In Praise of Randomness

I’m a big fan of randomness – under controlled circumstances, of course. Actually, only under one circumstance.

I’ll start again.

I’m a big fan of setting my music player to “random” or “shuffle” mode. I have what some would call eclectic tastes, and my library reflects that: if a music player were to truly play random songs from my library I might hear a classic blues number followed by a hard-core death metal song followed by some house or trance stuff followed by some old school (or new school) rap/R&B, followed by some Afro Jazz, followed by… well, you get the idea. There’s a lot of stuff in there.
A number of years ago Microsoft introduced a “feature” into Windows Media Player which I disliked because it broke the random feature: it would allow you to manually rate songs (which wasn’t so bad), but it would also track how often songs were played and internally nudge ratings up or down such that the more you played a particular song the higher its rating would go. Then when you asked WMP to “randomly” play songs it would give higher priority to songs that were rated higher.

On the surface of it this sounds like a great feature, until you think about it for 2 seconds. (No, “surface” wasn’t meant to be a pun, and yes, I’m claiming that the Microsoft engineers spent less than 2 seconds thinking about this feature.) Think about how this will play out in real life:

1. You turn on your computer, fire up Windows Media Player, and listen to music for an hour. This means you’ll hear about 15 songs, give or take.
2. As you listen to each of those 15 songs it gets a slight nudge from WMP to give it a higher rating. (Already the logic falls down here – you’re not listening to those songs because they’re awesome, you’re listening to them because WMP randomly put them on – but that’s a side note.)
3. After an hour you realize that you haven’t masturbated to porn in a long time so you turn off the music, watch some videos, and then go to the kitchen for some water to rehydrate yourself.
4. The next day you log back onto the computer, fire up WMP again, and tell it to randomly assign you some songs, but because you listened to those 15 songs yesterday they now have a slightly higher rating so they’re slightly more likely to show up in your playlist than other songs in your library. Depending on the size of your playlist this slight nudge to these songs may not be noticeable, you might not hear any of those original 15 songs, but you might – you’re more likely to hear them than to hear any of the other songs in your library, even if the extra probability is still very small. Of course, if you do hear any of those songs they’ll get nudged again.
5. The real effect of this gets felt over time. Any time you listen to a song it gets a slight nudge as WMP assumes it’s more of a favourite than songs that haven’t been played, and therefore it becomes more likely to show up on random playlists, at which point it gets another nudge upward becoming even more likely to show up on playlists, ad infinitum. And the reciprocal is also true: Songs that don’t make it into your initial listening sessions become less and less likely over time to show up in WMP, since other songs are getting rated higher and higher and therefore are becoming more and more likely to get chosen by WMP to be played.

There’s another side effect from this: A song that gets played over and over and over again will start to get tiresome; “Not this song again!” I’ll think, from time to time. But the more I hear a song the more likely it will be to get chosen over and over again – the algorithm is now such that songs that annoy me from being played too much are more likely to turn up when I’m listening to music, and annoy me even more.

They haven’t stated it explicitly, but I think Google’s music service does something similar when it comes to “randomly” selecting songs; trying to choose the information best suited to your request is Google’s strength, so of course they’d lean toward “smart randomness” when designing their music player. (“Based on the fact that he got an email today from his wife that his dog died, maybe we should play a bunch of country music when he asks for ‘random’ songs...”) I haven’t seen this documented as a feature of the service, but I have noticed that once I hear a song I’m more likely to continue hearing it, as opposed to some of the other songs in the corners of my music library that sit there gathering dust.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but so far this post has had nothing to do with pornography. Let’s rectify that, shall we?

I try to include dirty pictures with almost all of my posts, and when I’m writing about porn I like it’s easy to do so; if I’m going to write a post about orgies or cumshots or boobies it’s a deep and genuine pleasure to browse through the relevant Smutty hashtags looking for good pictures. Unfortunately, sometimes I also write posts about porn I dislike, which makes it more difficult to find pictures. If I want to write about, say, fisting, there may be photos that will be sexy, or photos that will at least illustrate the point and not be as bad as other fisting photos, but in order to find them I have to scroll through a hashtag or two that are crammed full of pictures I don’t enjoy. If I want to write about scat I won’t even bother looking because it’s not worth the pain, and if I am writing about child porn I’m simply not going to put any pictures at all because I have a soul.

And as I was writing these posts about porn I dislike, and looking through Smutty for relevant pictures and trying to quickly scroll past the ones that turned me off, the main thought going through my mind was how much I suffer for my readers, and how I deserve, at the very least, a slurpy blowjob from a sexy girl. (Who swallows.)

But I’ve noticed something: I’m starting to see photos in my regular Smutty stream that I wouldn’t have expected to see. I come across fisting photos more often than I used to, and golden shower photos more than I used to, and some other types of porn that I dislike are also starting to pollute my feed more than they used to. And I think it’s because Smutty has remembered the different searches I’ve done, assumed that searching for something equates to liking it (or at least being curious about it – a fairly reasonable assumption, if you’re going to make an assumption at all), and is doing the same sort of “nudging” of pictures into my feed that my music players do with my music.

Either that or I’m just hypersensitive to certain types of porn after writing posts decrying them; perhaps nothing has changed in Smutty, and I’m just noticing things more than I did. Or maybe my posts are sparking a reaction in the world of porn: “He says he doesn’t like fisting? Quick, everyone post fisting photos to Smutty! That’ll teach him to have an opinion!”

But really… I think Smutty is actually putting more of these photos in my stream after searching for those topics.

All this to say: it’s now all the more apparent how much I suffer for my blog readers. Instead of (or in addition to) that slurpy blowjob, I think I deserve to have that sexy girl lay me back, straddle me, and slowly “thank” me to completion. Please submit your applications via the comment box below; you’ll need to provide “proof of sexiness,” supply your own airfare, and most importantly convince me that you’re not a psycho before I agree to meet you. Offer valid until the end of time or until I’m too old to get it up anymore, whichever comes first.

 
(“Whichever comes first” sounds like it should be a pun, but it wasn’t meant to be.)