The banality of online recommendation culture

In the 2010s, affiliate marketing became a dominant form of 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, offering a small cut on each purchase of items it recommended. In 2017, New York has relaunched its own buying guide section, the Strategist, as a standalone site. In their posts, journalists and celebrities explained which toothbrushes, suitcases or sofas they liked; the revenue from such product referrals was part of the reason Vox Media made the acquisition New York in 2019. Since then, online recommendations have crept further into the media ecosystem. Platforms want to tell us what to buy, where to eat and, in general, how to live better consumerist lives. TikTok shopping videos are taking up more and more space in users’ feeds, with aspiring influencers offering up beauty products, cookware or leisure gear whose benefits they personally embrace with the energy of QVC pitchers. Letterboxd, a social network focused on movie reviews, promises to solve the riddle of what to watch by letting users rate what they’ve seen so others can follow along: “Tell your friends what’s good,” the tagline reads of the site. Beli, another app, helps you “follow and share your favorite restaurants.” Email newsletters encourage a kind of benign narcissism: In the quest to fill readers’ inboxes, authors resort to sharing the latest books they’ve read, albums they’ve listened to, and podcasts they have opinions on. taken over.

This recent wave of human-curated guidance is both a response to and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations, which have taken over our digital platforms over the past decade. Today’s automated social media feeds deliver increasingly indistinguishable content that is now sometimes generated by artificial intelligence; In light of this attack, we desire to be satisfied with proof that there is actually a real person behind the products or works being promoted. Since late 2010, publications have been publishing clickbaity guides in the “Ten Things to Watch Now on Netflix” genre, but the personal recommendation genre became entrenched during the pandemic, when the biggest problem besides avoiding COVID-19 decided what he wanted to see on TV next. At the same time, social media entered a more multimedia phase, with podcast audio and TikTok video highlighting voices and faces, creating a new generation of micro-personality cults. If you’re following someone’s life voyeuristically online, you might want to know what he or she recommends to eat for breakfast or wear to bed.

An outlet that characterizes the new cottage industry recommendations is Perfectly imperfecta newsletter founded in 2020 by Tyler Bainbridge, a software engineer at Facebook. Twice a week, subscribers receive a list of recommendations from young musicians, artists or internet celebrities on everything from niche cultural products to everyday self-care accessories. Molly Ringwald recommended the Criterion Channel. The songwriter MJ Lenderman recommended “Shoes without laces.” Jack Antonoff recommended saline nasal spray. Each featured item is published with a relevant emoji and explained with a short text blurb. The newsletter is designed, as Bainbridge recently told me, “to get you out of your algorithm by just showing you what someone else likes.”

In March 2021, Bainbridge moved to New York City from Boston and drew subjects from the emerging cultural scene around Dimes Square, the downtown area that became a destination during the quarantine. “When Catholicism and religion became trendy in the city center, it was reflected in the recommendations. We have much less of that now,” he says. (Center writer Matthew Davis recently recommended praying the Rosary, though he acknowledged it wasn’t a new tip: “People have been doing it for about 1,000 years.”) In May 2023, freshly fired from Facebook, Bainbridge decided to take on the project full-time. The newsletter’s combination of spirited irreverence and countercultural credibility had proven popular and was growing in popularity, with nearly five hundred topics. Bainbridge also built a separate Perfectly Imperfect social network where users could post their own raw recommendations and read those of others. Starting this month, Perfectly Imperfect is moving from Substack to its own standalone website (designed in a lo-fi Geocities style by the same company as the campaign for Charli XCX’s “Brat” album) and started producing videos. The relaunch included a message from Olivia Rodrigo– the most famous participant yet – who recommends English breakfast tea and a card game called Kings Corner. The site has almost a hundred thousand users so far. Bainbridge told me, “The goal of PI is to be a kind of universal place for taste.” (He recommended almost fifteen hundred things own accountranging from the New York restaurant Congee Village to ‘being sincere’.)

The word “flavor” has become a bugbear of the tech community lately. Online recommendations are ubiquitous – we’ve been posting our likes on the Internet since the early days of Facebook profiles – but ‘taste’, with its suggestion of deeper knowledge, perhaps, of Why or How something is good, recommending it turns into something specialized, with an aura of irreplaceability. In a recent essay: “Taste is Silicon Valley food,” entrepreneur Anu Atluru turned heads with her argument that taste was the new dominant commodity in an age of generative artificial intelligence, where knowing how to control a machine threatens to displace human knowledge or skill. “In a world of scarcity, we cherish tools. In a world of abundance, we cherish taste,” Atluru wrote. Considering that the internet offers us so many possibilities, the choice what to pay attention to, what to consume, or even what to create is most important. Sharing your tastes online can help you develop cultural capital. As Bainbridge put it, “Making the right recommendation makes an impact.”

In this way, Internet residents compete with each other to make the best, most authoritative or provocative recommendations. A friend of mine, newsletter writer Delia Cai, recently commented to me that the digital media landscape often feels like “just a list of recommendations about where to get your recommendations.” In some ways, Perfect Imperfect attempts to resist the deliberate commodification of online personhood. The site does not track follower counts or algorithmically promote content; posting is just for the fun of sharing (or at least to increase the chance that your choices will be mentioned in the newsletter, alongside those of a more famous person). Perhaps partly due to the lack of commercial motivation, the recommendations on PI’s site tend towards the pleasantly banal: ‘basking in the sun that comes through the window like a cat’, ‘being radically honest with yourself’, the film ‘Practical Magic’ . The content feels more like a hub of personal blogs or a selection of posts from Tumblr from the early 2010s. There are at least nine suggestions for calling or visiting your grandparents.

One problem with recommendations as a 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 a latent sameness in what we all like. Bainbridge acknowledged the problem: “You want to feel unique and feel like you have your own thing. As soon as more people talk about Bar Italia” – an indie rock band from London – “or whatever, you start to feel like less of an individual.” Sharing recommendations online now can pose a dilemma when it comes to spreading the things you are deeply and personally passionate about: if the algorithmic content feeds get their hands on it, it will likely be sent to millions of people and your personal claim to what then also hollow out. is that you love. (Or worse, fed into the maw of generative AI and reproduced.) A restaurant becomes insurmountably booked; a musician’s work is spread through social media discourse. It may be safer to recommend nasal spray only.

Much of the recommendation culture remains focused on efficiency. We want to consume the best things, develop the best habits and visit the best places. And yet unchecked efficiency, whether algorithmically or organically fostered, is inhospitable to the development of a deeper sense of taste. Another buzzword – ‘gatekeeping’ – has recently taken on a new and different meaning online, expressing a desire not recommended. ‘Gatekeeping’ means keeping inside information to yourself rather than throwing it to the winds of the Internet. In another much-discussed recent essay, designer and artist Ruby writes Justice Thelot praised the gatekeeper for erecting “the fence that the enthusiast happily jumps on” but that “holds back the dilettante” – in other words, for making it difficult to experience what is recommended without a little investment. Everyday things are easy fodder for recommendations; What’s truly closest to your heart may warrant a little withholding, no matter how antithetical it may seem to the pressures of being online.