That's really interesting - although when I read that story I thought the point was the broken recommendation system.
Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing. Or Facebook/Youtube, somehow: I watched a single video on Youtube about Viking sword fighting and suddenly my people recommendations on Facebook were at least 20% militaria fans, always visible from the profile picture already. It finally stopped but it took well over half a year.
That's why I thought this story was about recommendation systems recommending either only narrowly what you already know, and finding something new is not really well supported or not better than random, or that one outlier can skew your recommendations for a long time. Worst is there is no way to tell the system "stop recommending me this kind of stuff" at least for the second problem, no manual way to make adjustments for the user.
Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing. Or Facebook/Youtube, somehow: I watched a single video on Youtube about Viking sword fighting and suddenly my people recommendations on Facebook were at least 20% militaria fans, always visible from the profile picture already. It finally stopped but it took well over half a year.
That's why I thought this story was about recommendation systems recommending either only narrowly what you already know, and finding something new is not really well supported or not better than random, or that one outlier can skew your recommendations for a long time. Worst is there is no way to tell the system "stop recommending me this kind of stuff" at least for the second problem, no manual way to make adjustments for the user.