Big Recsys Redux: Recs at Netflix

I wrote about recommender systems last week, but there is so much discussion around their effects right now in the mainstream tech press that they deserve a second issue. As a recap, I said that there were two things that made recommender systems super ineffective, and that YouTube, one of the premier companies tech using recommendations, suffers from both a lot of the first and a lot of the second. Recommender systems today have two huge problems that are leading companies (sometimes at enormous pressure from the public) to rethink how they're being used: technical bias, and business bias. The real problem is YouTube's business model. YouTube is THIRSTY for advertising money, at all times.