV for your temperament, I guess. Recsys is just a standard comp science discipline. We have our textbooks, our journals, our papers. We all read the same stuff, pretty much roll the same code with minor frills.

Nobody's out to get you.

I don't have to think someone is "out to get me" to believe that the current state of affairs is deeply broken and that you can't fix it with a better mouse trap.

This is just a really easy way for you to dismiss any criticism and avoid cognitive dissonance over your work. I believe you have good intentions. I also believe that those "dozens of news apps" all burn a whole bunch of watt hours on producing nearly identical results and are largely just facades over a handful of media companies.

And that's not speculation or a conspiracy theory, it's plainly true. Media conglomeration has happened at an incredibly fast pace over the last 40 years and local media has been decimated. No one has to be a cackling evildoer with a fancy mustache and a british accent to make this happen, they just have to keep grinding harder and harder at inventing new ways to 'fix it' with more conglomeration.

“…what brings the company most money, megacorporation pushing slushy mass.... Jesus!! Man, didn't know recsys invokes such vitriol.”

yes, corporations do whatever makes the most money. pointing that out has nothing to do with emotions. welcome to the real world.

It's also "showing me stuff I may want when I least want to be aware of it". Stop the distractions already.

If anything algorithms that drive engagement are mutually exclusive with what people want to see. Most people don’t usually engage with anything but the odds are a lot higher for someone to reply etc out of anger or disgust than anything else.

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