Why Your Thumbs-Up Is a Data Point but Mine Has Nuance
My Experience Has Nuance, Yours Is a Data Point
Jim Nielsen reflects on the gap between how we experience feedback mechanisms as individuals and how we treat aggregated data in professional contexts. Drawing on Eric Bailey's proposal for more expressive Netflix rating icons and Bryan Cantrill's idea of a 'rage click' button, Nielsen argues that we know these metrics are reductive, yet we still use them to make sweeping decisions. He calls for conversations about values, nuance, and vision instead of blindly following the numbers.
We reduce the experiences of others to mere data, but grant ourselves exemption from such oversimplifications.
- jerf
To me, the "best of the best" is its own thing. I do not watch romance movies in general, but I've had good experiences watching what people call the best of the best of the genre. Similarly for a lot of genres, media types, etc. Even just the "best of the best" of "cute animal video" can be fun every once in a while.
But I have to keep a heavy hand on the YouTube watch history and remove many things that I may have enjoyed as an exception, but don't want to see endlessly offered up forever. Some of the strange attractors in the algorithm are very, very powerful, like the aforementioned "cute animal videos". Another problem I hit is situations like, I watched the video because, say, a parrot was doing a very good impression of Captain Picard (just making this up, sorry) which was given due to general sci fi interest, but the algorithm sees "a ha! another hapless human who likes cute animal videos! Après cette vidéo, le déluge!"
At least YouTube has that knob, and does generally seem to honor it. The algorithms that don't are very hard to keep from degenerating into the lowest common denominator, because the slightest hint that you like some extremely popular thing or have an interest in a very lucrative ad keyword almost immediately swamps my actual interests.
- zug_zug
I do agree a "I'm watching this but I regretted it" would be a useful button, if the companies respected it. But my default presumption is that the already know this, and don't care, and that baiting engagement / addiction is at the very least "views" and possibly a deliberate strategy.
I think we need to start building intermediary feeds for all of our services (presumably via AI or something) that lets us customize how much we get of each type of content (e.g. no more than 5% about bad the economy is, no more than 5% about a new AI trick, 0% about 'drama of the day', 40% educational)
- Arainach
I didn't mind naive rating algorithms before statistics and recommendations got so gamified.
YouTube and Amazon are some of the very worst. I regularly watch a video or song on YouTube (/Music) and explicitly say "I enjoyed that but don't want YouTube to focus on recommending me things like that so I'm not going to hit like".
Amazon, there are entire classes of links I won't click or products I won't search/buy because I don't want them filling my recommendations forever.
And no, having to manually dig through settings and find a list of my entire history to manually delete entries isn't a good workaround. Too much effort, easier to just not give the platforms the data in the first place.
- nitwit005
> Yet we turn around in our professional contexts and see numbers like “142,432 users gave this a ‘thumbs up’” and we forget everything we knew about our own individual experience with these systems.
The data people know this, the executives do not. Or rather, they choose to ignore it, because they prefer metrics be as simple as possible.
They even try to reduce numeric values to boolean ones. When you get asked on a survey to rate from "Very Unsatisfied" to "Very Satisfied", they often reduce that to a percentage count of people who answered the top 1 or 2 boxes.
I worked at a medical company where the CEO was very enthused with the idea of having large thumbs up and down buttons at the front desk, right in front of the staff. What worked for convincing him this was a bad idea was a story about staff at a retail store panicking because a child started banging on the thumbs down button. Customers got an email with thumbs up and down instead.
- lifefeed
The lack of nuance is killing all these sites for me, not just Netflix, which I gave up on managing. It's when sites carefully note what I look at, and start making drastic changes based on that.
It's like if I go for a walk, metaphorically, and I see a giant pile of shit, and that's a genuinely interesting thing to see, because Jesus Christ that is huge. Then the algorithm notices I stopped to look at that, and the next time I go for a walk everything is filled with shit. That's what my Instagram feed is right now, metaphorically speaking. A never-ending field of shit.