> Is there any evidence that the recommendation systems are actually intent on putting something you would like to see in front of you instead of some other incentive?
Something I've been wondering about recently is how infrastructure costs factor into this. Obviously videos get served from a local CDN node when possible, but I'm guessing sometimes the file you're requesting is uncommon enough that the local CDN node doesn't have it. Maybe this isn't the case with Netflix, but it's probably the case with youtube, just because they have that much more content. Adding more storage to the CDNs would cost money, and cache misses on the CDN also cost money, so does youtube have a financial incentive to bias their recommendations towards videos already cached near you?
The infrastructure costs might be low, but transit performance back to Google is terrible for many ISPs (looking at you CenturyLink), so there might be 'quality' costs to consider as well.
Something I've been wondering about recently is how infrastructure costs factor into this. Obviously videos get served from a local CDN node when possible, but I'm guessing sometimes the file you're requesting is uncommon enough that the local CDN node doesn't have it. Maybe this isn't the case with Netflix, but it's probably the case with youtube, just because they have that much more content. Adding more storage to the CDNs would cost money, and cache misses on the CDN also cost money, so does youtube have a financial incentive to bias their recommendations towards videos already cached near you?