hello!
I’ve only started seeing this happen since about the start of last week. I am the type of person to add the whole set of books in my recommendations to my TBR all at once. I usually wait a couple weeks before I do this, just because it makes me happy. After I finish putting them in my TBR, I organized the next set of recommendations for next time (i.e removing the ones I don’t want, leaving the ones I do want, etc.). In the past, this was no problem; I would see the books I had been recommend weeks ago still there, untouched and not removed. Recently, however, I cannot even leave my recommend list for a day before I notice some books have been removed/replaced! I don’t know if this is a feature or a bug, but if it is a feature, would I be able to disable it?
Hello! I think I know what you're describing! It's not a bug but a side effect of how the recommendations search menu works. I'm surprised you're only seeing this from last week since this behaviour should have been present ever since we introduced the "search/filter" menu on recommendations.
The extent to which you see differences as you come and go depends on how much you've filtered the recommendations you see.
So, if you just do update your survey and don't do a search, do a search without checking anything in the menu, or hit the "Reset" button, those are your base recommendations, and those won't change as you come and go each day. Any changes will be minor and would come about if a book that would have been recommended to you was previously hidden because the book info wasn't up to scratch or vice versa, we 'unpublish' a book until the info against it can be improved.
If you select different moods and genres, the request goes out to our machine learning system, but then we also make sure the books you see exactly match the filters, so there's two levels of processing going on before you see your recommendations. When you go back to the recommendation page on another day, you only see the first level of filtering applied, so some extra books might appear, and since you only see the top 30 at a time, it can appear as if some books are removed/replaced. If you were to repeat whatever filter you did, you'd see the same set of books.
The only other thing to note is that in the last week we have released a new model, which increased our recommendations pool from 200k to 1.5m, so in general users are seeing different books, but the underlying behaviour of the system hasn't changed.
I hope that information is helpful and I've taken note of your experience and expectations for future iterations of how our recommendations work!
In the meantime, given your workflow, perhaps updating your recs at the same time that you're ready to add to your TBR might work better!