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Comment by riffer | Hacker News Reader

Recommendations is an 11-figure business. Seriously. This is a pretty reasonable angle of approach, so I can understand that part.

What I have trouble with is what chaosmachine points out: the recommendations are not that good. At least from a cold start.

How does this have 18 votes in 16 minutes? At a time when the site is pretty quiet? That is very suspicious.

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>How does this have 18 votes in 16 minutes? At a time when the site is pretty quiet? That is very suspicious.

I'm sure it's nothing nefarious. But a good number of people who use this site have strong affinity for YC startups either because they're YC alums or just they're people who really like YC startups and feel like part of the YC community due to being members on this site and having watched YC grow.

I would guess that a subset of said people will basically upvote anything about a YC startup. And launches are especially prone to this treatment because people think that users of this site will find any YC launch interesting (which many users will).

I upvoted it because I worked on a similar idea with abossy and randomwalker. I agree with abossy's comment above: this is a great idea, I wish them all the best and I hope they kick ass, but the business side is difficult. So long as you rely on YouTube for videos, you are at the mercy of changes to the YouTube terms of service. You can look for other sources of videos besides YouTube, but this is challenging.

So I'm hoping they succeed where I failed. Hence the upvote.

From other YCers one would guess ? - maybe someone did a shout out at the scribd party or something to get upvotes.

I get that recommendations are a big deal. But YouTube itself already DOES have recommendations, on the home page if you're logged in!

If a service like this catches on, YouTube could replace it overnight, especially as they have data on what you (and the people you correspond with, via Google) enjoy watching.

The Pandora analogy has been thrown around a fair deal, and it is flawed. Pandora does not play and recommend content that is owned and managed by exactly one company.

Can you name one recommendation service that is an 11-figure business? The only company I can think of whose core business is mostly recommendation is Pandora, and they're not even that large; nine figures at best.

One could make a pretty strong argument that Amazon is at its core a recommendation service (with really good logistics that take care of the rest of the whole "oh, I just bought this thing I didn't know I wanted" process).

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