Lullabies and Content Recommendation

I don’t lose sleep over content recommendation.

But somebody should.

We’re a solid 20 years into content recommendation going mainstream in digital products. Yet despite better under-the-hood performance, how we interact with recommendations is stuck.

If you ask a random person on the street what are the implications of liking a post on Tik Tok, or repeatedly listening to a song on Spotify they probably don’t get that it impacts what content they will see in future.

Younger users get it; tech savvy users get it. But the average global citizen doesn’t yet. Users certainly don’t understand the dimensions along which those content recommendations work. 

And yet, interview users and most of them would like more control over their recommendations.

Tech savvy users have workarounds. They also have hesitations.

They have algorithm hesitancy - a reluctance to interact with digital products because the don’t want to mess with how algorithm curates for them.

So we have couples who won’t share Netlix profiles, or users who are effectively punished for using their accounts in non-typical ways.

A good example is Spotify Discover weekly. Here’s a company that shot to popularity on the back of really great music recommendations.

And yet, I had to abandon my Discover Weekly in 2020 when my son was born and it became dominated by white noise and baby lullabies.