Have you read the hilarious If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay article? I recently faced similar issue with Pandora – a music discovery service. On one of my stations Pandora started playing Latino music and never recovered from it. If I remember it right I had created a Jethro Tull station to begin with. But rating Santana and Gypsy King high resulted in getting lots of latino recommendations. I enjoyed the change initially but when I wanted to get back to my mainstream recommendations things got out of hand. I tried to rate certain songs unfavorably to get the system back to where I wanted but that didn’t work. My only option was to delete the station and create a new one.
At the time the Wall Street Journal article was written (in 2002) the personal recommendation space was brand new and evolving but my experience was quite recent. The following quote from the 2002 WSJ article is still applicable to most of the recommendation engines:
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and
heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either
know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off
base.
I think the one of the problems with the most of these sites or products that provides recommendations is the Black Box nature of their recommendation engines. The users have no idea how their behavior is being interpreted by these engines. I would like to how these recommendations engines are storing and using my preferences.
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