I’ve been a user of reddit.com for a little while now. Part of the value of reddit.com is its recommendation engine. Based on what kinds of links you vote up/down, reddit comes up with a list of recommended links in its library.
However, in my experience, the system just doesn’t seem to work very well. I’ve done my best to “train” the system (as suggested by the reddit folks) by signaling that I like articles about software, technology, startups, etc. and don’t like articles about politics, goldfish(?) and other weird stuff. However, the system continues to recommend articles to me that are of absolutely no interest. And, I’m a reasonably simple guy and not that hard to figure out.
This got me to thinking a bit: How does the engine actually work? Recognizing that the algorithm is proprietary and private, I still have some high-level guesses. I think the algorithm is probably one (or a combination) of the following approaches:
- The engine tries to match me up with others that voted similarly. Then, it finds articles that the other person liked and recommends them to me.
- The engine does some sort of “content matching” using keywords in the articles to figure out what I like or don’t like based on prior votes.
In either of the above scenarios, the engine probably also factors in the popularity of articles overall.
Now, here’s my issue: Without having some idea of how the engine works, how do we trust it? For weeks, I’ve been struggling with figuring out why reddit.com recommends what it does. When it sends me strange recommendations, I simply write it off to: “Its probably just me – its got to be working for others…”. So, that’s my question: Is it working for you?
Though it’s a bit of a stretch, I relate this back to the days when encryption algorithms were kept “secret”. Now, the common convention is to disclose the encryption algorithm as a way for the community to ensure that the approach is valid and legitimate. This would quickly expose anyone that was using a simple obfuscation algorithm and passing it off as strong encryption. Similarly, how do we know that the reddit recommendation engine isn’t flawed – or worse, mostly random? I’m not saying that it is, but as an individual user, how do you know it isn’t?
In any case, if your experiences vary greatly from mine (and you think the reddit engine is the best thing since sliced bread), post a comment. Would love to hear about positive experiences. I know that reddit can’t divulge their “super-secret recommendation algorithm”, but I’m curious to know if its just me that is having the problem, or others are too.