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.
Ok, vibes based category system. Maybe we could let users determine what the vibes are, and label the game accordingly. They could assign multiple labels to each game as they liked, and we could use those labels to try and guess what is relevant to each user. We could even call these labels 'tags'!