Buzzfeed Quiz - Recommender Decomposition
The specific quiz I am exploring is “Rate These Popular TV Shows And We’ll Guess Your Age” with the shows listed: Orange is the New Black, Stranger Thigns, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Friends, Riverdale, Saturday Night Live, The Good Place, and The Office. The options to rate them are on a sliding scale from “overrated” to “underrated.” The outcomes are a series of age groups.
This is a very simple interactive recommender.
They then suggest a new show to watch in the answer.
I’ve been doing buzzfeed quizzes for years now so this was an interesting new take on this system.
User: With a sliding scale answer system and 8 questions, there are many combinations of answers to these questions to inform the engine. It would be interesting to know the weight of certain questions versus others.
Items: There are about 5 age range answers, each with an image and a suggested show. I assume there are answers that carry more weight than others and determine your age entirely.
Cold Start : Content Based
With no user information in their database about interests and age, buzzfeed could seed the system with tags reflective of the shows an age range is interested in and serve this as the training method. This is a content-baased system, which is aimed at the user. The answers you inpout are probably comapred to a real data set of answers and age ranges that buzzfeed has.
Warm Start: User-Item Based Collaborative:
If quiz takers have answered the same questions you have, buzzfeed definitely has a headstart. Since there is no history or account linked to this quiz, it doesn’t ever get much warmer tahn that hasa start. Buzzfeed essentially just starts with results of your ‘quiz’, and then they can make suggestions.
Summary This is a one-trick recommender system, essentially comparing you to previous quizzes. Since the essence of the quiz is silly, there is no need to be complex about it.
The quiz did guess my age correctly, which I wasn’t surprised about. I have already seen the show they recommended (Parks and Rec), and enjoyed it. Since buzzfeed has no history of my watched list on netflix, they wouldn’t know that so it wasn’t a bad recommendation!