April Fools
If someone pulled an April Fool’s joke on you April 8th, would it still land well more than a week later?
That’s what content recommendations algorithms have been doing for the past week.
Did you post something silly on April 1st? Know that it’s been reposted many times beyond its ‘best before’ date. As the context of the first of April quickly fades, how many readers are left confused or even perhaps questioning your cogency.
Automated recommendation systems are not context-aware. That is, unless they’ve been explicitly programmed to be so, by a human. It took years for Facebook to stop reminding its users of painful memories on their anniversary dates.
April Fools and the anniversary of the passing of loved ones are the easy, clear cut cases. However, these systems are connected to a veritable firehouse of new content, often relating to developing or nuanced events. The lack of context-awareness will continue to be a notable shortcoming of recommendation algorithms and guarding against all edge cases will be impossible.