Re:Before YouTube’s algorithm, there were ‘coolhunters’
by vintermann on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @05:23AM
(#32748398)
I used to say that too, but it's been years. Spotify used to be absurdly impressive in finding obscure stuff I was interested in, but it just doesn't do that any longer.
It may be that they changed the algorithm to work better for people who are not me. It may be that the algorithm choked on its own feedback (once listening patterns influenced by Discover Weekly started influencing Discover Weekly). Or maybe it just plain ran out of stuff to recommend me, having picked all the low hanging fruit (from its understanding of my taste).
It's also a bit conspicuous that DW was at its best when Sander Dielemann and Aäron van den Oord were interns working on it. Both went on to write some pretty great machine learning papers, and both were snapped up by Google/Deepmind.
It may be that they changed the algorithm to work better for people who are not me. It may be that the algorithm choked on its own feedback (once listening patterns influenced by Discover Weekly started influencing Discover Weekly). Or maybe it just plain ran out of stuff to recommend me, having picked all the low hanging fruit (from its understanding of my taste).
It's also a bit conspicuous that DW was at its best when Sander Dielemann and Aäron van den Oord were interns working on it. Both went on to write some pretty great machine learning papers, and both were snapped up by Google/Deepmind.