I cannot parse the second word in "for you page" as anything other than a mangled possessive and that's why I don't use tiktok
much rather go to cohost, where you're always greeted with an implicit "for you, page:" and then a list of posts from other pages you've asked to see
It curdles my brain to think that the experience of social media for the vast majority of people, which is to say the experience of the internet for the vast majority of people who use it regularly, involves just having whatever nonsense they didn't ask to see thrown at their faces based on some statistical model of impression metrics and whatever personal data can be crammed into it.
I just have zero interest whatsoever in seeing any stream of so-called "content" that's not curated by people I know, or at least whose taste I trust. If you're looking for art specifically and you're starting from absolute zero context I guess I can understand the value of a tool to help seed your follows list, but beyond that trusting a machine to do curatorial work—a task that intrinsically demands taste and discernment—seems to be perverse beyond measure.
I was young and naïve when I first heard about Netflix's vaunted recommendation algorithm, and I'll admit to starry-eyed imaginings of the films it could discover for me. But it became clear the moment I actually began to scroll sideways through the "movies you might like" that it hadn't the foggiest idea of my tastes. No matter how much data I poured down its hungry gullet, it never machine-learned even a loose approximation of what I enjoyed. A simple list of films I hadn't seen directed by the same people as films I had would have been dozens of times more useful to me.
Do people not realize this? Do people not have friends of good taste who share their curations online? Have we forgotten how to collate art direct from the artists themselves, that we must be beholden to the torrent of horseshit that is "for you page"?
Honestly, recommendation algorithms nowadays are not really recommendation algorithms because 'recommendations' is kind of a trap idea.
When I (and presumably you too) was growing up, television was often a very un-curated experience, right? You'd just tune in and watch whatever was on. You had a bunch of channels to choose from, but within each channel you had no choice. If you wanted to truly curate and seek out specific television, you'd need to arrange your life around being around to watch a show – most people didn't do that except for maybe one or two must-see-TV type deals.
The Netflix carousels are functionally the same thing now – a selection of genres and a list of things that Netflix is trying to push in those genres. Programming is done by executives. The 'algorithm' is barely there, and your carousel probably looks a lot like someone else's; most of the recommendation is coming in the form of rearranging which genres are floated to the top, and maybe the imposition of some broad categories (Netflix can look very different depending on whether or not it thinks you watch k-drama, for example, but it will always push its big expensive prestige shows to the forefront).
Which is to say, 'recommendation' is now just the monoculture. Spotify infinite playlists are not particularly distinguishable from just listening to genre radio, etc.
I think that in the early days of this stuff there was just a total misapprehension of how people consume media. Most people have a relatively omnivorous media diet where they consume the most broad and accessible things in a variety of different genres. I think the idea of "oh, this algorithm will recommend hiddem gems to you" kind of runs into the reality that most people are not that interested in watching hidden gems because they are getting more than their fill of a given genre just from the regular gems. Is the median movie viewer going to seek out the more obscure horror films when they are already barely keeping up with the big A24 releases?
