But what if I want a faster horse?

For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing. For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.

If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.

Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.

So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.

which is also what I feel about the Spotify algorthim at times — no matter what I'm listening to, it invariably brings me back to what it thinks are my "old reliables" once it gets onto recommending stuff.

I might just listen to it, if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice", but it's a million miles away from, say, listening to a radio DJ where you like their rough output but they're cherry-picking what to play next.

> if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice"

I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.

>I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.

None of the music services seem to understand that just because you like multiple genres, that doesn't mean that you want it to randomly jump around between them without any consideration for how they flow together.