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Interesting to ponder. I'm working on an app for podcast discovery (think Youtube for podcasts; I've put the twitter link in my HN profile page if anyone is int
by firasd 10y ago
Interesting to ponder. I'm working on an app for podcast discovery (think Youtube for podcasts; I've put the twitter link in my HN profile page if anyone is interested in updates) and I've been thinking about this. I am generally anti-curation in my current approach. In this context I don't like the concept of people asking you to upvote something on Product Hunt, or leave a review on iTunes so it filters to the top of the list and gets some editor's attention, etc. I kinda prefer the Netflix or Youtube approach that tries to figure out what you'd like based on your viewing history, or items related to what you're viewing, or what other people who like what you're viewing have also liked... (Related, I also don't like the idea of 'categories' where you have to select whether an item is 'History' or 'Politics'. I'd like my software to be able to group items intelligently without manual intervention...)
So in a way, with something like the way Netflix replaced explicit star-ratings based recommendations with viewing-history based recommendations, we are still looking for curation but in a subtler, more algorithmic way... same with Google PageRank and Facebook Newsfeed for that matter. Maybe algorithmic filtering is just curation at scale.
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoI wish you luck. I prefer these sorts of curations much better than piecing together things based on reviews. I haven't had Netflix for years: Youtube can be fairly pleasant, until I click on something that "poisons" the feed. Surprisingly, Spotify does fairly well on recommendations for me, considering I have eclectic and sometimes unpopular listening habits. I'd consider the app you are working on :)
- dredmorbius 10y agoOn YouTube: 1. Deleting from history any "poison" content -- generally, stupid shit -- "that corner of YouTube" stuff, helps. 2. I've largely abandoned logged-in use of YouTube for numerous reasons. Its app is all but unusable due to pre-roll ads. (Tasteful banners I can stomach.). Routinely purging all history, and/or resetting device ID helps. 3. Purposeful and directed use of YouTube, or, frankly, any other service, is best. Search for what you're interested in and read/view that. Much of my use is autodidactic and informational. There's actually a wealth of information online now, if you can filter out the crud. 4. Being able to blacklist the stupid shit channels would help a hell of a lot. If I could personally banish to the depths of Hades any channel that posted stupid crap, things would be markedly improved.
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoI do some of these from time to time, and weirdly, the 'back' button on the browser helps temporarily. #3 is my usual mode for initial watching, but I'm prone to go with suggestions from that when I'm watching. Sometimes, even with best intentions, it gets messy. Number 4, that would be most excellent. :D
- dredmorbius 10y agoIf you're on desktop, installing Stylish and removing YouTube's comments and Suggestions panes is a huge win. You'll still see suggestions in-video, but those are slightly less annoying. (I've also noticed that, well fed and pruned, YouTube's suggestions actually tend toward useful these days, though that's with exceptionally aggressive pruning.) Yet another option is to use youtube-dl to download and play content locally. I do this pretty much exclusively on desktop, and find it quite helpful.