“How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood” by Alexis C. Madrigal really focused on how Netflix came up with such a large number of genres that the users could pick from. As an avid Netflix user, I have myself witnessed movie suggestions: after watching The Walking Dead I was suggested other zombie-like movies right after. And I have experienced this with numerous websites/apps!
I’m also an avid Instagram user and have been using it for the past 2+ years. Recently I have noticed that right after I click the “follow” button when I come upon a new user I like, a little drop-down section falls right under it with 3 “suggested users.” I found this extremely strange as I wonder what is the criteria that makes these users of a potential interest to me. If I follow a friend from high school, let’s say, maybe I recognize a friend of that user will pop up in the “suggested user” space. This makes sense to me as maybe they’ve tagged each other in pictures. This friend make have only had 100 followers or maybe followed themselves 100 people. The pool is much smaller to choose those suggested users from.
But sometimes I follow users that have 80,000+ followers (maybe because they post pleasant nature pictures!) and maybe they follow themselves 500 people. The pool to choose the suggested users is greater. Where do these 3 users come from?
One possibility I can think of is similar hashtags. Maybe the suggested users use many of the same hashtags? But this seems unlikely because if one person inputs #nature, there are probably thousands of entries for that hashtag. Another possibility is the similarity in users. If there are multiple people who are into nature pictures, they will follow many users that post about nature. But without hashtags how does instagram know what the content of the picture is? Maybe if they post a relevant caption or use the geotag. It gets messy really soon. It is incredibly difficult for me to decipher it, but like Netflix, Instagram must have a algorithm to everything.
Another feature instagram has is “explore.” I have gone to this feature multiple times and each time is something different. Perhaps the first time it was full of nature pictures but the second time it was full of make-up pictures. It is obviously trying to cater to my interest – but how does it know my interests? I soon realized it depends on recently viewed photos.
Maybe someday someone will try to figure out Instagram’s algorithm, although I am sure it is not as crazy as Netflix’s!
For reference:
http://www.instagram.com
http://www.technobuffalo.com/2014/07/11/instagram-suggested-user-feature-quietly-rolls-out/