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Preference Engines Side-Effects in Online Retail
jasonla writes "The Los Angeles Times ran a Column One article about the impact preference engines have on consumer buying habits. From the article: 'In the physical world, I bump into all kinds of people by chance. But online, if recommenders were perfect, I can have the option of talking to only people who are just like me. There's a danger that if we don't have some level of shared interaction, it can be destructive to our social cohesion.'"
"I can have the option of talking to only people who are just like me. "
Welcome to slashdot.
"But online, if recommenders were perfect, I can have the option of talking to only people who are just like me."
Does that mean you are perfect?
Humanity is going to disperse as a social construct because Amazon wants you to buy some additional shit?
I don't get this... are we going to have preference engines in our daily lives? at the store? at the bar? How is this affecting more than 2% of your waking lifetime?
WAH WAH WAH they don't work anyway. Next post.
In my opinion, at least at present, this is not the case - the opposite is true. Whereas normally upon hearing about, say, the newest Harry Potter book from a friend, you would only check out that one book and maybe the rest of the series, you can now find a huge range of similar novels (most of which suck). Your tastes are widened (as you don't lose interest in old tastes) and significantly deepened (duh).
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
This is a very valid point. As people start to only interact with similar minds online, they will confront a sort of system shock when they have to deal with people who have a radically different view on life in real life. It would probably take a few generations for this effect to happen though...
There's a danger that if we don't have some level of shared interaction, it can be destructive to our social cohesion.
Sure, and we can all die tomorrow. But that doesn't mean it is likely to happen.
Way back when, people would live in small villages and were limited to interaction with those in the village (and those travellers who happened to be passing through). Small communities tend to result in people having the same opinion on most things. Society was able to survive in this mode for quite a long time. It's only been recently that the idea of exposing yourself to differing opinions and seeing other people's side of things has gained wide-acceptance.
The internet encouraging people to only interact with those who share their opinion will not be the end of society as we know it.
In a way, Slashdot is a pioneer in this area. Posts which are unacceptable to the mainstream are moderated down, effectively "disappearing" them to most viewers.
What the preference engine does is to tailor this to the individual viewer. Thus groupthink can operate at very refined levels. Provided that there is sufficient clustering of opinions, isolated communities-of-opinion form.
Indeed, even if the clustering of opinion is slight, over the long term it may be reinforced by the effects of the preference engine, thus causing a sort of condensation of parochialism.
Of course, the same thing can happen in meatspace. But there it takes longer, and there always the uncomfortable chance that you may happen by chance to talk to someone outside your community (a homeless person, a Bush voter, an atheist, etc.), and your assumptions could be challenged.
Whereas online, it seems that these isolated communities are ever more cohesive, and venture into foreign territory only to engage in virtual pogroms. (E.g., in the context of political weblogs, the occasional 'invasions' of redstate.org by partisans from dailykos.com)
Is this at all like Slashdot-manufactured consensus? Where we mod up anti-Microsoft, anti-patent, anti-**AA, anti-SCO, pro-F/OSS, pro-Apple, and "Linux is difficult" posts, and mod down anti-Java and anti-USA posts?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Talk about narrow tastes!
Seastead this.
No, that's not "danger", it's prospect.
It is a very good thing to keep away from me, if someone annoys me, and I will do the same for those whom I annoy.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Listening to other people's point of view is all well and good. But no-one should feel like they have to listen to the hatred and bile that are chick tracts. And while that takes things to an extreme, that disregard for other people's opinions and that propaganda is extremely common on the internet. Just stay here at slashdot for a while.
Having said that, I have managed to find a message board with mixed people, and they are fairly nice and keep the propaganda to a minimum. But these places on the internet are rare and few. I don't blame people for wanting to avoid people like Chick. Why are people so much more extreme on the internet? Well they're extreme in real life, but Penny arcade made a good point with a comic that said "Anonymity + opinion = fuckwad." People who might be nice and able to take differing opinions in real life, don't NEED to do so on the internet because they don't care about the people they interact with. They act nice in real life, because they care about people's opinions who they interact with. On the internet, this is no longer the case. They can act one way on one message board, another way on another message board, and no-one will ever know.
