Recommendation Systems for Everything

Recommender systems are not on your side, and the better they get, the more true this becomes. The goal of most recommendation systems is to a) maximise your engagement to whatever content it is feeding you and b) extract money from you by upweighting whoever pays the most for ads. Your goals are presumably different from this. And the more powerful the system becomes, the more that your interests and the interests of the platform decouple.

When a platform starts out, it is often just trying to accumulate users (and creators), and maximising your engagement often just looks like showing you what you want to see. However, as these systems get more powerful, they can start to capitalise more and more on your base emotions, showing you content that might not be satisfying or informative in any way, but keep you on the platform. They can start to shape your desires to pull you down a rabbit hole that keeps you watching more and more. They start to shorten your attention span, creating a psychological dependence on your next fix of reels. Spotify have baked in paid placement into their algorithm to upweight artists in exchange for royalties. Half of the first page of an amazon search will be paid promos. Ads only work when they show you something you would not have bought all else equal. Ads directly make recommendation systems worse by obscuring the thing that is most relevant to you.

The internet used to be a tapestry of interconnected websites, but now more and more content is being subsumed by monopolising platforms. Alphabet, meta and netflix generate nearly half of all mobile internet traffic worldwide. These platforms lock you in and mediate your interactions with the online world. This is an enormous amount of power we are giving these companies.

Anyway, that's why I want to build open source recommender systems that i can own and control to act in my interests instead of those of big tech companies, to aggregate across many different platforms and independent sites rather than locking me into a platform, to help me deal with the overwhelm of information that can be found and must be kept up to date with on the internet. If you're interested in working on something like this, please get in touch.