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Add something to recommendations to let me know why it's recommended
D
doctorfudgeSep 13, 2023
I believe I would find more of a use for the recommendations given if I could see why they were being recommended. I have to assume recommendations are driven by books in my lists, but it would be very helpful if I could see which books brought the recommended books up. I have a few books in my "read" pile that I absolutely hated, for example, and how am I to know if those in some way influenced a recommendation? It's confusing.
I can't take the recommendations I'm getting seriously without this.
Comments
The recommendations are actually driven by a much more complex machine learning system which takes several inputs, but mainly your reading preferences survey. We're also constantly iterating on it to improve it.
Some time this year we'll be overhauling the recommendations system and it'll be more clear about why a certain book was recommended to you.
Hope you love it!
In the meantime, you can really fine tune your recs by playing with the survey, especially the free-text box, but again we'll be improving that workflow/UX!
Nadia Oh, fair enough, I thought it was more of a simple "You liked this, these are similar, therefore you will like this". I'm used to that.
I look forward to seeing how it gets overhauled!
doctorfudge Ooh, have you tried the Plus Up Next Suggestions feature (which you get to via your To-Read Pile)?
And have you tried the Similar Books feature?
But yes, I think the way we're improving the general recs will be more of what you're used to! 😊
Nadia I've tried the similar books feature and the up-next suggestions, and I can see the use-case and I understand why you're suggesting them (Obviously if I'm wondering how I can know why I'm being recommended something, I'd know very easily by just going by similar books), but they're not super useful to me specifically because of the way I'm currently trying to fill out my reading list. I'm trying to be more explorative, and I worry that using those features might lead me closer to previous experiences than I'm trying to go, if that makes sense.
Typing that out now I realize that my original question sounds counter-productive to that aim but I promise it's not lol.
doctorfudge Your aim is exactly why we've built our recommendations feature the way we have so I encourage you to be tweaking your reading preferences survey as much as possible — especially the free-text box —and using the filter menu on the recs after that to further say things like: "okay, take into account my preferences but don't show me books in any of my fave genres". We give users the freedom to power their recs to avoid them getting stuck in a cycle!
But we realise the UX gives users too much freedom right now so with our overhaul it'll all be more intuitive!