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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

This looks interesting, but I'm always sad to see consumer web apps still requiring you to sign up before you can try it out. Missing out on so many potential users. 1) sell the product then 2) ask for the customers info

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Agree. If there was a way to try it out without creating an account, I probably would. As it is, there is no chance unless for months I consistently hear from friends "You have to try MovieLens - it's brilliant." And I've never heard about it, so I close the tab.

Movielens is non-commercial product. Its emerged and maintained as a product of Grouplens Research group. They may not have put effort to integrate with some obvious SSO but its definitely worth a try.

P.S. I am biased because I have worked in Grouplens research lab for a short time and I have loved interacting with all the students and professors there.

Yes, I'm aware of the background, but surely if they want people to use it, they should take the best route to achieving that? Or if it's a learning experience, learn part of the reality about getting people to use a service?

Otherwise, how many of us look over the page and then walk away?

What would you expect to try out without an account? The whole point is using your personal ratings of movies get new recommendations.

In most cases, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you, but in this case, the experience is pretty tightly tied to having an account.

Maybe ask the user to enter three movies they like and then give a recommendation based off those three. I'd be more compelled to sign up once I see the recommendation it returns isn't completely off the mark.

That's a lovely idea in theory, but in practice any recommendations made off three data points are far more likely to discourage than encourage you from ever using the service again.

Recommendation engines require a lot more training (by you) to be useful (to you).

Worse yet, without the modest investment in time, including thinking up a new password, there's a very high risk people will randomly click just to see what the results are, which muddies the water for other users.

In any case, non-identified recommendation source data would need to be kept in a silo until the user identified / validated they were not just fiddling around. And that becomes a major mess to manage the data.

Having said that, I do respect people's right to tilt endlessly at windmills in HN comments.

Couldn't it be done via cookie?

Sure, but the big problem is not so much the tracking (IP, agent, cookie, etc) but the small number of data points.

To properly evaluate the quality of the data you can get out of a recommendation system, you need to put a useful amount of half-way decent data into it.

It's a relatively small cost to create an account -- it took me less than 30s, most of which was recording a new set of credentials in my password store.

One possibly intentional side-effect of requiring even a very simple registration process is that it may reduce the amount of cruft going into the engine. </speculating>

All that is all good and well, but for two things:

- it took me less time to input enough ratings to get useful recommendations than to register

- the registration asks for unnecessary information

Solution: if you don't want cruft in your dataset throw away recommendations not linked to a registration. If the users finds the recommendations useful, offer to save the profile by registering.

It's not like you are going to get any less cruft by forcing users tonregister. The only difference is that you are going to end up with a lot of throwaway accounts.

You could remember their ratings with a cookie and generate recommendations based on that, with a banner on every page saying "Save your ratings, make an account".

Once people have invested a few minutes in rating movies they're probably much more likely to want to save that by making an account.

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