

A philosophy of movie recommendations - lizxrice
http://blog.tanktop.tv/2014/01/a-philosophy-of-recommendations.html

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normloman
Pigeonholing is the reason I can't stand Pandora radio. I like novelty, and I
want someone to recommend types of music I haven't heard before. Pandora's
model takes what you already like and gives you more of it. How is that useful
to anyone but the closeminded?

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chaosphere2112
Actually, this isn't quite correct. At least, not for a station I've been
listening to for the last few years (3-4). It started out based off of OK Go,
and has continuously introduced me to new music that I either like or dislike
(it does keep trying to get me to listen to nordic death metal). I've learned
about a lot of new bands, and have actually managed to develop a (much more
accurate than my previous) sense of "current" music.

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drcongo
I like the Mood option. I asked for something "Funny and Feelgood", it offered
me The Act of Killing.

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thibauts
For those who can read french there is an interesting experiment here
[http://culturewok.com/lewokentravaux/cine](http://culturewok.com/lewokentravaux/cine)

The indexing is based exclusively on mood and the ratings are user-
contributed. I can forward contacts if someone wants to know more about the
project.

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lizxrice
Thanks - that's really interesting. I'd be really interested to know how many
user ratings were needed for such fine-grained controls?

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thibauts
How many ? As far as I know, as many ratings as there are movies. Of course,
the more ratings the more "accurate" is the system, if we can use such a word
for a search engine that aims more for a kind of serendipity attracted by
moods than for _exact_ matches (how exact can be this kind of query, btw ?). I
many be biased but I feel we need this kind of system at a large scale!

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catalonia
Like the mood option - very helpful. I personally also like it when a
recommendation engine tells me why it thinks I will like the
movie/restaurant/whatever. That way i can decide whether the recommendation
makes sense for me instead of just trusting the "secret sauce". Thoughts on
this?

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lizxrice
It's really interesting the extent to which some people want to 'see the
working' behind recommendations, while for others it's just clutter. I think
some people want to build the mental model of what's going on, where others
want it to feel like 'magic' (when it works, at least!)

I think my gut reaction against it is that people might reject a perfectly
good recommendation because they didn't like the reasoning. For example, if we
recommend something to Alex because Bob likes it, but Alex doesn't trust Bob's
judgement, then Alex might reject the recommendation even if in practice she
always enjoys the same things as Bob, she just doesn't realise it.

On the other hand, collecting feedback about whether the user agreed with the
way the recommendation is made might be helpful in improving the way it works.

Definitely something to think about though.

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catalonia
Agreed - Different users will have different reactions. Some will want to see
the reasoning at least when they have just started using the service, just to
see if the service works for them, while for others, it might be clutter. I
like how Nara's iOS app does this (although it too doesn't do it perfectly)..
they show you the recommended restaurants for you. When you click on any one
result, they have a tab which shows you why they recommended it. That way, its
there for the users who are struggling to make the leap of faith but not in
the way of those who already trust the recommendation.

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eterps
It would be nice if you could rate movies using shortcut keys (when hovering
with the mouse pointer on a movie). That would be really helpful in rating
lots of movies.

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afterburner
Or even better, let me import my list of Flixster ratings (or a flat file with
some standard format).

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chadwickthebold
I assume there's some technical reason recommendations from Netflix, Amazon
Prime, and Hulu aren't shown here? Is this localized for the UK or something?

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lizxrice
Yes, right now we focus on UK providers

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drcongo
You know we get Netflix in the UK?

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lizxrice
And we'd love to list them, but they don't want to play.

[http://blog.tanktop.tv/2013/08/what-happened-to-
netflix.html](http://blog.tanktop.tv/2013/08/what-happened-to-netflix.html)

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elliott34
why is there no netflix or amazon

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philpearl1
And we'd love to list Netflix, but they don't want to play.
[http://blog.tanktop.tv/2013/08/what-happened-to-
netflix.html](http://blog.tanktop.tv/2013/08/what-happened-to-netflix.html)

We do list LoveFilm - which is Amazon's UK service. We don't list Amazon
Instant because we're UK focused at the moment.

