Pinterest is looking to give users more control over the recommended Pins they see on the platform with a new 'Tune your home feed' option which will enable you switch on or off recommendations for certain topics.
The new feature is revealed in a piece by Will Oremus on One Zero, in which Oremus outlines the trade-offs Pinterest has dealt with in building its recommendation algorithms.
This week Pinterest plans to announce a new feature called "Tune Your Home Feed" that lets you tell its recommendation algorithm what to remember and what to forget. If it's already rolled out to you, you can find it here: https://t.co/Mbm0ZmHzRA pic.twitter.com/HoBkheAwD6
— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) October 14, 2019
As you can see in this example, the 'Tune Your Home Feed' option will enable users to easily remove topics from their recorded interests.
As explained by Oremus:
"On Tuesday, the company will roll out a feature designed to address perhaps its algorithm’s most visible flaw: its tendency to draw the wrong conclusions from users’ past behavior, and pollute their feeds with stuff they don’t want to see anymore - like wedding dresses for a user who broke off her engagement, or nursery decor for a user who suffered a miscarriage. The feature, which Pinterest is calling the Home Feed Tuner, will let users review and manually edit their activity history and interests, essentially telling the algorithm what to remember and what to forget."
Here's what the option looks like for me on desktop:
Click on any of the toggles for any topic and you'll get a pop-up notifying you of the action you've taken.
It's similar to Facebook's 'Ad Preferences' listing, which enables you to remove certain advertisers or topics which Facebook has pegged you with, based on your activity.
But Facebook doesn't provide the same option for its algorithm recommendations. You can, of course, still tune your experiences on all platforms by choosing the 'I don't want to see this' options on specific posts, which will then inform the system of your preferences. But Pinterest's option aims to provide more overarching control, which will help users enhance their on-platform experience, and could make it even more engaging.
As noted by Oremus, if the option is available to you, you can try it out at this link.
UPDATE (10/16): Pinterest has announced that 'Tune your home feed' is now available to all users, and that it will also enable users to get related recommendations for their secret boards, which were previously excluded from matching considerations.