I think on average the answer is yes we are but so many things are in the equation for judging what makes someone chose A. over B. and if we find we allow ourselves to be approached with items that meet a formula built on estimation then we are likely selling ourselves short. Issac Asimov spoke to this in the Foundation series when speaking of Psychohistory and the ability to predict humans actions in large groups. It is evident to me that there is a great deal of truth in this for large groups of people but I do believe this is very controversial with regards to individuals and believing you can predict their like and dislikes over time.
Not as often as I used to. In the morning I see other people on the campus shuttle, as I fire up my Nintendo DS/PSP/GP2X handheld. The bus ride ends, but I've gotten good at switching my headphones to my MP3 player for the walk to class. Should I ask the cute girl in front of me to borrow her notes from yesterday? Nah, the slides from yesterday are on the professor's webpage.
Class is over, so I plug my headphones in again and head for some lunch. There's a really nice sit-down Thai restaurant, but I've got a paper due, so I'll just jump into the line at the fast-food shop; food in under three minutes, what could be better? Fed and caffinated, I mp3 my way back to my next class. Occasionally my other class has really good class discussions, but this prof just powerpoints an hour and a half of my life away. My doodling's improved, though.
That's all of my classes today! I thought about seeing if some of the guys in this class wanted to study for the test on Monday, but my guild has a raid planned for tonight, so I'm headed back to the bus.
-----
That's not me. That is, however, what I see of some of the undergrads here, a bit exaggerated, but still relatively accurate. My point is that if you're interested in vilifying technology, blaming online retail for a lack of social interaction in modern youth and young adults is like blaming Joe's Taco Stand in Tuscaloosa, AL for the rise in methane's contribution to the global greenhouse effect.
Rather than thinking about word of mouth versus preference engines, think about it as preference engines vs any type of advertising.
Preference engines are just a way of introducing a product to a person. Traditional advertising does it by targeting demographics that they think the product will appeal to. A preference engine is an expert system that correlates other people's tastes and your's, and then can recommend something you will probably like. Sounds to me like more product will get sold, and the customer will be more likely to walk away with music they will enjoy. Everybody's happy.
Given a choice between "one-size fits all" mass media where everyone sees the same ad and this, I'd much rather have semi-intelligent software point me to a song that I might like.
BTW, Amazon does this too, and in my experience they are right more than they are wrong about my tastes.
With the industrial revolution the urban population exploded - in only a short generation and a war or two, society had transformed from an agrarian rural lifestyle to urban industrial specialists. Machinery was the enabler, when one person could produce an amount of food that it previously took maybe a hundred people to produce then it provided the ability for a small machine-augmented rural population to feed larger city populations. Now in North America urban population far outweighs the rural population. Only a brief hundred years or so ago things were completely different.
Shh.
The slashdot community has a certain group-think to it, exemplified by my recent post.
An article was posted where the headline had little to do with the article. There was post after post of based on an erroneous headline. I pointed this out, and got modded flamebait.
I'm not upset by this; I knew pretty much that's what would happen going in. But, it's an example of a preference engine (the moderation system on Slashdot) acting to squelch any ideas that don't conform to the group-think so prevalent here.
Thus, you say what slashbots think you should say, and you get modded up. Question them, or provide meaningful data in opposition to any of the core mantras around here, and your voice is quickly trampled in mods of "flamebait" and "off topic", or perhaps "overrated" to avoid any karma consequences in metamoderation.
Microsoft=bad. Linux=perfection. Sun=irrelevant. Everybody here's a single male between 14 and 35, living in momma's cellar. ??? profit!
