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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

I always find that recommendation websites suffer in the long-term because the incentive to just keep adding more stuff (to keep the site not seem stagnant, thus make people come back) is greater than the incentive to strictly filter only super high quality things. How is this site going to tackle that problem?

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I dont use any single recommendation source anymore for this reason. Its always a combination od youtube, amazon recommendations and reviews, reddit, and stackexchange sites.

Great idea. Crowdsourcing is good but averaging out crowdsources of crowdsources is a better way to understand the general sentiment of the population.

Ya theres also alternativeto.net, producthunt, wappylzer, slant for software too. Also bpproductansphoto reviews, bestbuy reviews, and googlereviews.

Then you can also do SEO analytics on site for domain authority too, that tells you roughly how many people use it vs other software. Or check how old a site is, how old a video is etc

I think the problem is that you don’t actually want the general sentiment of the population: it most likely leads to things you’ll accept, but not actually want (ie movies you’re lukewarm on).

I think what recsys really should be trying to target is finding the group most similar to your tastes, and then picking based on the outliers of that group. The goal being to find something within your tastes, but far enough from your normal to be interesting

Recommending based on star personalities preferences, is I think, a way of approaching this idea: why would you want to know what the average item is? You want the best one.

This.

I'll be sourcing recommendations from the silent majority of experts as well (https://prog21.dadgum.com/143.html).

Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17784551.

Im not sure I understand how you intend to do that: the silence problem is that the majority of experts don’t post their recommendations, right? Even if you have their names from linus, how will you get their recs

Email is the first step. I'll have to find another way if that doesn't work :D

OT: I checked your profile but couldn't find an email to contact you. It'd be cool if I can shoot an email once in a while to brainstorm.

There is one area that I can think of, where the recommendation of _some_ 'experts' can very useful: medicine. It is extremely difficult to find a competent physician. Medicine as is generally practiced is often about drastic procedures like surgery, pills etc. which worsens the overall condition of the patient and often results in huge bills. There are various contributing factors, some of which are not in the physician's control - but the end result is always the same - a really bad deal for the patient. 'Silent' recommendations can often lead to some renegade physicians who are great at treating people but may be at odds with the physician's board. All what I said hold true for dentists also: the truly good ones are very few.

Medicine is a tricky area (it is close to religion in this aspect).

Well, agreed...

Uncompromising focus on people.

I don't mind if the site is stagnant.

Plan on taking investors? Because that last sentence might make it a challenge, much as I agree with it.

What could investment do for a site like this?

Its a good question.

Scale, curation, combating spammed submissions to AJ, etc. might be the biggest things if the site gains momentum, but if the site remains a hobby project indefinitely (which I think is totally fine regardless of popularity), then it's absolutely not needed.

Doing the right thing makes good money.

Brings to mind "The fisherman and the businessman"

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the-...

Haha. Love it.

This is fantastic

If that's true why do externalities exist?

Well just because p -> q doesn't necessarily mean that ~p -> ~q

You have got to be kidding. A list of recommendations is something that is worthy of taking investors?

"Worthy"? Taking investment is not something special, something that needs to be your one and only life mission before you're allowed to do it. If someone thinks an investment to the site will yield a bigger return back, that's enough. Don't let ideas like that prevent you from taking a go at reaching the potential of your idea.

You're right, it (if we're talking about VC) isn't something special. And a highly specific, narrow way of bringing something into being that makes no sense a lot of the time.

Living in San Francisco, you hear just how narrow this focus gets, with 20-somethings walking down the sidewalk making conversation about how to monetize this public accommodation or that human impulse. It strikes me as an odd mixture of funny and repellent, and at least some of those folks will grow up someday.

It does mean a lot of folks are concentrating on a crowded path that smart people will avoid. I mean, sure, if your big idea is in enterprise storage or EV, that's not happening with investment. A recommendation website? If you're not building to flip (which would be stupid anyway), it would be crazy to go begging to build.

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