tldr; I believe personal recommendations > ratings and we need to lean more on that
As a slight tangent, I do agree that personal recommendations are the most reliable. That’s kind of where we’re going with the new recommend button. I understand ratings are not the same as recommendations, but when selecting a movie to watch, I believe both are used to the same end goal.
My perfect system goes like this… (don’t hold me to this, we’re still trying to figure out what’s possible hardware-wise behind the scenes)
- User’s like yourselves get to recommend a certain amount of items. We need to limit recommendations in some way so that users don’t go ham and recommend everything they watch (25 total, 1 per month, 10 per year…
). - These recommendations are used to elevate top tier movie/show choices to the people that follow you.
a. Example, I follow 20 people total. We add up all the recommendations from those 20 people and sort by the most recommended. (already works like this) - We use the recommended items to provide similar user suggestions
a. If I have 20 out of 25 recommendations in common with another user, we probably have very similar taste and it would benefit me to see what else they like.
b. This is another reason I want to limit recommended items. It will make people really think before recommending and create a strong relation between similar users. - User’s find more likeminded users and get better recommendations.
The only thing i dislike about this is this creates an echo chamber effect to some degree. Still thinking about how to create variation here so that I might get recommended something that is great, but not in my normal wheel house of what I watch.