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This is an issue facing much of online media content (imo). Take for example music. I use youtube to find music, where-as I used to regularly spend money at rec

This is an issue facing much of online media content (imo). Take for example music. I use youtube to find music, where-as I used to regularly spend money at record stores. At this point youtube represents a far more varied buffet for me to pick from. HOWEVER, since selections and recommendations are algorithmically generated, and clearly drive towards sponsored artists (and sometimes what appear to be algorithmic black holes: looking at you Tycho), the variety of the recommendations I get tends to get be pretty damn stale. It takes substantial effort on my part to introduce variety into the system and when allowed to run on its own, it always seems to regress towards a very static set of recommendations. I think the analog variant of this, a record store resolves this by at least forcing you to walk past a bunch of music you might not have other wise listened to. Same thing is true with the book store. You might not be into the classics, but you'll walk past them everytime to get to sci-fi. Eventually you might be like, eh, sure, lets try out some Dostoevsky. I think a possible resolution to this is to stop treating recommendation algorithms as a purely a product recommendation system or as some black box secret sauce. Give people the ability to work with and manually adjust the algorithms that are built to offer them products/ make recommendations. Allow users to work in partnership with the algorithms to get a more varied (or less varied) range of recommendations.

op03 6y ago
Depends on the personality trait distribution in the population around the store - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory#Personality_dimensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Invent... Not everyone has the openness to new experience trait.
pixelface 6y ago
you may find Bandcamp addresses some of the of issues you outline above. I do what I refer to as bandcamping: sort by new releases, filter for physical media and major genre. start flipping through everything and be pleasantly surprised. my reasoning on the physical media part is that it raises the barrier to entry enough that you're browsing things someone believed in enough to put on tape or vinyl. the fact that Bandcamp seems to be the best payout to artists as well as free unlimited ad-free streaming and drm-free downloads of your library makes it really attractive compared to other options.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Use search rather than recommendations. CSS extensions (Stylus) and uBlock origin's element blocker can remove YT's recommendations entirely. That (along with. nuking comments) is a tremendous UX boost.
- jointpdf 6y ago
  Search has a discovery problem, though—you have to know what you’re looking for. Even if you know, it’s increasingly difficult to locate it via keyword search. And isn’t Google/YouTube search a type of recommendation engine anyways (i.e. results are conditional on your browsing history and other factors)?
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    True, though it varies somewhat by dommain. For, say, informational or academic topics, search is at least fair. When researching a specific author or authority, better. For music, not quite so much. I don't have a YT account, have used it under Incognito for years (keeping session histories minimal and fresh, and as of a few months ago, block all cookies entirely. This kills some search relevance, but is exceptionally good at avoiding that corner of youtube --- the zone of ever more finely curated crap. YT's lack of channel-blocking (never, ever, on any circumstances show results from $CHANNEL in search or recommendations, or of creating short-term playlists based on search results, are increasingly crippling. On the latter, mps-youtube has excellent search and list-curation features I use heavily.
hrktb 6y ago
> Give people the ability to work with and manually adjust the algorithms that are built to offer them products/ make recommendations. I think most people are already there. Even non technical people see their recommandations get flooded by dozens of similar videos, and quickly realize they’ll have to find by themselves different videos if they want to see their recommended stream change. I had my son explain he didn’t want to click on the unboxing video even if he was interested, because it would make all his feed unboxing videos.

op03 6y ago

Depends on the personality trait distribution in the population around the store - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory#Personality_dimensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Invent... Not everyone has the openness to new experience trait.

pixelface 6y ago

you may find Bandcamp addresses some of the of issues you outline above. I do what I refer to as bandcamping: sort by new releases, filter for physical media and major genre. start flipping through everything and be pleasantly surprised. my reasoning on the physical media part is that it raises the barrier to entry enough that you're browsing things someone believed in enough to put on tape or vinyl. the fact that Bandcamp seems to be the best payout to artists as well as free unlimited ad-free streaming and drm-free downloads of your library makes it really attractive compared to other options.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Use search rather than recommendations. CSS extensions (Stylus) and uBlock origin's element blocker can remove YT's recommendations entirely. That (along with. nuking comments) is a tremendous UX boost.

jointpdf 6y ago
Search has a discovery problem, though—you have to know what you’re looking for. Even if you know, it’s increasingly difficult to locate it via keyword search. And isn’t Google/YouTube search a type of recommendation engine anyways (i.e. results are conditional on your browsing history and other factors)?
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  True, though it varies somewhat by dommain. For, say, informational or academic topics, search is at least fair. When researching a specific author or authority, better. For music, not quite so much. I don't have a YT account, have used it under Incognito for years (keeping session histories minimal and fresh, and as of a few months ago, block all cookies entirely. This kills some search relevance, but is exceptionally good at avoiding that corner of youtube --- the zone of ever more finely curated crap. YT's lack of channel-blocking (never, ever, on any circumstances show results from $CHANNEL in search or recommendations, or of creating short-term playlists based on search results, are increasingly crippling. On the latter, mps-youtube has excellent search and list-curation features I use heavily.

hrktb 6y ago

> Give people the ability to work with and manually adjust the algorithms that are built to offer them products/ make recommendations. I think most people are already there. Even non technical people see their recommandations get flooded by dozens of similar videos, and quickly realize they’ll have to find by themselves different videos if they want to see their recommended stream change. I had my son explain he didn’t want to click on the unboxing video even if he was interested, because it would make all his feed unboxing videos.