HackerHow much of a preference did the last recommendation create?
A click responds to an item and to the choices that were visible. Follow missing posts and creators adapting to a metric to see how one round of feedback shapes the next recommendation.
Questions in this reading · 3
What does zero clicks mean for a link that never appeared?
Pariser recalls clicking more links from liberal friends and later losing conservative voices from his feed. Imagine two stories shown ten times each yesterday. Today only one gets ten further impressions. How much evidence about preference comes from the other story’s zero clicks today? Click share can move with no change in taste. To interpret it, keep the set of options shown, their audience and their positions alongside the clicks.
Passages and timestamps · 2
I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links.And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.Can an autoplay sequence identify the objective?
Tufekci watched a video on vegetarianism and autoplay took her to veganism. She offers retention as an explanation while acknowledging the algorithm is proprietary. Inventory, other viewers or a shared tag could also produce that sequence. A testable question is whether showing different relevant next items to comparable starting histories changes what people later search for voluntarily. Continued playback alone can still be produced by autoplay.
Passages and timestamps · 2
I once watched a video about vegetarianism on YouTube and YouTube recommended and autoplayed a video about being vegan.Now, YouTube's algorithm is proprietary, but here's what I think is going on.Who changes the supply of things to recommend?
Bridle shows children’s titles assembled from surprise eggs, cartoon characters and other popular terms. The phrases read strangely to an adult but make sense to a producer chasing exposure. Now add supply to the earlier loop: exposure changes clicks, and producers respond to exposure by changing tomorrow’s catalogue. To interpret a click-through trend, retain what was eligible each period and compare the choices viewers make when selecting the next item themselves.
Passages and timestamps · 2
So the main way people get views on their videos -- and remember, views mean money -- is that they stuff the titles of these videos with these popular terms.all of these words from other popular videos into your title, until you end up with this kind of meaningless mash of language that doesn't make sense to humans at all.Try it on your own example
With only a click log, how could you distinguish greater preference from greater exposure? Name the denominator you would need, then design a comparison that separates the explanations.