These are all Slashdot mantras, ideas so firmly entrenched into the moderation culture that to really oppose these ideas means moderation oblivion and a loss of karma. (voice)
It's entertaining, and as a Linux user, I mostly fit in, but it's definitely an ideological monoculture. Sometimes, I just get pissed. (and modded to the wasteland that is -1)
PS: I have some mod points now, and will be using them soon...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It seems to me that implicit in the article is the suggestion that we are defined by what we buy. That's absurd. What does it matter if I only listen to Techno and my neighbour only listens to Jazz? He still lives next door, we breathe the same air, drive on the same roads and have the same elected representatives. That's what creates social cohesion, not all listening to the only radio station in town and being brainwashed into buying Britney albums as a result.
Even in the activities we have total choice over we are all members of a number of different groups. I'm a robotics geek, a physicist, a cricket fan, an electronica fan, a motorsports fan, and I fit in a dozen other categories too. Within each category recommendation engines work well enough. But through being a cricket fan I meet people who aren't robotics geeks and who aren't physicists and who don't like electronica. Through these people I get to hear about jazz and soccer and knitting and all the other things they don't have in common with me.
If there's ever a a service which recommends every aspect of your life, from what to eat for breakfast to where to live and what job to have I might worry. Till then I can be pretty sure all the people I'll meet are multi-facted individuals and will have something new to teach me - even if our record collections are identical.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
What's social interaction?
Television and TV commercials have already done this. Now ISPs are the middlemen now, but nothing else has changed. Certainly in suburban America, everyone seems increasingly isolated. I assume that's true elsewhere, but I don't know, 'cause I don't go anywhere anymore. (Note to mods: I'm dead serious)
One thing that's being totally ignored is that there are many types of people, and some of them don't like hanging out with people like themselves.
My friend Max loves to argue. He can't stand sticking around people who share his opinions for too long. (sound like anybody you know?)
My friend Addie is really girly, but can't stand hanging out around too many girls, because she likes being the "most girly" one in the group.
The point is that some people very much like diversity in their social circles. Some don't, but if the preference engines are perfect, many people will not be pidgeon-holed into interacting with people like themselves, which might even mean that some people who would be auto-segregated won't be.
Of course, this might not show up as a result now, because there's still a lot of work that needs to be done on the preference engines, so they don't necessarily detect that kind of thing. But we shouldn't ignore it.
Come on, some people could find something bad about anything. Preference engines, suggestive selling tools, whatever you want to call them. They're awesome. And it doesn't take away anybody's ability to see things that don't match their interests.... all the have to do is browse. I can go to Wikipedia, for example, and click "Random Page" or take a look at the home page, and get presented with something I never would have thought to look for. But the desire to do that doesn't mean that they shouldn't also have "See Also" links in the story I'm reading, with the assumption that my interest in one story suggests a potential interest in other stories.
Poor, poor, 21st century consumers... surrounded by so much technology that we can't even go looking for new stuff anymore? Hogwash!
RP
Man, you need to meet new people.
"Hey, buddies, let's go out for a burger!"
"Where to?"
"Hold on, let's check burgers.com and see what's the pick-of-the-week."
Looks like today isn't your day.
Take, for instance, my ex-girlfriend (no really, take her! Ha.Yeah. Anyway...): she considered herself to be a huge environmental activist, and we were constantly arguing about the legitimacy of human behavior. She would, in essence, go to the library or online source, find a bunch of books by people who agreed with her opinions, read them, and use that as legitimacy of her thought process. Ya know, because a "Dr." prefix makes them right, automatically. There are plenty of intelligent people on all sides of most issues, and reading only the research by those who've come to the same conclusion of you is not only short-sighted - it's counter-productive to the learning process. The truth is almost always somewhere between the extremes of those who you agree with and those you don't.
