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Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

instagram-engineering.com

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Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#51

Post by oefrha »

thegabriele wrote: post #48
gravitas wrote: post #5

It 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. :)

Same thing happens with youtube, at least in my experience. The time i click by mistake on a video that really doesn't interests me i feel like i'm doomed.

If your watch history is on, removing that specific entry usually fixes the problem. Though, if your watch history is off and empty...

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#52

Post by rozularen »

uoaei wrote: post #34
sbilstein wrote: post #29

If 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…

Spotify's Discover Weekly has improved a lot since I started following different Artists. At the begginning it was more like what you just said everytime the same music over and over until I started following new Artists.

The same thing applies for New Releases.

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#53

Post by Nextgrid »

nightski wrote: post #23
gravitas wrote: post #5

It 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. :)

This is so amusing to me. I imagine their team goes to great lengths to obtain training data, clean it up and feed it to their ML algorithm. Yet the most critical input data - direct feedback from the user on the traits that shape their interests, is completely ignored/not collected.

This is one of the reasons why I would never use such an app. If a tool would rather guess what I want (and obviously get it completely wrong) rather than ask me then I consider the tool defective and stop wasting my time with it.

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#54

Post by thegabriele »

oefrha wrote: post #51
thegabriele wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happens with youtube, at least in my experience. The time i click by mistake on a video that really doesn't interests me i feel like i'm doomed.

If your watch history is on, removing that specific entry usually fixes the problem. Though, if your watch history is off and empty...

Thanks for the hint, gonna clean something

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#55

Post by kennywinker »

PowerfulWizard wrote: post #25
raverbashing wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a "see fewer posts like this" button (as mentioned in the text) But yeah it can be off-putting.

I think it is driven by likes and bookmarks, if you browse your likes and bookmarks you might see the source of certain recommendations, and unliking and unmarking should control it. (I don't actually know, but this is how I believe it works.)

Not entirely. Likes and saves increase the chance of seeing some types of content - but i also started seeing guns and kardashians at one point, without ever liking a gun post or a kardashian post. So simply viewing things will cause them to show up

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#56

Post by sbilstein »

mgraczyk wrote: post #42
sbilstein wrote: post #29

If 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…

What sort of KPIs would you prefer? I work on similar things at IG and curious what you would suggest.

I think it’s inherent in a free ad driven product that I spend as many minutes per day browsing through images and videos. It’s like television; it’s not like IG wants me to look at one high value image and call it a day. If I listen to music all day however, I am still going about the rest of my life. Instagram success means my direct attention...direct attention is easier to get with racy photos and surprising content.

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#57

Post by leobakerhytch »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #32
wastedhours wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Thanks for this suggestion — will try this as a way to escape the ‘filter bubble’. To clarify: do you reset completely, retaining absolutely no likes, subscriptions, etc., or do you find it sufficient to clear your watched videos?

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#58

Post by uoaei »

rozularen wrote: post #52
uoaei wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Spotify's Discover Weekly has improved a lot since I started following different Artists. At the begginning it was more like what you just said everytime the same music over and over until I started following new Artists. The same thing applies for New Releases.

Good call. I agree with you and I don't feel that requiring that level of user engagement should be necessary to grant them a decent experience.

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#59

Post by eggie5 »

So IG ins't using collaborative filtering? The whole process starts w/ simple NN search in the account embedding space. Those candidates are then passed to the ranking stack.

This makes sense w/ what I see in IG recs: past behavior is strongly reinforced w/ littler diversity. Filter Bubble/Pigeon Hole problem.

So in conclusion, I would argue that the IG explore tab doesn't have ANY explore at all!

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