New recommendations

Recommendations pages—available from your profile (http://www.librarything.com/profile)—are now keeping tack of "new" and "old" recommendations, giving you three choices.

1. You can see only new recommendations
2. You can see recommendations in the order they were delivered.
3. You can see the top 1,000 recommendations, as before.

"New" recommendations are available for both automatic and member recommendations. They are not available for Unsuggester recommendations. Cry not. They are also not available for your tags. Apologies for that.

In this context "new" means "since the last time you looked." In most cases, recommendations don't update faster than 24 hours, so you'll basically get the opportunity for new recommendations every day. Whether you get those recommendations is up to a certain random factor in the recommendations algorithm, combined with the usual, continual, grinding regeneration of recommendations book-by-book and day-by-day.

"New" will have a somewhat bumpy start. Automatic recommendation start with a "Initial set," which is considered to be beyond time (and morality). It will not be new, even the first time you see it. After that, it's all new. "Member" recommendations, however, will all be new the first time you look at them. (We haven't been keeping track of when you looked at them; now we are.)

Incidentally, you can only see what's new on *your* recommendations, not others. To see others would potentially reveal too much about how obsessively they visit. :)

This is really neat. Thanks!

Two thoughts:

1. It'd be nice to see how highly recommended the new recommendations are.
2. Any chance of an RSS feed?

Very cool!

3. You can see the top 1,000 recommendations, as before. (#1)

In my case, the top 965 recommendations (and that many only because I tend to be shy about dismissing recommendations). Will I ever get back up to 1000? Or am I stuck with 965?

Could we see a 24-hour cache of others' "new recommendations"?

>5 infiniteletters:

You mean on someone else's recommendations page? No.

>6 timspalding:

That still doesn't say anything about me being stuck at 965 (I did have 1000 when the new page came out).

You want your last 35 recommendations? You can't handle your last 35 recommendations!

7: Hee. I'm in the 840s.

I'll look at whether I can redo the code. I *think* that excluding your "no thanks" during the process rather than after is going to prove hard. But I'll take a look.

Could you pass in the total number of "no thanks" to the process so that it keeps looking for 1000+"no thanks" recommendations?

Yeah, I'll take a look.

Question for people:

Should recommendations stay new until the next batch arrives—whenever that is—or should they stay new for shorter—maybe 2 hours after you first saw them?

>13 timspalding: It need not be until the next batch arrives, but I would personally prefer it if they remained new for at least 24 hours. This way, we can take a peak at the new recommendations, and come back for a more thorough review later...

My first New Recommendation is a music CD. But it's Jello Biafra, so it all works out!

These "new recommendations" are shown with a little yellow "New!" text by it, right? That's what I'm seeing on my member recommendations page. However, I'm not seeing that on my automatic recommendations page... Not seeing any "new" text or banners or whatever at all. ... ??

Also, since I'm completely new to the entire recommendations function.... I see that it's possible to say "no thanks" to a book (and as I recall that's a pretty new feature), but is it possible to say "no thanks" to an entire series and/or author? For instance, in my automatic recommendations there are MANY books of an "A-Z Mysteries" series or somesuch, all saying "why" = because of all my Nancy Drew books, but I'm not interested in that series at ALL. It seems like such a waste to have so much of my list taken up by that series.

I think the New block only shows up when sorting by new. It would handy to have it show up on the automatic list though.

It's only possible to say no thanks on a book-by-book basis. I'd like to have an author cloud (or at least list) for recommendations myself, or even a title/author search.

>19 AnnaClaire:

You don't have any new recommendations. You looked at them today. All 1,000 are new or none are.

Oh really! ;)

Thanks Tim, this is neat! (I figure since I complained about the planned dumbing-down of the "Members with your books" I should make a point of also commenting about new features I like, and this is great. Lots of the ones on my "new" list prompted reactions like "hey, yeah, I've been meaning to read that" or "aw, I forgot about that book!"

>21 EncompassedRunner:

What?