Being in a cynical period for my feelings about people in general, this self-applauding tendency worries me. In a recent class on governmental comparison, our teacher used a chart to refute the idea that computers would someday irrevocably separate people from one another. It was a study of Brits, who were asked (gotta love those self-reporting studies) whether they felt effective in and informed about their government. The study compared their feelings to internet usage, and found that people who used the internet for long periods of time felt more efficacy when it came to their control over national government. In my opinion, this is a fallicy. Sure, it's easy to be better-informed because of access to online news, both national and international, but when it comes to efficacy itself, I find it hard to believe that people in newsgroups are (necessarily) more politically active than those that aren't.
Without going into the feelings of self-importance and pseudo-intellectualism that distant interaction allows people, my main fear is that so much energy is going into agreeing with one another that (this sounds Marxist, I know) the energy required to engage the government in a revolutionary sense may never build up! Will the anger and dissapointment ever reach critical mass when we're so busy applauding eachother's homogenous opinions? After all, in the case of environmentalism, how many oil tycoons are reading 'open letters to the industry?' Probably not a whole hulluva lot. So isn't that, in some sense, completely wasted energy? As another example, isn't the allowance of peaceful protest (which is a very important right, I agree) just a way to legitimize the current regime? When I see a group of teenagers playing guitar and bongo drums to get a political point across, I can't help but think that they're playing right into the WASP's hands. "There. You played yer guitar, you smoked yer reefer, now go home and feel like you can sleep easy because you've 'done something about it.'" In other words, I fear that small bursts of political energy may take away from the potency of what would, eventually, be a mass outcry.
While I agree that the 'net is a perfect social vehicle, I also think that way too much time is spent patting eachother's backs and accumulating whuffie, under the impression that it's actually making a difference to anyone but ourselves. The people that we intend to sting with our barbs have no idea we exist. Why? Because they're all busy on their own forums, agreeing with one another.
(By the way, I think that peaceful protest and the right to share and build upon one-another's opinions are very important things; I just also happen to think that we're too easy on ourselves and avoid exploring the benefits/costs of things that we've already made up our minds against because we don't get the same social/neurochemical kickback when people don't agree with us.)
Actually, if you really want to drive Amazon's preference engine mad, just let several people with wildly different tastes use the same account. Or buy some Christmas gifts for friends while you're also buying books for yourself. You get some strange recommendations from then on.
... this is a great tool to look for products that are really popular (which translates usually into a wide user support base) or that suck terribly and have better alternatives.
:)
This really can't be blamed on the preference engine though, since it's just a form of the old Garbage In, Garbage Out principle. The preference engine is mostly filled with data from single-consumer accounts. If you then go and create an account and let four people use it, the recommendations won't work very well, because it's not a case that the engine is designed to deal with very elegantly. So you get all sorts of strange predictions, or ones which can only possibly appeal to one person's tastes. (In other words, you don't get any help in finding a book or movie that the whole family would like -- instead you get recommendations that are obviously person-specific.)
More generally, my point is that I'm not really concerned about these preference engine type devices because they're not as generalizable. They only make predictions based on the data that's being put into them by other people, therefore they're only as 'good' as people's situations are similar. So if people get similar predictions and as a result buy the same things from Amazon, it's really only a reflection of underlying similarities in tastes. They are a symptom of groupthink, not a cause.
Personally, I like Amazon's system. I've never bought anything based on a recommendation, so I don't know how successful a business tool it is, but I get a kick out of navigating through their site sometimes and following the links, seeing what comes up. What I have found useful though are the links which show actual purchase data, for example while looking at a WiFi router it says "35% of people who looked at this item eventually went on to buy *this one*"
Given that it's 3:11am, I hope this isn't completely incoherent.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You seem to assume (but maybe I'm just mis-reading it) that being forced into some uninformed unfiltered choices of social groups will result in more diversity. I'd say, on the contrary, it reduces diversity on the whole.
