Lessons Learnt from Building Friend Recommendation Systems.
Published in The 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining Conference (WSDM), 2024
Friend recommendation systems in online social networks such as Snapchat help users find friends and build meaningful connections, leading to heightened user engagement and retention. While friend recommendation systems follow the classical recommendation system paradigm that consists of retrieval and ranking, they pose distinctive challenges different from item recommendation systems (e.g. Youtube videos, Amazon products, Netflix movies), and require special considerations in building one. In this paper, we elucidate the unique challenges encountered and share invaluable insights from developing the friend recommendation system for hundreds of millions of users on Snapchat.