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Comment by sohkamyung | Hacker News Reader

My preference is to rely on the judgement of reviewers whose taste kind of matches mine.

I'm into SF and Fantasy. In the past, I would read the reviews featured in Locus magazine by the various reviewers. Nowadays, I occasionally read Locus but also reviews from other places like tor<dot>com, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Interzone magazine.

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> My preference is to rely on the judgement of reviewers whose taste kind of matches mine.

I wish there were a website where I could put in all of my favorite video games, books, movies, anime, etc. And it would recommend me things based on what people with similar tastes liked. Then, I could try out the recommendation and then either like or dislike it.

I would slowly acquire a recommendation network of people like me, effectively crowd sourcing the content-finding to a bunch of clones!

That's FilmAffinity, for movies. It's pretty popular in the Spanish speaking world.

You vote movies, it calculates what it calls your "soulmates" (people who voted similarly) and then you get recommendations Of movies based on what those people loved, which you can filter by genre, era, etc. You can recalculate your soulmates anytime, and there are some options to tweak the algorithm.

You can also organise movies into lists (kinda like music playlists) and those are public, so if my preferences match user X and they happen to have a list titled "movies I enjoyed this past year" I can just check that.

There's https://tastedive.com/ which does this pretty well?

That's essentially what https://www.senscritique.com/ does in the french speaking world. You rate movies, books, comics, series, music, then it will suggest "éclaireurs" (scouts/recon) to follow, finally you will be advised to see/read/listen what they love and you do not know.

https://www.anime-planet.com/ does recommendations like that on a per-show basis (if you liked [this] then you may like [this], [this], [this]...), the relationship recommended, voted, and commented on by other viewers.

This somewhat reminds me of GameInformer, which had a table of each reviewer's overall preferences so you could find the reviewers you agreed with.

This used to be what Last.fm did before they turned into a MySpace-like mess. Reviews are great but in a world of access to a monumental volume of content, a way to discover obscure things is still difficult to find, and apparently, to monetize. When Netflix started streaming, they tried the long tail approach, but soon changed to only licensing a few things and then serving them up in endless configurations, which must be far more business-friendly for them.

RateYourMusic can do exactly this; find some users with similar tastes (you can see who rates an album as what score), and add them as friends (privately, i.e they won't be notified when you add them). Then you can make lists of how your friends collectively rated music. You can also find site-wide charts for specific genres.

I think Steam is working on something similar, with recommendation based on what you're playing (https://store.steampowered.com/recommender). Well it recommends only games on the store, so that's a lot of games off the table right from the start.

>I would slowly acquire a recommendation network of people like me, effectively crowd sourcing the content-finding to a bunch of clones!

But I don't want recommendations from people like me. I want recommendations from people with good taste.

makes sense. I've been reading Gaitskill's "little hammer" - it's a collection of essays, but... like half of them are book reviews, so now I'm pausing to read some mailer. For that matter, it is pretty common for me to read books because they are mentioned in the front matter of other books.

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