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Comment by liendolucas | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the obsession of some companies to recommend things. I'm happy not only for not paying Netflix but also for not wasting time watching crap. I have my own manual recommender: browse IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes of past directors, cast, etc that I've enjoyed. Also from a good old friend that from time to time recommends me films as we have very similar preferences. Randomly browsing genres worked very well too. That has become a near perfect movie recommender over many years.

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They push very aggressively for whatever new TV series / movie they just released that is "top 1 in your country".

Spotify is the same with whatever crappy playlists and podcasts they want you to listen.

YouTube doesn't even bother showing results that you searched past the 10 or so results, it's "content you might like" which is crap and unrelated to anything I've watched, 100% of the time.

We live in a crap-stream world LOL.

Is this a serious comment? Netflix does not and should not base its strategy on how you specifically choose to consume media. Surely you understand that most Netflix users don’t use IMDb/RT at all, let alone as a recommendation ‘engine’.

Netflix, especially Netflix back then, is highly reliant upon in-product recommendations because if people sought out specific pieces of media they’d often find that Netflix didn’t have it.

I dunno I think when they work recommendations are actually quite good. YouTube's recommendation system is very dumb but even so it's quite good (sorry Googler's; I'm sure you have optimised the wrong metric extremely well). Amazon's "people also looked at" is very useful - more useful than the actual search in my experience.

I think it really falls down on Netflix because it doesn't have anything good to recommend to you 90% of the time. Doesn't matter how good your recommendation algorithm is if your catalogue is 90% dross and the user has already watched the remaining 10%.

Exactly. Give me proper filters in the search tool, I'll find my own movies.

This is fine (although not particularly in harmony with Netflix's business goals), but I think it's also a recipe for stagnation.

My question is: how do you discover new things that you might like even more?

I think about this more in terms of music than movies, but maybe it applies to many media.

Some people will listen to Aerosmith and The Eagles until they die. They do not need media discovery. But how do new artists find an audience and how does that audience find new artists?

Recommendation engines suck, but is this a failure of current implementations, or something more fundamental?

I do use the IMDB recommender but is rarely my first choice. I'm not entirely disconnected from recommendations, but I do take my time to pick what to see (by reading some critics you can also get related content). If it's something interesting and maybe not so similar to something that I've recently seen I consider watching it. I guess that at some point yes, you need to have some source where to pick things from. With music sometimes can get easier, you listen a band then learn that maybe a guitarist or bassist is now part of another project (or has been in a past band). Going to Wikipedia and starting with a band you're interested in you can get a ton of new music this way. Other times simply if you're listening something you like you can use Shazam.

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