
The Day Yahoo Decided I Liked Reading About Child Murder - nsns
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-day-yahoo-decided-i-liked-reading-about-child-murder/255970/
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tgflynn
The thing about this is that the "Filter Bubble" isn't actually new. It has
existed as long as mass-media has. Technology may well be making the
phenomenon worse, perhaps to the point of creating something qualitatively
different from what has been seen in the past, but anyone who thinks that the
media has ever provided an accurate reflection of actual reality is horribly
mistaken.

In fact its difficult to see how the media ever could provide such a
reflection. Actual reality is very boring, reading about it doesn't interest
people, because the brain has its own filters which lead us to only be
interested in that which we find new or surprising.

Unfortunately providing people with information which appeals to them (which
is what the media has always done, with or without algorithms) will invariably
distort their own sense of reality, just as would training a probabilistic
model only on outliers.

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kijin
Yes, it happens in traditional media too, albeit more crudely. After all, all
of the incentives are already there.

Run stories about rare but terrible crimes -> more people watch your news ->
ad revenue goes up -> run more stories about even rarer but more terrible
crimes -> even more viewers -> wash, rinse, repeat -> everyone thinks the govt
should be "tough on crimes" even though our society is the safest ever.

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Caerus
After reading this story, I was curious how much Google News had personalized
my homepage after several years of using it as my primary outlet. Somewhat
surprisingly, there wasn't any I could find other than things I had told it to
do: more "Science" stories, no "Entertainment", a couple custom news alerts,
no Huffington Post or Fox News.

The actual stories under each category were identical, other than a few were
linked to different sources.

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rplnt
The worst thing related to this happened to me just today. Google maps gave me
different result for address search. Like the little mark on map was placed on
different place than it was when I tried it in private tab (and just to make
sure in other browser, also not logged in). It is a really weird thing to do
(and dangerous too -- I almost sent a friend on a wrong bus).

The reason why I think this happened is different numbering system. You see, I
entered street name, number and city. I meant street number, "normal" google
maps showed result using the street number, but when I'm logged in I get
result not by street number but rather distrcit number (not sure if I'm
translating this right). Really bad behavior in my opinion. Also, there was no
note on other results, or did you mean, or anything like that.

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ajays
Something's wrong with the narrative. The author writes, "Going through my
search history, I could trace the emergence of stories to the day I read about
the Bustamante murder." .

But she didn't use 'search' to get to that article; she just clicked on it on
the homepage. So it wouldn't be there in the search history.

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83457
Probably just a coincidence but Chrome's history page has a "Search history"
button.

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akoumjian
Let's also keep in mind that if true, this is personalization done poorly (for
the consumer). Presumably, was no correction in Yahoo's model to consider
whether the user liked the content after reading it. The first question here
is whether or not the author clicked on more articles leading to more ad views
as a result. If so, then it "worked" and made business sense. The second
question is whether or not it improved the user's experience, which in this
case it obviously did not.