See, if you did go (alone) to Bar X and tried to fit in and have some "shared experience", the result isn't that there'd just be some people (older or not) who could use some more diversity. Chances are there'd be a clique of regulars who already have One True Way (TM) of seeing the world. They already have their favourite football team, their right way to dress, their right(eous) set of prejudices and biases in how they see the world, etc. And are quite content to pat each other on the back and circularly reinforce the view that that's the One True Way (TM) and it's everyone else who's anywhere between wrong and a menace to society.
Will they welcome diversity and a wildly different, sometimes even opposite, point of view? Well, no, groups generally don't. Chances are they go there precisely to hear it from each other about how they're the right and upstanding ones, and feel like in one big like-minded family.
That's not meant as an insult or anything. It's just the way human groups work, and how humans look for social acceptance. Chances are you want to be in a group who thinks you're right, not in a group where you're the odd freak.
If you go in there with spiky green hair, a "Work Sucks" t-shirt and a few piercings won't remind them that the world is more diverse and we all could be more open minded. It will just be a disturbance in the Forc... err... in that comfy illusion that the world isn't diverse, and that a closed mind is the right kind of mind. If anything, it will just result in a round of talks (either right now or, rarely, politely waiting for you to leave first) about how hooligans like you are what's wrong with society today, and how back in our day the grass was greener, the sun brighter, and everyone not only walked 5 miles through snow to school, uphill both ways, but they _liked_ it.
(And to not only pick on older people -- hey, I'm no longer myself either -- the same would happen in reverse if you went in a gentleman outfit, complete with vest, pocket watch and bowtie, to a punk bar. You'd just be their own version of what's wrong with society today, and how nostalgic lemmings like you are what keeps us all in the middle ages.)
If you want to fit in that existing crowd, you have to dress like them, talk like them, cheer for the same football team (even if you don't even like football), have the same prejudices, and generally be on the "us" side of the whole "us vs them" theme. And there'll be a _lot_ of "us vs them".
Such a group exerts a pressure towards conformism and uniformity. Adding one more member won't make it more diverse, it will just add one more guy or gal who ends up assimilated in it, and ultimately becomes yet another clone of any other group member. Maybe an imperfect clone, but nevertheless a clone.
So on the whole of society that kind of homogenizing actually reduces diversity.
Is it that much worse if I go looking for a group that fits me as I am instead? I'd say not at all. Even if it results in largely separated groups, it does a hell of a lot more to preserve diversity on the whole.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The idea is sold to us as a way to simplify our lives. The snag is it also helps disenfranchise sections of the population, and if abused allow gov'ts to control the flow of news by simply ensuring it gets marked as irrelevant. People could also then decide to never hear bad news, and could cause even greater polarisation in society between rich and poor, healthy and unhealthy. Imagine if 60% of the US population never knew about Hurricane Katrina?
About 8 or 9 years ago my boss at the time did a lecture on "The Daily Me".. the idea has been kicking around for years... e.g. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1017779142.php
Is it inevitable? Can society decide to control the viewing habits of everyone, i.e. a reverse censorship to make people NOT turn off? That's a big question!
Paul
Now, imagine everyone does this. Imagine trying to change society for the better, and being completely unable to, because only people that already agree with you will ever hear what you are saying.
Imagine people discussing how to make the world better only with people they agree with, endlessly debating why everything is just wrong and how nobody understands (because they aren't listening) and how your only way of making change is doing it yourself.
That's how many extremist movements were born.
From TFA: "there's a danger that their tastes can narrow and that society may balkanize into groups with obscure interests."
Would this outcome be bad for society on a whole, or is it just bad for mass market manufacturers? I really doubt that this will be allowed to happen. How long before marketers start going to the sellers and giving them incentives to have their preference engines suggest specific products, brands, titles, artists, albums, etc.? This sort of marketing is already a common occurance in brick and mortar stores, the difference is that in brick and mortar stores, it is shelf position, displays, and salesperson spiffs that are sought rather than preference engine suggestions.
Civilization, the death of dreams.