Who were ‘For You’ pages really designed for?

When a good idea turns toxic

 
The idea for personalizing the internet is nothing new. As far back as 15 years ago, FriendFeed was helping people curate their own newsfeeds with content from their favorite publishers and social media networks. Today, platforms like TikTok have significantly raised their personalization game, with “For You” pages (FYP) that are so good that they elevate the user experience and drive loads of engagement and activity on the platform.

If only every FYP was so useful.

 
On the other end of the spectrum is Chrome’s FYP. Let us give you an example: When Ana logs into Chrome on mobile, her FYP includes recipes and lots of travel stories, which authentically reflect the content she’s recently consumed. But then there are also all the tabloid stories and other low-quality content that are only tangentially (maybe?) related to what she’s searched or interacted with.

Although she can trace why she’s seeing content on particular topics, there’s no way to easily configure which sources are being surfaced on her FYP. Chrome, the world’s most widely used browser, could have built a super useful starter page for its legions of users, but instead it appears happy to fill FYPs with garbage content. And while there’s a chance that the publishers behind said garbage content are using Google’s advertising technology to artificially boost their own reach, we as users honestly have no way of knowing why some content is recommended for us. There is absolutely no transparency into these personalization algorithms, which are largely considered trade secrets.

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Πηγή: sparrowone.substack.com