Why am I seeing recommendations for smut and porn games? Because I’m playing Witcher 3. Witcher 3 has a few scenes where you see tits, and so it has a “nudity” tag. So Steam now thinks I’d be into this other weird shit because they, too, have “nudity” tags.
Fuck me, how have we still not come up with a better system than this? 🤦 It’s braindead, vacuous and almost always misses the mark. And in this case, it makes my Steam front page look like I’m a chronic masturbator who can’t even game without needing a mid-session wank.
How about a vibes-based recommendation system? Almost like a criminal profile, you look at the games which the user has played most, or where they’ve unlocked a certain percentage of the achievements, or something like that, then you build an ever-evolving profile of the kind of gamer ‘personality’ the user has. Then, to recommend a new game to them, you compare their profile with similar profiles, and whatever games the other profile has played (to a statistically significant degree) that you haven’t yet played is the recommendation. Kinda like Last.fm’s compatibility check between users, but under-the-hood and without any user being mentioned or even logged (I’m sure it’d be a privacy issue otherwise).
“You played Skyrim which has a dragon in it, therefore you’ll like Dragon Fucker Hitler Bastard 5,000” has gotta be the worst way to recommend games - or any media - to people.
You know you can just turn off seeing these games in your store preferences, right?
I think you’ve missed the point OP was making.
It was less about how to stop seeing recommendations, but more about why tag-based recommendations exist when they’re so ineffective.
But are they though? In general, I’ve been quite happy with the tag based recommendations; they do fit the games I normally play. Of course exceptions happen, but in general I feel like the feature works pretty well.
I wasn’t commenting on validity, just OP’s intent.
No doubt it works for some. It doesn’t for me… most of the time. Sometimes it’s fine, though.