The effectiveness of this approach varies widely. Why does a playlist generated off a single song on Spotify work so well and yet its podcast recommendations feel generic? Why, after spending years and millions of dollars on research, including the fabled Netflix prize, do Netflix's recommendations still feel generic, and why doesn't it really... See more

I just don’t think it is possible to get a recommendation system that makes everyone happy; there are too many stakeholders with directly contradictory needs.

The answer could potentially be that companies should empower users to control the recommendation engines they interact with. This sounds tempting, but I have concerns. We don’t interact with

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Lastly, what data you can claim to be yours is usually not worth the trouble to engineer a whole payment scheme around. If you opt out of hyper-targeting on Facebook (the ‘Custom Audiences’ toggle you can maybe find a dozen levels deep in your Facebook settings screen), your ARPU, i.e. the revenue Facebook makes off of you, doesn’t go to zero. That... See more