I just got back from a few days of workshop and backpacking but am not in much of a mind to talk about it, so I ask you this question that is very far from my current mood, but which I was reminded of by the demands of relaxing upon returning home:
Good question. There's a related, more general question - why isn't Netflix (and other streaming services) more interested in recommendation? 20 years ago Netflix offered a million dollar prize for recommendation algorithms that outperformed their existing system. Now you never hear about it. Occasionally you can get a taste of what really good recommendation feels like. Tiktok is famously good at serving up content users like, and I think sometimes YouTube can be very good as well. But the big streaming sites don't seem to care.
Is it because the problem harder than it looks? Is it intractable? Is it because high-quality recommendation algorithms are jealously-guarded corporate secrets?
I think the answer is business models. Netflix and other big streamers don't care about recommendation as a problem because they want you to watch one of the dozen or so featured shows and movies that are in the current rotation. They are no longer in the library business, they are more like studios now, serving up seasonal content, much of which they have made, or at least paid for, themselves.
I think you’re right. Compared to the level of effort gone into “advertising,” ie., making people want what they produce, as opposed to librarianship, ie., giving people the right content for their personal situation, they practically haven’t tried to solve this problem. So I would expect that significant traction could be made by reconceiving of a streaming site as a personal librarian — something which offers you a range of choices, all of which develop your character in some important or useful way. To the user(s), it becomes more like a “choose your own adventure”; choose to ‘consume’ the works that give you the character you want to become.
Doing this well seems like it could be immensely valuable. Librarians are incredibly underrated as a profession - here in NZ there was a big fight about government pay equity where the govt essentially assumed that librarians jobs weren’t worth much.
But what could be more important than building the character of the next generation (or yourself for that matter?)
Now that I’ve typed this out, I’m keen to look at actually implementing this. The group thing is still hard but at least for an individual this should be a much better way of doing recommendations, beyond “here is something similar to what you already watched.”
Anyone seen anything similar to what I’m saying here?
I'm semi-obsessed by these questions. What, indeed, could be more important? And I do think the key is business models. I don't think you can make a serious effort to tackle this problem without starting from a foundational commitment to isolating it from the dominating incentives and pressures of partnerships, promotion, advertising, time-on-device, etc. You must have a clearly-articulated evaluation function which is explicitly articulated by the user. Putting this weight onto the user - forcing them to take responsibility for deciding what they want from a movie, song, book, etc. - is, to my mind, a major part of how solving this problem would improve the world.
100% agreement. Personal computing -- Truly personal -- is the answer to a lot of problems plagueing the world and particularly the infosphere today.
I am currently making a notes app based on this philosophy: every action/interaction that affects program behaviour is explictly either done by the user or is communicated to the user in a way they can understand. So the whole behaviour is necessarily *chosen* by the user in a deep sense. Notes apps are like "second brains" to their users so in my view we want them to be fundamentally responsible by/to/for/with the user, not a financial business model.
Can this even be done automatically? Group dynamics of greater than two members are generally chaotic so you would expect any group recommendation algorithm to be importantly wrong most of the time. Thinking about rewatches and "so bad it's good", people watch things together for different reasons that are not simply related to their individual preferences.
What is really needed here is some kind of well designed negotiation protocol implemented with software that helps a group figure out what kind of experience they want to have together.
What does that look like? No idea. What kind of naturally elicits the true information about what experiences people want to have with others other than just doing it live? Can we do better with software than that? It seems difficult to me because most of the information is hidden even to the participants.
Good question. There's a related, more general question - why isn't Netflix (and other streaming services) more interested in recommendation? 20 years ago Netflix offered a million dollar prize for recommendation algorithms that outperformed their existing system. Now you never hear about it. Occasionally you can get a taste of what really good recommendation feels like. Tiktok is famously good at serving up content users like, and I think sometimes YouTube can be very good as well. But the big streaming sites don't seem to care.
Is it because the problem harder than it looks? Is it intractable? Is it because high-quality recommendation algorithms are jealously-guarded corporate secrets?
I think the answer is business models. Netflix and other big streamers don't care about recommendation as a problem because they want you to watch one of the dozen or so featured shows and movies that are in the current rotation. They are no longer in the library business, they are more like studios now, serving up seasonal content, much of which they have made, or at least paid for, themselves.
I think you’re right. Compared to the level of effort gone into “advertising,” ie., making people want what they produce, as opposed to librarianship, ie., giving people the right content for their personal situation, they practically haven’t tried to solve this problem. So I would expect that significant traction could be made by reconceiving of a streaming site as a personal librarian — something which offers you a range of choices, all of which develop your character in some important or useful way. To the user(s), it becomes more like a “choose your own adventure”; choose to ‘consume’ the works that give you the character you want to become.
Doing this well seems like it could be immensely valuable. Librarians are incredibly underrated as a profession - here in NZ there was a big fight about government pay equity where the govt essentially assumed that librarians jobs weren’t worth much.
But what could be more important than building the character of the next generation (or yourself for that matter?)
Now that I’ve typed this out, I’m keen to look at actually implementing this. The group thing is still hard but at least for an individual this should be a much better way of doing recommendations, beyond “here is something similar to what you already watched.”
Anyone seen anything similar to what I’m saying here?
I'm semi-obsessed by these questions. What, indeed, could be more important? And I do think the key is business models. I don't think you can make a serious effort to tackle this problem without starting from a foundational commitment to isolating it from the dominating incentives and pressures of partnerships, promotion, advertising, time-on-device, etc. You must have a clearly-articulated evaluation function which is explicitly articulated by the user. Putting this weight onto the user - forcing them to take responsibility for deciding what they want from a movie, song, book, etc. - is, to my mind, a major part of how solving this problem would improve the world.
100% agreement. Personal computing -- Truly personal -- is the answer to a lot of problems plagueing the world and particularly the infosphere today.
I am currently making a notes app based on this philosophy: every action/interaction that affects program behaviour is explictly either done by the user or is communicated to the user in a way they can understand. So the whole behaviour is necessarily *chosen* by the user in a deep sense. Notes apps are like "second brains" to their users so in my view we want them to be fundamentally responsible by/to/for/with the user, not a financial business model.
Can this even be done automatically? Group dynamics of greater than two members are generally chaotic so you would expect any group recommendation algorithm to be importantly wrong most of the time. Thinking about rewatches and "so bad it's good", people watch things together for different reasons that are not simply related to their individual preferences.
What is really needed here is some kind of well designed negotiation protocol implemented with software that helps a group figure out what kind of experience they want to have together.
What does that look like? No idea. What kind of naturally elicits the true information about what experiences people want to have with others other than just doing it live? Can we do better with software than that? It seems difficult to me because most of the information is hidden even to the participants.