Most people (I would hazard a guess) who enjoy Garfield Minus Garfield are not, in fact, Garfield fans. In fact, they probably feel close to how Randall feels about it.
So you can stop sending me fucking “suggestions” to buy Garfield books just because I bought the Garfield Minus Garfield one, Amazon. I don’t want them. They’re a drain on intelligent humor and are tipping the balance of the comic industry further and further into stupidity with each new strip. You’d do better to buy spam lists, because then you might actually randomly hit on some people who believe that the king of Nigeria actually contacts them.
I can see how it might work the other way. Someone is buying a bunch of Garfield merch for cousin Bobby because “the boy ain’t quite right,” and they see this new book Garfield Minus Garfield. Maybe cousin Bobby’d like that one too, and they’re actually probably right about it, because to be honest he never learned to read all that good anyway.
dunno even know why I went to Amazon, goin ta used book sites exclusively from now on, grumble grumble…
I can say some of them used to be Garfield fans, back before it got so damn formulaic. (Seriously. Check out the stuff from the 1980s, when Lyman was still in the cast. Davis has never been a genius, but back then he was still trying.)
Meh, I have to give Mr. Davis a little credit. In my own weird little hobby (classic video gaming), he authorized the release of the prototype for the Garfield 2600 game for free distribution, something very few copyright owners will do. A touch of kindness to a small hobby group, and one that was completely unexpected.
(I do believe, however, that someone put the kibosh on the Garfield Randomizer… that might have been the syndicate, though, since the Randomizer used the syndicate’s online Garfield strips as feedstock.)
I work in the business of generating those recommendations (although not for Amazon) and it’s mostly done by purchase correlations; ie, people who bought G-G really did buy Garfield books. Sometimes with only a limited number of transactions to go on you get some very odd correlations, but in general they are based on what actual people buy.
I think that Amazon should have a button, in addition to the ones that say “I own this” and “Not interested”, that says “This is totally not me”. Or one that says “I HATE this, don’t show me anything like it”. I would get great pleasure out of pressing that button sometimes. For a while, Amazon was showing me Disney Princess stuff, and Robert Jordan books. Oh, and the Barbie stuff. Can’t forget the Barbie stuff. I buy the occasional game, young adult novel, and I buy GIFTS. And I buy the occasional erotica. I can’t help but wonder what Amazon is recommending to the people who also buy games and young adult novels…XXXenophile #3?
Not to pour cold water on a good rant, but you can give Amazon feedback about its recommendations. You can rate the recommended item, mark it as not interested, or mark it as already owned. You can even see why it was recommended to you, and then go one step further and tell Amazon not to use that item to base its recommendations. Handy for buying gifts or when tastes change. The format for doing all this is a little clunky, but it is there.
I’m aware of that. That doesn’t make the recommendation for How to be a Super Hot Woman: 339 Tips to Make Every Man Fall in Love with You and Every Woman Envy You based on buying anti-leg cramp medicine any less strange.
Is it really that hard to imagine that lots of women buy leg cramp medication and want to look pretty?
For anyone who’s curious, this paper describes Amazon’s recommendation algorithm in moderate detail. It’s exactly as has been said: they look at what you’ve bought, look at what else people who buy those things have bought, and recommend you the most frequently bought items. The goal is not to maximize the number of items that any one customer buys based on recommendations, but to maximize the total number of items sold based on recommendations, and for that, it seems to work pretty well.
The thing that annoys me about Amazon’s recommendation system is that there’s no way to tell it something like “I already have all the Nero Wolfe/Dorothy Sayers/etc books, so stop recommending them to me.” Telling it not to use the fact that I already said I own some of them doesn’t help, because eventually it will recommend them again based on the fact that I have other mysteries. Even more annoying, telling it that I have a complete series set of DVDs doesn’t stop it from recommending the individual season sets.
But what it doesn’t do is allow me to tell it that it should never, EVER recommend a Disney Princess item or a Robert Jordan book again. Ever. Not in this lifetime, not in the next, not until the sun grows cold. And it’s not like Amazon is recommending me these items to me because I buy them, it’s doing so because I buy YA fiction (or stuff labeled as YA fiction, anyway) and a lot of SF/fantasy books. I want a button that says “You are totally out of your mind if you think I’m gonna buy this kind of shit” and I want it NOW.