I'm skeptic about recommendation feature. My reaction to them, in these rare occasions when not get ignored all together, in all sites ranges from 'huh?' to 'wtf?'. Specifically Youtube gives geographic location too much weight -- just because I live in a certain country, it doesn't I'm interesting in all these trending local shit-pop music or stupid 'fun' videos.
I can confirm this. I saw a lot of region-based, really stereotyping videos when I got a new computer and visited YouTube. While I understand they need to fill up the home page with something, I just prefer they can be a little more creative about the whole thing.
After glancing through the top few, I quickly went for the search box. To their credit, once I do a few searches, the recommendations drastically improved when visiting next time.
A side effect of this, of course, is that you can study all kinds of stereotyping and biases by repeating my experiment in various regions I suppose.
if they don't have any good information about you other than your location what else would you recommend rather than the most popular in that location?
When you lack the information to make a good recommendation, "the best we can guess from really generic or sparse information" tends to be annoying. That's really bad.
Yes, I watched a bunch of Dota replays during a recent tournament. No, I don't normally go on youtube. So I watched a daily show video clip that was linked. All my "watch next" and "recommended" are Dota. That's not smart, that's aggravating. I would have been ok watching a couple more ds clips, but instead exclusively bad recommendations were made based on poor data.
I dislike the idea that my world gets filtered by algorithms, but I really hate when they're obviously bad at it. Although I suppose I should be grateful that it's easily spotted when it's bad?
