Somehow Facebook has figured out I like cats and trains and are always showing me videos of them. But lately Facebook has been showing me many different videos of CHUBBY El Salvadoran high school marching band majorettes. Why this topic? Not that there is anything wrong with that.
If you happened to click on one of them out of curiosity in the beginning, you are going to be offered 10,000 of them now. You now need to choose “hide reel” for every single one you are shown until it gets the hint. (I had that happen a couple of weeks ago when Facebook decided I wanted it to be all Charlie Kirk, all the time.)
Why would I want them to stop?
I remember when Facebook somehow decided that I wanted my feed to be filled with information about former Wings guitarist Jimmy McCullough. It was baffling. Nothing about my online behavior would suggest I’m an unusually big fan of him or Wings. It took some consistent effort to convince Facebook to knock it off.
When I worked for a company that sold recommendation software there was a tuning element for random stuff. Depending on the setting, it might recommend random stuff just to stir things up. It was useful to prevent the recommendations from getting stale. I think it was called something like “Exploration” and was used to find other interests that hadn’t yet been discovered by browsing patterns.