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Comment by heavymark | Hacker News Reader

This is like when Apple said their Music platform would be more human curated rather than algorithms like competitors such as Spotify. But the reason why I love Spotify's recommendations and not Apple's is because Spotify focuses on algorithms and does them so well.

Same with Netflix, in my experience they truly know what I will like to watch, they seem to know what shows I'll love and what shows I won't love but will help pass the time, and seem to show it to me just when I want it.

I imagine it takes a lot of time and lots of past history and data on users to create those algorithms so when starting out the human curation method is required. And for companies like Apple, may be the long term strategy because the alogrithm method that YouTube and Spotify comes at the cost of potential tracking and privacy concerns.

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In contrast to other commenters, I loved manually curated Apple Music playlists, I found so much great music through them in first 6 months of using their service. You could really feel that they were created by people with real passion for underground and experimental music, on par with best user-curated Spotify playlists. When they switched to algorithm based recommendations its quality tanked and I moved back to Spotify because it has better overall user experience on desktop and social features. Spotify's algorithms has never, ever introduced me to interesting new artist, it only suggest to me things that I either already know and like, already know and dislike or new things that pretend to be good but there is no original though behind them. Fortunately, a lot of independent music critics and enthusiasts have their own playlists with good, deep cuts - but you need to find them outside of Spotify, because their discovery features are so bad. I miss early Apple Music so, so much. It reminded me of prime years of Last.fm.

I think it also depends on what you listen to. I've seen plenty of people complain about Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist and how it doesn't get it right, but I love it. If you listen to a wide range of genres, it will give you a weird mix, but otherwise its been my go-to for many years now.

I agree with you regarding spotify (though in my opinion lastfm was better ages ago), but I completely disagree with Netflix. Even if it weights genres I might like, netflix always recommends me whatever is popular at the moment.

It might be because of the service balkanization, but in the past I was able to find hidden gems on netflix, the same afterwards with prime video, but nowdays not only I have to browse in the text catalogs you might find online to quickly search among all the stuff I don't like, to find something I might enjoy that would certainly be buried in netflix UI. And even worse, I find myself rewatching my favorites instead of being able to find something different than blockbusters in the platforms.

> Same with Netflix, in my experience they truly know what I will like to watch...

Wow, I'd love to live in that world. Once Netflix abandoned their 5 star system their recommendations really tanked for me. It feels like it's recommending more based on outrage & "engagement" than enjoyment for me. Meanwhile MovieLens [1] consistently guesses what I would rate a movie within +/- half a star, I think I'm using their Warrior recommendation algorithm. The tagging features on MovieLens help - apparently I most enjoy "visually appealing surreal mysteries".

But I absolutely agree about Spotify. Spotify seems like its actually learning from my Liked tracks, curated playlists and behaviour, and picks up on when my tastes shift to wildly different genres for a while.

[1] https://movielens.org/home

100% agreed re: Spotify, but Netflix's algorithm seems to think that if I liked Annihilation and Arrival then I'll like any young adult or action movie with scifi aesthetic.

Similarly, if I liked The Witch and Hereditary then top recommendations for me must be $5m budget cash grab teen slashers and haunted webcam gimmicks.

I think random selection would be more effective for me than the current Netflix algo(s).

> But the reason why I love Spotify's recommendations and not Apple's is because Spotify focuses on algorithms and does them so well.

The article literally makes the point that Spotify's system is much more human curated than Netflix because it heavily relies on human curated lists that are shared between users.

Spotify also makes it seamless to tunnel down a rabbit hole and then back up. I've done this across genres from one seed song while still enjoying and occasionally sampling new music along the way.

Netflix bothers me because they have a marketing bend that creates your tunnels for you.

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