[HN Gopher] Scholars once feared that the book index would destr... ___________________________________________________________________ Scholars once feared that the book index would destroy reading Author : hhs Score : 82 points Date : 2022-02-20 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lithub.com) (TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com) | jhoechtl wrote: | Scholars once feared that a search engine would destroy | intelligent reasoning. | mortenlarsen wrote: | It did, when it turned out you could game the system to move | eyeballs from reality, to fiction that confirmed peoples | biases. (both search engines and other content ranking | systems). | nate_meurer wrote: | That's a good point, and undoubtedly true for some. But I | honestly believe that the discoverability of knowledge that | Internet search enables is the most powerful and beneficial | tool humanity has ever made. It certainly is for me | personally. | [deleted] | frostburg wrote: | I have heard (yes, somewhat recently) some classicists argue that | the move from scrolls to books, with the text segmented in pages, | was also harmful with arguments along similar lines. | blurker wrote: | This reminds me of an episode of 99% Invisible [0] that I | listened to. That episode also covered a bit about the history of | indexes (which is relevant to the history of alphabetical | sorting), including how scholars feared and resisted the adoption | of indexes. It was super fascinating and I highly recommend | giving it a listen if you found this article interesting! | | [0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/ | mortenlarsen wrote: | Thanks for that. Now I have 530 episodes in my podcast queue :) | DantesKite wrote: | On a side note, I've always wish there was an API that could | recommend media content. | | Like you could just plug it into any playlist of songs, | movies, or books, have it do some algorithmic analysis, and | spit out what you would probably find fascinating. | ghaff wrote: | You've basically described recommendation engines generally | and they tend to deliver mediocre to awful results for a | bunch of different reasons. I remember hearing talks on the | topic over a decade ago and things haven't really gotten | much better--and my sense is that most people have given up | on actually creating a _good_ engine. | bombcar wrote: | I've found much better results using your lists to find | _people_ with some overlap, and then looking at what they | have. | | Which is basically what HN is. | timbeccue wrote: | Do recommendation algorithms not take this into account | already? Perhaps privacy policies make it harder to | automate this effectively. | bombcar wrote: | The famous ones may, but it ends up taking into account | "what do we want you to see/listen/look at" much more | into account. | ghaff wrote: | The original Netflix prize also, it turned out, wasn't | really implemented for a number of reasons. But one of | them was apparently that Netflix doesn't necessarily want | to give you the best recommendations; it wants you to | keep your subscription. There's certainly some overlap | between those objectives but they're not the same thing. | mortenlarsen wrote: | I have played ~5 seconds of one random episode from the | front page on my Netflix profile since i subscribed | around 2016. This was just to verify that it worked. | | It still chuckles me up when they send me an e-mail once | in a while, about what I might like based my past viewing | preferences. | | Note: My GF, has a profile that she uses sometimes, but | mine haven't been used since the account was created. | bombcar wrote: | They're also incentivized to show you things that cost | them "nothing" or "less" than others things - and if they | KNOW the things you'd like to watch it's better for them | to string those out so you keep subscribed. | | The perfect Netflix customer is one always on the cusp of | cancelling from lack of use but never actually does ... | ghaff wrote: | In addition to the cost angle, they're also incentivized | to push you towards exclusives. Things you can watch on | other services (assuming you subscribe and know they're | there) are much less of a hook to keep you on Netflix. | ghaff wrote: | It depends what the overlap is of course. Something like | music probably has a big age component in what people | like for example. | | But, yes, in general friends with at least reasonably | similar preferences to myself are almost certainly a | better source of recommendations for video, music, and | books than a recommendation engine. | zdragnar wrote: | I remember when Pandora was attempting to compute the "DNA" | of a song (assorted classifications like key, tempo, style) | and recommend music based on that. You could then get a | "station" based on a single song, and fine-tune it by | adding more or disliking songs as they came up. | | The end result was underwhelming- it never really captured | the characteristics that I actually liked about particular | songs, and ended up being crappy or so narrowly tuned that | it lacked enough variety to be interesting. | | The concept is still around, but with less scientific | sounding fluff and, I think, more relaxed parameters for | recommendations. | ghaff wrote: | >You could then get a "station" based on a single song | | Apple Genius did something similar and it mostly worked | not badly because it was drawing from songs in your | collection already. | | You're more likely to like songs in specific genres and | time periods and songs that are popular generally. Once | you get beyond that, it gets harder. And the situation is | probably even harder with video unless you basically | watch superhero films. | thaumasiotes wrote: | Did Pandora change at some point? | martyvis wrote: | As soon as I saw this post I thought it that podcast. It was | quite interesting how we take the alphabet as so fundamental. | (And with a surname beginning with "V" I was always frustrated | at school at being down the back of the line unless an | enlightened teacher occasionally mixed it up) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-20 23:00 UTC)