Yippee! I'm up to 975 recommendations! (That means I've gained about a dozen.) Keep up the good work!

Tim,
My recommendations don't 'remember' where I was at in the list before I clicked on a book. For instance, I can be on page 4 and click on a book and when I 'back page' I end up on page 1 of the recommendations.
This happens both at work on WINXP and at home OSX. Both using FF.

>22 timspalding: E.R.'s statement is explained on his profile...

25>

The explanation doesn't make any sense, either, though. (The words do, but not the reasoning behind them.)

I mean, it's really obvious that the "recommendations" are "Books recommended by LT to X", not "Books recommended BY X", so what's the big deal?

Besides, couldn't he have just done a "No, thanks" to all the recommendations he disagreed with, so that nobody else would know what LT wrongly thought he might be interested in?

There was a big argument about this a while back before all the new recommendation changes. 'No Thanks' wasn't an option then, but doing it to 1000 books seems rather daunting. Hopefully half the books will be ones he agrees with so he only has to 'No Thanks' 500 recommendations.

Actually, ER's problem was with member recommendations on his books - people were putting books with opposite views (with the intention of suggesting people see both sides of the story) on some of his religious books. I'm not sure he was actually talking about these recommendations at all.

Strikes me as overreaction, but then I tend to avoid arguments (and especially religious arguments) entirely. My opinions are mine and not for public discussion.

ETA - well, my opinions on religion, politics, and similar hot-button areas. Now books, tech, climate...there I'll happily enter into a discussion, and sometimes even change an opinion (mine or the other person's).

I'm sorry you went private, but can't fix the issue. LibraryThing creates connections automatically and non-automatically all the time. A book you despite but have in your library is going to generate recommendations, and people are going to find them. They're going to find them on Amazon too. If participation in an interconnected web of information implies endorsement, it's all over.

When collections happen, I hope one of the options will be "don't use for recommendations". I think that would fix part of Encompassedrunner's problem with the recommendations. As for tags... I wouldn't mind disabling that for some of mine either. But I get a pile that I'm happy with, as is.

29> I understand your point, but I agree with Tim that people will find the "recommendations" no matter what. I think the poper way to go is to add a message to your profile page, which will definitely be read by people interested in your library.

On top of that, LT offers a perfect way to mitigate the effect of recommendations you don't like, I think: Add a member recommendation to a book with say, a more balanced view, adding a few words on why you might want to read it.

31 - 'When collections happen, I hope one of the options will be "don't use for recommendations".' I hope so too.

Is there any way to see a list of things for which I've said "no thanks" or to change my "no thanks" to "yes please" at a later date? I don't want to start using no thanks unless I know what happens to that data.

>33 rsterling:

At present no. It's not that high on my list, though, so if it worries you, I think you might want to avoid doing it.

Recent recommendations

No new recommendations

Recommendations by date

It's very sad. Especially since when I looked at Recommendations by Date, I hadn't seen some of the top ones before.

35> Yes. The new recommendations doesn't seem very accurate as to what's new and what's not.

Dear Tim
I do not care for the new "recommendations" page.
A few choice items daily from the genres I am interested in, yeah.
An overflowing trash can of every genre - not so much.
I will never be interested in Christian Fiction or Graphic Novels.
Even when I pick just one genre there is still such an overload as to render unappealing and fairly useless.
As it stand, if I could delete this feature I would. Or go back to the old version.
Now if you let me pick specific genres AND only displayed the genres I'm interested in AND limited it to maybe 10 titles per genre per day...

I'm confused at what I'm seeing. The Recommendations linked from my home page sidebar (https://www.librarything.com/home#recommendations) look like the "old" recommendations, not the ones I saw via the link in this "New Recommendations" thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/346584 (https://www.librarything.com/recommendations) - which are also linked from the home page header.

I don't see anything in either place to register the three-option choice described by >1 timspalding:

This topic is from 2008. The topic about the current new recommendations (2022) is at: https://www.librarything.com/topic/346584

Ah, thread necromancy ...