The mode gets shown more, so it gets picked more, so the model grows more confident the mode is what people want, and the tails starve. Within a few dozen rounds, a catalogue that began almost perfectly even collapses onto one dominant option. But why does it collapse toward the mode rather than fan out across all that individual data?
I read about this article in Pluralistic’s blog. It felt timely, as just yesterday we were having the same discussion about how everything feels the same. About how all houses look the same from the inside, about how all AirBnBs are the same, about how all cars look the same and so on.