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Comment by jacobobryant | Hacker News Reader

I did this in a previous version of Findka. I had integrations for Last.fm, Spotify, Youtube, Goodreads, Pocket, RSS and a couple others I think. I did a "reset" on Findka in February, removing most of the features in order to make it simpler. Eventually I would like to add integrations back in. I'm working on some social networking features right now--hopefully that'll work as a reliable user acquisition channel. Once I've figured out a way to keep getting new users, I'll be able to spend more time on things like integrations and improving the algorithm.

Also I hadn't heard of letterboxd or RYM. I'll check those out more when the time comes.

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> Eventually I would like to add integrations back in

I might be missing the big picture, but wouldn't log-in with oauth[0] solve integration problem and removed impediment from new users coming in? Also, if you do not mind, which algo do you use to find matches?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OAuth_providers

Edit: formatting

I don't think it'd make any difference. In the list you linked, only a few of those provide log-in with oauth. Letting people log in with Google won't let us import data from e.g. Letterboxd etc. Even if Letterboxd provided log-in with oauth, you'd still have to go through another authorization flow if you wanted to import data from an additional service.

The algorithm uses a simple item-based neighborhood model. i.e. if you like song A, Findka looks up all the content liked by other users who liked song A and probabilistically chooses an item that was well-liked. To help the algorithm keep learning, 35% of the recommendations are purely random ("epsilon-greedy"). I describe the implementation here[0], though it's changed slightly (now I export the database every day or so and generate a model on my laptop, then I load it into memory on the server). I experimented with a machine learning-based model (a latent factor model) last week, but it seems I don't yet have enough rating data for that to be useful.

[0] https://findka.com/blog/rec-sys-in-30-lines/

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