I got a mirror, you're the cow.

...yes?

I like good recommendations better than bad recommendations. The value I get is better recommendations.

Like, I literally update the categories of things I'm interested in, in my Google profile, so I get less useless ads.

People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time. Personalization is how you get better ones.

Just wanted to verify how far you are willing to go to get a list generated for you that’s probably not even that unique from the other Y number of people who love being suggested obvious information.

How many combinations of the restaurants around you do you think exist and are needed to provide that information? Certainly need Uber guzzling down Terabytes of data to rank the local Chiles over the local Applebees.

Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.

> Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.

I suspect you don't live in New York City, or another city with a thriving restaurant scene where new places open and old places close all the time and you can't keep track of them all in your head.

Lol I do live in Nyc in Brooklyn (between Bedford Ave and Rogers Ave on Martense St, I’ve also lived in Carroll Gardens, East Village, Crown Heights, Upper West Side) and there are plenty of blogs and people with a vocal enough opinion in Nyc to not need to hand off my restaurant searches to Uber of all companies.

If you have problems with restaurant rankings in Nyc you’re not living right.

"you’re not living right."

Oh really?

Sometimes you just need a quick decision, whether you're going somewhere with friends at the last second, or yes ordering delivery and just want something that will be one of the better options. Because there isn't 1 Chinese place in your delivery radius, there are 20.

Believe me, I read restaurant blogs and talk to people too. But that's more for stuff I plan in advance, not last-minute decisions in a neighborhood I don't visit often.

So maybe don't be so quick to judge that others aren't "living right", how about?

I get your point, but the problem here for me is that most of the available information about said restaurants (ads and social media reception) and just noise, there’s no actual signal there about whether I’d actually like to eat at a restaurant.

Why would the recommendations be "good"? I assume you mean "good" here to mean good for you or in your interests. That isn't how ads are sold, they're sold to the highest bidder

A rational advertiser is willing to bid more for someone is more likely to purchase (i.e., for whom the ad would be "good").

Rationality requires an actual estimate of the incrementality of your visit. As someone who has worked in the incrementality estimation function of adtech, for a measurment vendor to the likes of YoutTube, TikTok, Meta, etc., I promise you: the advertisers and the publishers have no fucking clue because the masurement companies, in their competition with one another for the business of these internet titans, juice their estimates to make them more attractive.

Trying to convince me to buy things isn't always good for me, though. It's good if the thing is useful or I already needed one and just need to know about brands, but a lot of advertising is trying to drive up consumption in more general ways that might cost me money unnecessarily.

> People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time.

I've never heard any complaint about that except from people who work in adtech.

I see it literally all the time on HN, how useless and spammy and low-quality ads on the internet are.

In contrast to high-quality ads that are e.g. for a movie you actually want to see.

The "value" you get is recommendations generated by some combination of:

-opaque optimization function over which you have no control and is not tailored to you (but yay you can sort by a few predetermined fields)

-willingness of the recommended to outbid one another for your attention

-companies who have paid some baseline pay-to-play vig

If you want real recommendations, talk to someone who isn't profiting off of you.

Good recommendations are places where you maximize payment [to people willing to pay], not best experience.

It's going to be a conflict of interest like most ads. It's not optimized for you but toward you

How often do you act on these recommendations?

I don't think the problem is these kind of suggestions.

Are people suddenly moving more between corp A and corp B? Must be something going on, let's buy the stock.

Suddenly multiple Ubers are dropping off people at a residential building during the night? They probably know each other. Let's flag that as a potential risk.