Recommendations for the Recommenders: Reflections on Prioritizing Diversity in the RecSys Challenge

The RecSys Challenge 2024, co-organized by the Danish news outlet Ekstra Bladet, called for participants to develop a news recommender system that accurately predicts which news article a reader is most likely to select from a given list. In the context of this challenge, the organizers explicitly stated their interest in beyond-accuracy objectives. However, the setup of the challenge did not facilitate pursuing these more normative goals: a missed opportunity, given the quality of the dataset. In this paper, we highlight the issues encountered in a submission that prioritized normative diversity. We reflect on the responsibility of conferences, RecSys in particular, when it comes to promoting beyond-accuracy objectives and provide recommendations for future challenge iterations.