3 ms·

The difference is that those old ways allowed for greater personal agency. Perusing old books requires selection and even a bit of curation on part of the buyer

by tomc1985 9y ago

The difference is that those old ways allowed for greater personal agency. Perusing old books requires selection and even a bit of curation on part of the buyer, whereas algorithmic recommendations make deciding fairly mindless. You write as if the filters you lament are bad. I think, given the overabundance of mischaracterized crap that seems to clutter up 'algorithmically' filtered exchanges (YouTube, Netflix, etc) I will take human curation and filtration any day of the week, biases and all. Pandora and Spotify still can't build or execute a playlist like a good DJ can. Netflix's recommendations still miss the mark way more than talking about movies/shows with friends.

kristianc 9y ago
> Pandora and Spotify still can't build or execute a playlist like a good DJ can. Spotify's playlists are at least in part human curated, so not sure how you got to that conclusion.
- melq 9y ago
  He's obviously talking about the ones that aren't, such as the 'Discover Weekly' and the way it will guess at what to play next after an album finishes. I believe his point is that the algorithms don't generate playlists or dj mixes with the same polish as a professional human and I'm inclined to agree. That said, I do think their recommendation engine produces decent results, but I don't think the composition of the list is something it focuses on. Rather its just a list of unrelated tracks it thinks you'd be inclined to enjoy on their own.
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    Exactly. A playlist full of tracks chosen at seeming random lacks the inter-track context that a DJ can add through his choice in selections. Auto-generated playlists have no sense of flow and transition. You can similarly ruin a good, curated playlist by hitting shuffle.
andrewjl 9y ago
Cuts both ways, for me domain-specific blogs and goodreads (with reviews by other people) influenced my book buying choices way more than any any algorithm and I suspect I'm not the only one.

kristianc 9y ago

> Pandora and Spotify still can't build or execute a playlist like a good DJ can. Spotify's playlists are at least in part human curated, so not sure how you got to that conclusion.

melq 9y ago
He's obviously talking about the ones that aren't, such as the 'Discover Weekly' and the way it will guess at what to play next after an album finishes. I believe his point is that the algorithms don't generate playlists or dj mixes with the same polish as a professional human and I'm inclined to agree. That said, I do think their recommendation engine produces decent results, but I don't think the composition of the list is something it focuses on. Rather its just a list of unrelated tracks it thinks you'd be inclined to enjoy on their own.
- tomc1985 9y ago
  Exactly. A playlist full of tracks chosen at seeming random lacks the inter-track context that a DJ can add through his choice in selections. Auto-generated playlists have no sense of flow and transition. You can similarly ruin a good, curated playlist by hitting shuffle.

andrewjl 9y ago

Cuts both ways, for me domain-specific blogs and goodreads (with reviews by other people) influenced my book buying choices way more than any any algorithm and I suspect I'm not the only one.