The banality of online recommendation culture

In the 2010s, affiliate marketing became the dominant trend in online business models. The Wirecutter, which was sold to the Times in 2016, made money by directing its visitors to retail websites like Amazon or Best Buy, taking a small cut of any purchase of items it recommended. In 2017 New York relaunched its own buyer’s guide section, The Strategist, as a separate site. In their posts, journalists and celebrities described which toothbrushes, suitcases or sofas they liked; revenue from such product recommendations was one of the reasons why Vox Media acquired New York in 2019. Since then, online recommendations have penetrated even deeper into the media ecosystem. Platforms want to tell us what to buy, where to eat, and generally how to live better as a consumer. TikTok shopping videos are taking up more space in users’ feeds, with aspiring influencers selling beauty products, kitchenware or sports equipment whose benefits they personally endorse with the energy of QVC presenters. Letterboxd, a social network focused on movie reviews, promises to solve the conundrum of what to watch by inviting users to rate what they see so others can follow them: “Tell your friends what’s good,” the site’s tagline reads. Another app, Beli, helps you “track and share your favorite restaurants.” Email newsletters encourage a kind of soft narcissism: In an effort to fill readers’ inboxes, authors resort to sharing the latest books they’ve read, albums they’ve listened to, and podcasts whose opinions they’ve taken on.

This recent surge in human-curated guidelines is both a reaction to and a continuation of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations that have taken over our digital platforms over the last decade. Today’s automated social media feeds provide increasingly indistinguishable content that is sometimes generated by artificial intelligence; In the face of this onslaught, we crave content with proof that there is, in fact, a real person behind the products or jobs advertised. Since the late 2010s, publications have been producing clickbait guides in the genre of “Ten Things to Watch on Netflix Right Now,” but the personal recommendations genre took hold during the pandemic, when the biggest problem besides avoidance became COVID-19-19 was deciding what to watch next on TV. At the same time, social media was entering a more multimedia phase, with audio podcasts and TikTok videos emphasizing voices and faces, creating a new generation of microcults of personality. If you’re voyeuristically spying on someone’s online life, you might want to know what they recommend you eat for breakfast or wear before bed.

One of the outlets symbolizing the new recommendations of the cottage industry is Perfectly imperfectnewsletter founded in 2020 by Tyler Bainbridge, a software engineer at Facebook. Twice a week, subscribers receive a list of recommendations from up-and-coming musicians, artists, or internet celebrities on everything from niche cultural products to run-of-the-mill beauty accessories. Molly Ringwald Recommended by Criterion Channel. Songwriter MJ Lenderman recommended “Shoes without laces.” Jack Antonoff Saline nasal spray is recommended. Each featured item is posted with a corresponding emoji and explained with a short text message. The newsletter is designed, as Bainbridge recently told me, “to break you out of your algorithm by simply showing you what someone else likes.”

In March 2021, Bainbridge moved to New York City from Boston and painted subjects from the emerging cultural scene around Dimes Square, a downtown area that became a destination during quarantine. “When Catholicism and religion became fashionable in the city center, you can see it in the recommendations. We have much less of that now,” he said. (Downtown writer Matthew Davis recently recommended praying the Rosary, although he acknowledged that it’s not new advice: “People have been doing it for about 1,000 years.”) In May 2023, fresh from being fired from Facebook, Bainbridge decided to devote himself full-time to the project . The newsletter’s combination of pithy irreverence and countercultural gravitas proved popular and grew even larger, accumulating nearly five hundred topics. Bainbridge also created a separate social network, Perfectly Imperfect, where users could post their unedited recommendations and read recommendations from others. This month, Perfectly Imperfect is moving from Substack to its own standalone website (created in the lo-fi style of Geocities by the same firm behind the Charli XCX campaign “Brother“album) and began filming a video. A post appeared in the relaunch Olivia Rodrigo– the most famous member to date – recommends English breakfast tea and a card game called Kings Corner. Currently the site has about one hundred thousand users. Bainbridge told me, “The goal of PI is to be sort of a one-stop destination for flavor.” (He recommended almost fifteen hundred things on his own accountfrom the New York restaurant Congee Village to “sincerity”.)

The word “taste” has become a bugbear in the tech community lately. Recommendations are ubiquitous on the Internet—we’ve been liking the Internet since the earliest days of Facebook profiles—but “trying it out” by offering more in-depth knowledge may Why or How something good, turns the recommendation into something specialized, with an aura of indispensability. In a recent essay “Taste is eating Silicon Valley“, entrepreneur Anu Atluru has gained attention with her argument that taste has become the new dominant commodity in the age of generative artificial intelligence, where knowing how to operate a machine threatens to displace human knowledge or skills. “In a world of scarcity, we value tools. In a world of abundance, we value taste,” Atluru wrote. Considering that the Internet offers us so many possibilities, choice What matters most is what to pay attention to, what to consume, or even what to create. Sharing your tastes online can help you develop cultural capital. As Bainbridge puts it, “Good advice leads to influence.”

Thus, Internet users compete to provide the best, most authoritative, or provocative recommendations. My friend, newsletter writer Delia Kaye, recently noted that the digital media landscape often feels like “just a list of recommendations on where to get your recommendations.” “Perfectly Imperfect” in some ways attempts to counter the senseless commodification of online identity. The site does not count the number of subscribers and does not promote content algorithmically; Posting is simply for the pleasure of sharing (or at least to get your picks included in the newsletter along with those of more famous people). Perhaps partly due to the lack of commercial motivation, recommendations on the PI website tend to be pleasantly banal: “bask in the sun peeping through the window like a cat,” “be radically honest with yourself,” the film “Practical Magic. » The content looks more like a hub of personal blogs or a selection of posts from Tumblr from the early 2010s. There are at least nine suggestions to call or visit your grandparents.

One of the problems with recommendations as the basis for the digital content mill is that there are only so many things to recommend. Repetition or scalability is the enemy of taste because over time it reveals hidden similarities in what we all like. Bainbridge acknowledged the problem: “You want to feel unique and you want to feel like you have something of your own. The minute more people talk about Bar Italia” – the London indie rock band – “or anything else, you feel like you’re less of an individual.” Sharing recommendations online now can pose a quandary when it comes to sharing things you’re personally passionate about: if algorithmic content channels take over, they’ll likely be shared with millions of people and ruin your personal claim to anything . this is what you love. (Or, worse, they were fed into the womb of a generative AI and reproduced.) The restaurant becomes overwhelmingly crowded; The musician’s creativity spreads through discourse on social networks. It may be safer to simply recommend a nasal spray.

The referral culture remains largely performance-oriented. We want to consume the best things, develop the best habits and go to the best places. Yet uncontrolled efficiency, whether algorithmic or organic, is not conducive to the development of a deeper sense of taste. Another buzzword, gatekeeper, has recently taken on a new and different meaning online to express desire No recommend. Gatekeeping means keeping insider information to yourself rather than throwing it out on the internet. In another recent and widely discussed essay, designer and artist Ruby Justice Teloth praised the gatekeeper for erecting “a fence that the enthusiast is happy to jump over” but which “stops the amateur” – in other words, for making it difficult to get what is recommended without any investment. Ordinary things are easy food for recommendations; what is truly closest to your heart may require some holding on, no matter how contrary it may seem to the pressure of being online.