A few years ago I wrote about how, when planning my wedding, I told the app Pinterest that I was interested in hair styles and tablescapes, and suddenly I was inundated with suggestions for more of the same. Which was great until, oops, I canceled the wedding and it looked like Pinterest pins would haunt me until the end of days. Pinterest wasn’t the only offender. All social networks wanted to recommend things that were no longer relevant, and the stench of this variety of outdated content lingered long after the event ended.
So, in this new era of artificial intelligence, when machines can perceive and understand the world, when a chatbot presents itself as incredibly human, when tech companies worth trillions of dollars use powerful artificial intelligence systems to increase their advertising revenue , surely those recommendation engines are getting smarter. , also. Good?
Maybe not.
Recommendation engines are some of the first algorithms on the consumer web, and use a variety of filtering techniques to try to surface the things you’re likely to want to interact with (and, in many cases, buy) online. When done well, they are useful. In the early days of photo sharing, such as on Flickr, a simple algorithm ensured that you saw the latest photos your friend had shared the next time you logged in. Now, advanced versions of those algorithms are aggressively deployed to keep you engaged and make your owners money.
More than three years after reporting on what Pinterest internally called its “miscarriage” problem, I’m sorry to say that my Pinterest suggestions are still depressing. In a strange leap, Pinterest now has me listed as a silver fox woman in her 60s and 70s looking for a stylish haircut. That and a sage green kitchen. Every day, like clockwork, I receive marketing emails from the social media company filled with photos suggesting I might enjoy dressing up as a coastal grandmother.
Yo was looking for paint #inspo online at a moment’s notice. But I’m long past the painting phase, which only underscores that some recommendation engines can be smart, but not temporary. They still don’t always know when the event has passed. Similarly, the suggestion that I would like to see “hairstyles for women over 60” is premature. (I’m a millennial).
Pinterest has an explanation for these emails, which I’ll get to. But it’s important to note (so I’m not just talking about Pinterest, which in the last two years has instituted new leadership and invested more resources in fine-tuning the product so that people actually want to buy from it) that this happens on other platforms. also.
Take Threads, which is owned by Meta and collects much of the same user data as Facebook and Instagram. Threads is, by design, a very different social app than Pinterest. It’s a scroll of mostly text updates, with an algorithmic “For You” tab and a “Next” tab. I actively open Threads every day; I don’t stumble upon it, as I do from Google Image Search to images on Pinterest. In my Following tab, Threads shows me updates from the journalists and techies I follow. In my For You tab, Threads thinks I’m going through menopause.
Wait, what? In lab terms, I’m not. But in recent months Threads has made me believe that could be. Right now, opening the mobile app, I see posts about perimenopause; women in their forties struggling to shrink their midsection, regulate their nervous system, or take medication for late-onset ADHD; husbands who hire companions; and Ali Wong’s final monologue about divorce. it’s a real housewives-You encounter a strange world, of boredom, of old people, of millennials, that does not fully reflect the accounts I choose to follow or my expressed interests.
