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Interesting question! A quick Google search for "predictors of interestingness" shows that several studies were made to see what makes something interesting, an

by inerte 16y ago

Interesting question! A quick Google search for "predictors of interestingness" shows that several studies were made to see what makes something interesting, and on different areas. For example, what makes a piece of text interesting, what makes a picture interesting, what makes a song interesting, etc... Now, interesting is different than "like", which is different than passion or love, which are all different than studying for school or work, or an obligation. But anyway, a very good question, you gave me inspiration to delve on this topic and come up with lots of different approaches to determine what people will thing it's interesting.

samd 16y ago
Interestingness is quite complex, and those studies seem to be about absolute interestingness. I wonder what predictors would determine relative interestingness. For example, given a set of articles that a person found interesting in the past how well could you predict that some new article will be interesting to that person? How well could you predict that given articles their friends found interesting? What about articles that came from a source that produced interesting articles in the past, or articles that were tagged with the same words, and so on. Furthermore, what algorithm would be best? A type of Bayesian filtering is really effective at separating spam from non-spam, would it be effective at filtering interesting from non-interesting?