A few years I previously wrote about how, when I was planning my wedding, I signaled to the Pinterest app that I was interested in hairstyles and tablescapes, and suddenly I was inundated with suggestions for more of the same. Which was all well and good until — oops — I called off the wedding and it looked like Pinterest pins would haunt me for the rest of my days. Pinterest wasn’t the only offender. All of social media wanted to recommend things that were no longer relevant, and the stench of this stale buffet of content lingered long after the non-event was over.
So in this new era of artificial intelligence—when machines can perceive and understand the world, when chatbots pose as unusual human beings, when trillion-dollar tech companies use powerful AI systems to increase their ad revenue—certainly these engines for referrals get smarter, too. right
Maybe not.
Recommendation engines are some of the earliest algorithms on the consumer web, and they use various filtering techniques to try to uncover the things you’re most likely to want to interact with – and in many cases buy – online. When done well, they are useful. In the earliest days of photo sharing, like Flickr, a simple algorithm made sure you saw the most recent photos your friend shared the next time you logged in. Now advanced versions of these algorithms are aggressively deployed to keep you engaged and make their owners money.
More than three years after I reported on what Pinterest internally called its “miscarriage” problem, I’m sorry to say that my Pinterest offerings are still dismal. In a strange leap, Pinterest now defines me as a 60- to 70-year-old silver fox of a woman looking for a stylish haircut. That and a garden green kitchen. Every day, like clockwork, I get marketing emails from the social media company full of pictures that suggest I might enjoy cosplaying as a beachy granny.
i it was searching for paint #inspo online at a moment’s notice. But I’m long past the drawing phase, which only highlights that some recommendation engines may be smart, but not temporary. They still don’t always know when the event has passed. Likewise, the suggestion that I’d like to see “hairstyles for women over 60” is premature. (I’m a millennial.)
Pinterest has an explanation for these emails, which I’ll get to. But it’s important to note—so I’m not just singling out Pinterest, which in the last two years has brought in new leadership and put more resources into fine-tuning the product so that people actually want to shop on it—that this is happening on other platforms too.
Take Threads, which is owned by Meta and collects much of the same user data as Facebook and Instagram. By design, Threads is a very different social app than Pinterest. It’s a scroll of mostly text updates, with an algorithmic “About You” section and a “Following” section. I actively open topics every day; I don’t come across it like I do from Google Image Search to images on Pinterest. In my Follow section, my Threads show updates from the journalists and techies I follow. In my About You section, Threads thinks I’m menopausal.
Wait what? I’m not a laboratory person. But over the past few months, Threads has made me a believer maybe be. Right now, opening the mobile app, I see posts about perimenopause; women in their forties struggling to slim their midsections, regulate their nervous systems, or treat late-onset ADHD; spouses hiring attendants; and Ali Wong’s latest take on divorce. This is a Real hosts-meets-elder-millennial-ennui strange world that doesn’t fully reflect the accounts I choose to follow or my expressed interests.
