<story><title>To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gfo</author><text>Are there examples of businesses out there which have done product recommendation correctly?&lt;p&gt;Amazon is notorious for trying to sell you the same kind of product after you&amp;#x27;ve already purchased it (e.g. I bought a ladder and now all of my recommendations are for more ladders). How hard can it be to uncover which items are more likely to be one-time buys and recommend the products people buy with those items instead (ex. show me painting supplies when I buy a ladder)?</text></item><item><author>guitarbill</author><text>The Kindle store is already garbage for any kind of discovery, and Unlimited makes it worse being just more marketing BS to hide the real price and displace good content. Their suggestion algorithms are terrible, and only really work if you want something from the same author.&lt;p&gt;Steam has exactly the same problem, although ar least they‘re trying to solve it in various ways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>s-shellfish</author><text>I really feel like this just happens because they don&amp;#x27;t have enough people looking over the data recommendations and the actual market economics, or enough communication between both divisions, if those divisions are sufficiently black boxed from one another. The difference may be purchasing one ladder versus purchasing a ladder, returning a ladder, and purchasing another ladder. Or companies, contractors, etc. purchasing in bulk. Obviously if their core recommendation algorithms are sufficiently generalized to all item types, it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter that it&amp;#x27;s a ladder. You could be getting side effects from people buying pencils for classrooms in bulk or survivalists stocking up on canned goods.  If the recommendation algorithms account for some categorical relation between item types, it still doesn&amp;#x27;t remove the problem, because different people in the world use different products differently and they can&amp;#x27;t all be classified and generalized to a collection of people&amp;#x27;s rule systems. It doesn&amp;#x27;t even begin to factor in the sorts of &amp;#x27;second order&amp;#x27; logic required when new economic systems begin to grow on top of the existing supply-demand relation. You could be getting side effects from competitive buyers on amazon treating amazon products like they are stocks.&lt;p&gt;It is hard. Dynamical systems.</text></comment>
<story><title>To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gfo</author><text>Are there examples of businesses out there which have done product recommendation correctly?&lt;p&gt;Amazon is notorious for trying to sell you the same kind of product after you&amp;#x27;ve already purchased it (e.g. I bought a ladder and now all of my recommendations are for more ladders). How hard can it be to uncover which items are more likely to be one-time buys and recommend the products people buy with those items instead (ex. show me painting supplies when I buy a ladder)?</text></item><item><author>guitarbill</author><text>The Kindle store is already garbage for any kind of discovery, and Unlimited makes it worse being just more marketing BS to hide the real price and displace good content. Their suggestion algorithms are terrible, and only really work if you want something from the same author.&lt;p&gt;Steam has exactly the same problem, although ar least they‘re trying to solve it in various ways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattbierner</author><text>Slightly different but spotify’s algorithmic recommendations have been great. I’ve found some really amazing stuff through “discover weekly”, “new releases”, and “related artists”. Same with Bandcamp. (Maybe the problem is easier for music?)&lt;p&gt;For content, I also find that user curated lists can be far better than automated systems. They give me an upfront sense of the curator’s tastes and define niches that algorithms would never recognize</text></comment>