"Explainable" AI

Reddit feed is getting more annoying by the day, and I blame its need to "explain" its AI

For some two years now, I’ve been a regular user of Reddit. I’ve not had Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn on the phone for the longest time, and though I have Instagram, i find that it’s not engaging enough - given the number of people I followed, the content is finite (I unfollowed a whole bunch when they got political - Instagram is NOT the place for that).

Reddit is a nice middle ground - you follow topics, and so can avoid topics you don’t want. On the other hand you don’t know most people you’re reading, and that means you don’t get addicted the way you get to twitter. It’s the perfect combination of being both “easily disposable” and for providing periodic dopamine hits.

Unlike on Twitter, where I normally go through the linear feed, I use the algorithmic feed on Reddit. It’s mostly good. I’ve discovered a lot of interesting communities through that.

There is one big exception, though - stuff that Reddit recommends to me because it is “popular in your country”.

Occasionally this can be useful - last year when I was on a holiday in Jordan, it started showing me some Jordanian and Middle Eastern groups, which I quite enjoyed (before they decayed away from my feed). However, the India-focussed groups that get referred to me because they are “popular in my country” are all mostly useless, and of no interest to me at all.

And I find that there is no way for me to tell this to Reddit. I muted r/Bangalore. It showed me r/Bengaluru. I muted that and it showed me r/Karnataka. So far I’ve muted most of the Indian city / state groups, and it’s responded by getting me recommendations of more and more obscure Indian groups that I want nothing to do with.

r/Btechtards. r/NEETards. r/AirTravelIndia, r/csk, r/IndianRailways - none of the stuff I'm interested in, but there is no way for me to tell this to Reddit! The more I try to tune the feed, the worse the feed gets. At the rate I’m going I might quit Reddit soon.

“Explainable AI” to blame?

Look at your Reddit home (algorithmic) feed, and you’ll see that it details why each post has been chosen for you - which is how I figured this “popular in your country” is a thing. Other things are “because you’ve visited this community before” or “related to communities you follow” and so on.

It seems like Reddit has made a conscious design choice where they want to tell you why they are recommending certain things to you. Which is all well and good, except that they seem to be implementing this through some sort of a quota system. “X% of posts from communities you follow, Y% from your geography, Z% from communities you’ve visited but are not a member of”, and so on. And this means that there is no getting away from this geography classification.

Think of how a more “pure” algorithm might have recommended stuff to me - it uses the communities I follow as a prior, and then looks at my activity - what I click on, what I up / down vote, where I comment (IMHO very high engagement) and so on, and then creates a high dimensional (sort of embedding) vector as my “profile”.

Each user has a profile like this, each community has a corresponding profile. And then they just unleash something like collaborative filtering (or a more modern version of it, assuming one such exists) and recommend stuff.

The downside of this kind of an approach is that it can’t be explainable - yeah you might retrofit some explainability but such algorithms are by definition black boxes. The upside of this is that your true preferences get known - for example, it might quickly learn that I’m not interested at all in Indian city / state communities. It might quickly learn that I don’t want to see American politics. It might infer that I’m mildly right wing.

The bug and feature of such an algorithm is that it will infer all of this without actually knowing that it is inferring these things! The quality of the feed will be better. The explainability will suffer.

I suppose Reddit has its own reasons for not being fully algorithm driven - its communities are famously strongly moderated, and so maybe it wants more human control over people’s feeds. Still, I don’t know if the company has examined the tradeoff that making things explainable makes things less pleasant for its users.

Life is full of tradeoffs, and the choice of algorithms is no different.