When Purchase Recommendations Go Bad

nixman99 writes "An article on MSNBC describes what happens when 'View Similar Products' recommendations go bad. From the article: 'The company said it was alerted to the problem early yesterday afternoon after word began spreading among bloggers. When visitors to Walmart.com requested Planet of the Apes: The Complete TV Series on DVD, four other movies were recommended under the heading Similar Items. Those films included Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream/Assassination of MLK and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.'"

Comments

That's quite funny

[MountainMan101]

Amazon recommended some adult entertainment to go with the Madagascar (rated U) when I ordered the other day. My other interest was nature books, so how it put two and two together no one knows.

Re:That's quite funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they figured out that if you're an adult who reads nature books and watches Madagascar, you're never going to get laid...

The Eye Of The Beholder

[nick_davison]

Connection:
Planet Of The Apes - Social Commentary.
Martin Luther King - Import changer of society.

Were you to be a glass is half full kind of person, that sounds like a connection. I could entirely accept that enough customers to trigger a connection algorithm are interested in social commentary to the degree that both titles appeal.

Were you to be a glass is half empty kind of person, clearly the system is racist.

Fortunately, we have a media that's only interested in postive and uplifting stories so they'd never focus purely on the negative, for shock value, without considering other possible alternatives.

And, for added amusement, type "Civ 4" in to Amazon and see what recommendations come up further down the list. It may too be racist. It may be a deeply humorous commentary on lonely guys playing Civ 4. Or it may be some other connection that we haven't figured out yet.

But then that's the whole point of data mining... Finding connections that humans tend to be entirely too preoccupied by their assumptions to be able to see beyond.

Re:The Eye Of The Beholder

[eclectro]

Were you to be a glass is half empty kind of person, clearly the system is racist.

Or to put it another way, if the banana is half eaten.

Re:The Eye Of The Beholder

[MuckRaker]

Maybe because back when racism was still very much overt in the early 2/3rds of the 1900s, blacks were often likened to monkeys and apes, by white people. Many racist whites/hate groups still do. Heck black soldiers fighing over in France during the World War were ridiculed by people asking could they see their {monkey} tails.

Seems like a good recommendation

[riflemann]

Why are people apologising for this recommendation? IMHO, this is actually a fairly good recommendation!

POTA is a movie about civil rights, in this case across species, not races. One species (the monkeys/gorillas) effectively enslaves another species (humans) and the base message of the movie is about the struggle for emancipation by this enslaved species.

So exactly how is a movie about enslavement and emancipation not related to real life civil rights issues?

I'm not American so I'm not really exposed to this over-the-top sensitive PC stuff, but this seems just silly to me. Franky, I find the people who did the complaining about this issue offensive and ignorant.

It actually makes good sense

[Walter Wart]

When Planet of the Apes first came out it was revolutionary. It took the Lords of Creation - White men - and put them in a situation where they were the oppressed, the minority. Someone else was in charge and no worse, perhaps better, than the astronauts. The movie asked questions and had a discussion of race in America that would have been unthinkable without the fig-leaf of science fiction.

So yes, it was appropriate. Those who are offended never looked deeper than the skin. Which is sort of the problem.

Blame

[quokkapox]

So we can blame the unthinking machines and the corporations that use them for our own cultural and racial bigotry. Nice.

Are bad recommendations from trolls bad?

[CurbyKirby]

... or funny?

E.g. http://www.speakeasy.org/~curby/swg/text/jellypong .gif

I vote for funny.

Evil Walmart

[thunderpaws]

The only reason this story is getting attention is Walmart is the current American icon of corporate evil and greed. America is a nation of victims who have nothing better to do than blame their personal failures on everyone else. This story should be humorous.

Why?

[t_allardyce]

Instead of making the unlikely assumption that Walmart has a racist policy based on the recommendation of 3 films buy a computer, did anyone stop to ask why the system did this? I mean perhaps the films do have something in common, does anyone star in more than one of them? Do they have the same release date/year? or DVD release date? Do they share composers, directors or crew? Are they all catogorised under "American History"? Maybe the most fucking obvious reason is that several people who bought Planet of the Apes also bought these other films!!

The press is always ready for a scandel and never ready to actually follow it up with some investigative journalism. I guess its cheaper to just re-broadcast a video feed and pay the royalties or print something direct from AP.

Re:Well the Civ 4 example is insulting

[thesandtiger]

If one grows up being compared to monkeys as a way of demonstrating that they are less than paler people, and more generally as a paternalistic term used to put one in one's place, one gets somewhat sensitive to monkey related stuff.

Sometimes this can be very blatant - Howard Cosell saying "Would you look at that monkey run?" when describing a black football player. Sometimes this can be less blatant, and a "clever racist" (if there is such a thing) will try to say "Well, Planet of the Apes is social commentary and so is MLK, so it's just those darkies being overly uppity again!) And, yes, sometimes it can be absurd - I have some friends who attend a church that insists they boycott King Kong because it is, and I quote, "An interracial love story designed to show the black man's unquenchable and self-destructive desire for white women."

So, I'd say it's somewhat disingenuous to say "Gosh, I don't know why people would get so upset that someone is comparing Monkeys Gone Wild with Martin Luther King! It's so absurd!" It comes off as rather false.

For further reading, I recommend "How to Rent a Negro" - pretty funny take on a less than funny subject.

Well, I'll say it -- I'm offended!

[KFu7]

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that most of the posters here don't "get it." But I guess I still can be.

Forgive me for lecturing, but I'll stereotype a bit here and suggest that the majority of /. readers don't fall into the group of people who can see offense in this situation either out of ignorance, or unfamiliarity with minorities and their history. I know there's a large contingent out there that believes the white male is an "oppressed" group in America due to affirmative action, Title IX, or other assorted anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws or rules. I'm sure the strain must be unbearable...

I love this site and my fellow slashdotters and I come here every day -- but sometimes things are just wrong.

I Am Not A Conspiracy Theorist (IANACT?) but there could be something more sinister at work here than some computer algorithm linking the social commentary of "The Planet of the Apes" with Martin Luther King's role in the civil rights struggle. Discrimination and offensive racial stereotyping are not dead issues -- they often lie just beneath the surface because there are many who still believe that some people are inferior to others simply because of their ethnicity, skin color or gender. And speaking as an African American (and I don't get up on this soapbox often, folks), this was offensive and I am not amused.

We all know the posters on this site wouldn't let Microsoft off the hook so easily or rush to defend them so quickly if the folks in Redmond were behind this.

Now, let the bashing begin! Who needs positive karma?