I've worked at a large e-commerce company before and it's surprising how many of the basic techniques like embedding, seed accounts, round robin diversification are exactly the same. I used to wonder if some of the apparent idiosyncrasies in our system were shared by other companies. It's uncanny how much of it is industry standard.
Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#32It can go pretty wrong - look at a picture of a gun one time and IG will start shoving gun pictures down your throat, it's horribly non-forgiving and can't be tuned by the end user easily. You learn pretty quick to never look even once at something you don't want a whole lot of that same thing force-fed to you - on the other hand, start looking at huskies and you'll get tons of puppers filling your explore. :)
That is one of the things I like about the YouTube one - the option to remove from your view history seemingly does have an effect on the recommendation engine.
> seemingly
It definitely does. The homepage goes back to recommending a mix of my subscriptions and content generally related to them.
I like to reset my Youtube viewing history a couple times a month to see which direction my viewing habits will take my recommendations this time. I'll often ratchet into new territory. This month it was Warcraft 3: Reforged gameplay (Grubby), a game I haven't played in 15+ years.
The month before it was fiction book review channels. It's fun to change it up.
In Youtube's recent homepage update this month, they also rolled out a "Don't recommend this channel anymore" button on the dropdown which is very welcome.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#33It can go pretty wrong - look at a picture of a gun one time and IG will start shoving gun pictures down your throat, it's horribly non-forgiving and can't be tuned by the end user easily. You learn pretty quick to never look even once at something you don't want a whole lot of that same thing force-fed to you - on the other hand, start looking at huskies and you'll get tons of puppers filling your explore. :)
There is a "see fewer posts like this" button (as mentioned in the text) But yeah it can be off-putting.
This feature currently isn't present in either the web or pwa version of Instagram.
That aside, my personal experience would be vastly improved by having a "hide all images with text in it" option.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#34If instagram's product KPIs were more inline with what I wanted as a user, this would be great...but they're not and my explore feed is frequently filled with models, child musical prodigies, and other popcorn-esque content. Compared that to Spotify, whose goal I presume is to get me to listen to more music and buy tickets and merch through their occasional marketing. I'm a music snob but damn does Spotify get me gre…
I've had terrible luck the past couple years with Spotify's Discover Weekly. Last time I remember it being good was Fall 2016. Now my "Discover" Weekly playlist has me "discovering" the same exact songs over and over.
I've been pigeonholed way beyond what I thought possible. Do other users really engage with the same 10 songs over and over and over that this is the default behavior of their recommendation engine?
I get "Discover" tracks which are from the same album I have downloaded to my phone!
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#35Interesting, and looks like the present choices have evolved over time.
Seems like they are moving towards a structured RL implementation. There are elements of it, a follow-up post on some components would be interesting.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#36I've worked at a large e-commerce company before and it's surprising how many of the basic techniques like embedding, seed accounts, round robin diversification are exactly the same. I used to wonder if some of the apparent idiosyncrasies in our system were shared by other companies. It's uncanny how much of it is industry standard.
Yeah, i have come to a similar conclusion. It is also very clear that academic papers are unless simple enough to be understood (like word2vec) they rarely make it to production.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#37If instagram's product KPIs were more inline with what I wanted as a user, this would be great...but they're not and my explore feed is frequently filled with models, child musical prodigies, and other popcorn-esque content. Compared that to Spotify, whose goal I presume is to get me to listen to more music and buy tickets and merch through their occasional marketing. I'm a music snob but damn does Spotify get me gre…
I've had terrible luck the past couple years with Spotify's Discover Weekly. Last time I remember it being good was Fall 2016. Now my "Discover" Weekly playlist has me "discovering" the same exact songs over and over. I've been pigeonholed way beyond what I thought possible. Do other users really engage with the same 10 songs over and over and over that this is the default behavior of their recommendation engine? I g…
i have a separate problem. i got a puppy and there was a time where i had to just put in headphones while i was crate training him, and listen to rain sounds to fall asleep, instead of his cries. months later, all i get on my discover feed are a bunch of mellow rain/sleepy songs. I dont actually listen to that crap, i just want it periodically for certain things. there needs to be a way to tag songs as "DO NOT CONSIDER" for the discover feature
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably IG is optimizing for something different than what you as a user would be optimizing for. Possible candidates would be “engagement” or sad impressions or clicks. As a user you probably don’t care to maximize how many ads you see or even how much you use the app. You just want to see things that interest you. And of course there’s absolutely no reason why IG would optimize for that.
You may or may not be right. I don't use instagram because of this. But how could they possibly know how relevant the data is to even their model since they do not even collect that data in the first place?
Well, as others have noted, apparently they do have some affordance for that. But in general, the argument "why don't they collect data X to see if it's relevant to their goals" could be applied to literally any possible data X. Of course intuition must be used to focus data collection efforts.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a "see fewer posts like this" button (as mentioned in the text) But yeah it can be off-putting.
This option is not working for me at all. I wonder if it's because if I see a thumbnail of something unwanted, I first have to open the post in order to access the menu, so the the app counts it as a view first, adding the unwanted post to things I "engage" with.
Try long pressing and then sliding the post up. You'll get the same menu without popping into the full post view. I don't think it counts as strongly, because I've been able to eliminate a lot of things this way.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#40Interesting engineering and all, but let's keep in mind that at the end of the day, this is, once again, some of the smartest n% of the people in the world putting their brains to work making an app as addicting as possible so people click more ads.