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Comment by lolptdr | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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...

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.

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

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