4 ms·

I wasn't old enough to remember it, but when search engines tried to do this in the 90s, it became clear that people preferred machine recommendations. See yaho

I wasn't old enough to remember it, but when search engines tried to do this in the 90s, it became clear that people preferred machine recommendations. See yahoo directory, look smart.

fullshark 6y ago
This is different though, because of the potential exclusivity of the corpus. It would be like if Yahoo could hand pick websites and stop competing websites from retrieving them.
MBCook 6y ago
I don’t think it became clear people prefer algorithms, I think the fundamental problem was with the millions of websites Yahoo couldn’t scale. HBO is operating on a much more tractable problem. Human curation may work better here.
- ethanbond 6y ago
  And it's not obvious that people want to discover art the same way they want to discover information (obviously not implying that Google can't be used to discover art).
- munk-a 6y ago
  HBO will never scale itself beyond it's own ability to comprehend itself, or, if that happens, it's quite a ways off. Considering HBO is throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at each of these shows paying twenty bucks for manual curation on top of that doesn't sound unreasonable.
skciva 6y ago
It feels like different problem sets might yield different results no? As an avid music fan the ways I've sought out new material go as follows: - Originally, recommendations via trusted outlets / forum members - Not so long ago, Spotify algorithm recommendations - Currently, curated recommendations via trusted outlets / social media posters My anecdotal experience between Netflix/HBO follows a similar pattern: I tend to first go to a provider like HBO when seeking out new content, assuming quality is higher than whatever Netflix is pushing on me these days. In contrast, a roommate of mine almost exclusively uses Netflix. She is more of the put on whatever, maybe pay attention maybe not type of viewer. I guess summed up the main difference FOR ME between the two is HBO: "I need something good!" and Netflix: "I need something new!"
sgift 6y ago
People preferred it because Google - at the time - had found a scalable solution which gave (mostly) the best results. Why should I search for hours through directories if someone give me what I want after only entering a few words? No one has found the "page rank of movies/series" yet, so I think HBO has a better chance here.
- gregmac 6y ago
  > No one has found the "page rank of movies/series" yet, so I think HBO has a better chance here. I'm not so sure -- I think the problem is no one has deployed it. As a consumer, what I want is: based on my viewing history and/or shows I've said I like, show me more shows/movies I'll like. What I currently get is: shows/movies that are in a similar style and genre to what I've watched or liked. The algorithm doesn't seem to take into account "good" vs "bad" movies. The result is if I just randomly pick some movie from Netflix's "Because you watched.." recommendation, there's a very high chance I'm going to end up watching something I don't like because it isn't good. As a concrete example, I just went to Netflix movies. "Because you watched Avengers: Infinity War...". There are 6 movies on the first page, 2 of which I've seen and have high Rotten Tomato scores (they are both Indiana Jones movies, with 88% and 85%). The other 4 have RT scores of 31%, 27%, 12%, and 3%. (Don't get me wrong, there are movies I do like that have low RT scores, and there are movies with high RT scores that I don't like, but generally a bad movie is a bad movie and more often than not there's a correlation with RT scores.) Even if I could filter by "RT score > 60%" that would cut down on a lot of garbage, even if it means I might miss a couple movies/shows I'd actually like. This would change my personal perception from "The vast majority of content on Netflix isn't really worth watching" to something more positive. Note I still subscribe despite this -- there's still ample worthwhile content. I just don't watch things based on Netflix's recommendations alone. Certainly it is possible to come up with something better than that blunt filter. So the question is: why don't they?

I wasn't old enough to remember it, but when search engines tried to do this in the 90s, it became clear that people preferred machine recommendations. See yahoo directory, look smart.

fullshark 6y ago

This is different though, because of the potential exclusivity of the corpus. It would be like if Yahoo could hand pick websites and stop competing websites from retrieving them.

MBCook 6y ago

I don’t think it became clear people prefer algorithms, I think the fundamental problem was with the millions of websites Yahoo couldn’t scale. HBO is operating on a much more tractable problem. Human curation may work better here.

ethanbond 6y ago
And it's not obvious that people want to discover art the same way they want to discover information (obviously not implying that Google can't be used to discover art).
munk-a 6y ago
HBO will never scale itself beyond it's own ability to comprehend itself, or, if that happens, it's quite a ways off. Considering HBO is throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at each of these shows paying twenty bucks for manual curation on top of that doesn't sound unreasonable.

skciva 6y ago

It feels like different problem sets might yield different results no? As an avid music fan the ways I've sought out new material go as follows: - Originally, recommendations via trusted outlets / forum members - Not so long ago, Spotify algorithm recommendations - Currently, curated recommendations via trusted outlets / social media posters My anecdotal experience between Netflix/HBO follows a similar pattern: I tend to first go to a provider like HBO when seeking out new content, assuming quality is higher than whatever Netflix is pushing on me these days. In contrast, a roommate of mine almost exclusively uses Netflix. She is more of the put on whatever, maybe pay attention maybe not type of viewer. I guess summed up the main difference FOR ME between the two is HBO: "I need something good!" and Netflix: "I need something new!"

sgift 6y ago

People preferred it because Google - at the time - had found a scalable solution which gave (mostly) the best results. Why should I search for hours through directories if someone give me what I want after only entering a few words? No one has found the "page rank of movies/series" yet, so I think HBO has a better chance here.

gregmac 6y ago
> No one has found the "page rank of movies/series" yet, so I think HBO has a better chance here. I'm not so sure -- I think the problem is no one has deployed it. As a consumer, what I want is: based on my viewing history and/or shows I've said I like, show me more shows/movies I'll like. What I currently get is: shows/movies that are in a similar style and genre to what I've watched or liked. The algorithm doesn't seem to take into account "good" vs "bad" movies. The result is if I just randomly pick some movie from Netflix's "Because you watched.." recommendation, there's a very high chance I'm going to end up watching something I don't like because it isn't good. As a concrete example, I just went to Netflix movies. "Because you watched Avengers: Infinity War...". There are 6 movies on the first page, 2 of which I've seen and have high Rotten Tomato scores (they are both Indiana Jones movies, with 88% and 85%). The other 4 have RT scores of 31%, 27%, 12%, and 3%. (Don't get me wrong, there are movies I do like that have low RT scores, and there are movies with high RT scores that I don't like, but generally a bad movie is a bad movie and more often than not there's a correlation with RT scores.) Even if I could filter by "RT score > 60%" that would cut down on a lot of garbage, even if it means I might miss a couple movies/shows I'd actually like. This would change my personal perception from "The vast majority of content on Netflix isn't really worth watching" to something more positive. Note I still subscribe despite this -- there's still ample worthwhile content. I just don't watch things based on Netflix's recommendations alone. Certainly it is possible to come up with something better than that blunt filter. So the question is: why don't they?