better, smarter, faster

26 July 2006

Since our very first days, recommendations have been a huge part of reddit. I still remember writing the first recommendation system that we launched while sitting on the couch with Steve. And even before that, Steve had experimented with other forms of filtering and recommending.

Thanks to Chris, the system I worked on has since been replaced several times over and I'm pleased to announce our newest system is live today. One major improvement is that it's faster than ever before -- it's practically live. Head to your recommended page and vote on something and the recommender should whisk it away and give you a new recommendation within seconds.

The technology we're trying out is new and unproven -- and we appreciate you bearing with us and helping us out as we've tried to get it tuned over the past couple of days. And, of course, we continue to want to hear your thoughts about how it's doing. But the most important contribution you can make is simply to vote on stories on your recommended page and teach reddit what you like.

We continue to work on new and smarter recommendation algorithms. Lately I've been working on smarter ways to find stories on blogs that might interest you. I've posted some of my early results but there's still plenty more work to be done. Thanks for sticking with us.

-- Aaron

last updated 2 years ago #

Comments

We're not feeding the alien until it starts getting these right.

kn0thing 2 years ago #

Is the algorithm proprietary, or are you going to share the it (like Google did with PageRank)?

apollo 2 years ago #

I think that although google's original pagerank algorithm was in a paper, their current version is proprietary. You can probably find something close to what they have on Wikipedia or the Internet, I'd start looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

firklar 2 years ago #

Google patented pagerank, that is hardly what I would consider "sharing", in fact, it is the least "sharing" think you could do with an idea since it even prohibits independent reinvention.

san1ty 2 years ago #

Damn, guys. I am really impressed with this. You are sitting on the couch, really truly writing the next Web. It's impressive.

sempf 2 years ago #

Isn't it counter intuitive to teach reddit what we like by voting, specifically, on the recommended page? It seems to me that picking and choosing from a broader selection (such as "hot" or "new") would be more telling. Similarly, aren't we more limited in what we can teach reddit regarding our tastes if we choose from an already-filtered set of links (which, mind you, are potentially incorrect -- a fact suggested by the need to "teach" in the first place)?

dbickett 2 years ago #

Incidentally, I only liked two of the twenty-five stories on my recommended page (I know it sounds hyperbolic, but I'm honestly not trying to be negative ;)

dbickett 2 years ago #

Even if it never gets better than this, doesn't the benefit of finding these two stories outweigh the cost of glancing over the other 23? Anyway, you should help Reddit by voting those up, and the others down.

san1ty 2 years ago #

I'm not sure that it is, Reddit will recommend the things it thinks you will like, if you don't like them, then telling Reddit so is useful information that will allow it to learn. If you just rate stuff on "hot" or "new", then you may just be telling Reddit what Reddit already knows.

san1ty 2 years ago #

So, I noticed my recommended page length dropped from my prefered 100 entries to 15-20 a couple days ago. Presumably this is linked to your new algorithm. I'm happy to see you working on improving the collaborative filtering but why artificially reduce the number of recomendations?

dbenhur 2 years ago #

The reccomendation algorithm current generates a maximum of 25 entries, however when you rate entries, they get replaced after a minute or two.

san1ty 2 years ago #

um, s/reccomendation/recommendation

san1ty 2 years ago #

It seems the RSS feed for the recommendations page doesn't work/exist?.

nascent 2 years ago #

Please forgive me if this is a stupid question, but I'm no geek and these things are a mystery to me. Could these changes have anything to do with the "error: stack overflow" message I've been seeing on the Reddit logo all day, or is it just my machine? Thanks.

harryd 2 years ago #

the "stack overflow" stems from the drama with the reddit/digg recursion joke. it was an infinite recursive linking loop that jgrahamc set up, so reddit make a joke as if the infinite recursion had caused a stack overflow in reddit.

schwarzwald 2 years ago #

I find Reddit easier to navigate than Digg.

codese38 2 years ago #

i run a chat channel on EFNET my channel #news-wire has an RSS script and i post over 30 RSS feeds... two the channel channel favorites are Google and REDDIT.com REDDIT is a great site and i'm glad you put in the RSS for "new" because my chat channel needed site like REDDIT.com to complete the list... i can't say enough about your site... i thank you very much for your free and continuous list of links!

coca-blog 2 years ago #

So, does the new recommendation engine ignore votes if you hide them? Because I hide everything after I vote, and I'm not sure why I'm not getting any recommendations.

Maybe I don't vote enough, or maybe I've read & hidden all the articles that would have been recommended to me anyway, but still it's strange.

judgmentalist 2 years ago #