culture
Why Netflix's recommendations feel worse every year
They probably are not worse. They are optimising something that used to overlap with your interests and now overlaps less. Here is the mechanism.
5 min
Writing
On taste, algorithms and the twenty-minute scroll.
Notes from building a recommendation engine, and what the data says about how people actually choose a film.
guide
The twenty-minute scroll: what choosing costs you
The average evening loses real time to deciding what to watch. Here is why more options makes it worse, and the small changes that actually shorten it.
4 min
product
How Filmatic actually recommends a film
No hand-waving about AI. Here is the mechanism: what a swipe does, where the similarity comes from, and what the system is bad at.
5 min