You just have to have a colossal inventory, and a reasonably good algorithm.
People want what they’re providing, companies want to sell ads, and increase people’s tolerance of ads. Until the next platform without ads comes out (note - tiktok didn’t have ads almost at all for the first year)
Just like Pandora which was also really great for a while.
That's not how I remember it at all. The biggest features (that at least made me and my friends use it) was that no matter what player you used, it probably had a "Scrobble to last.fm" features (which sadly, seems Spotify at least removed), and then you'd use Last.fm to find new songs to play via your own player.
I don't think I remember anyone using the Last.fm radios/playlists, but instead just as a data-browser to find new artists/albums/songs, then play those somewhere else.
But this was around 2005 sometime in Sweden, we basically just had Spotify and maybe Grooveshark available for streaming, maybe things typically worked differently elsewhere.
Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves.
If you're trying to sell sustainabiity, what is your business? What are you selling? If it's advice on how people can be sustainable, or carbon credits or something, sure, those are things that may be tarpits.
But electric vehicles were probably a tarpit idea until they went from being advanced golf carts to being real cars.
Environmentally friendly packaging is doing very well. Etc etc.
Tell that to the funding programs.
I learned this when I was put on a team for a modeling competition in college. You had like 72 hours to solve the problem and write the report. It was really stressful but a LOT of fun.
There were a range of topics that you could choose from. Some were really obvious how to apply mathematics to, and some... weren't.
I was the math talent on the team... but my team members talked me out of going for one of the problems that were easy to apply math to. We instead picked the problem where it was LEAST obvious. And... we ended up winning the competition against a field of 10,000+.
I think that lesson applies in business all over the place. There's actually a lot of good comfortable money to be made in unglamorous industries.
Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services.
Isn’t this what Netflix used to be
Now, if someone made a "Recommendation-Engine-in-a-Box", where someone who wanted to make a recommendation app for themselves would supply the content and could tweak the algorithm and the design, I could see that being successful in this market :)
I guess SaaS aimed primarily at founders makes it a meta startup? The snake is eating its tail.
I spent 2024 building an awesome TV series recommendation platform. It worked by matching you to professional critics who shared your tastes, by basically crawling Rotten Tomatoes and getting an LLM to grade the reviews out of ten. The recommendations were awesome, and having a personalized Rotten Tomatoes where you could read about and research the show using reviews by people who felt the same way as you did about stuff was freakin' cool.
However, getting people to actually sign up and use the app without a massive marketing budget was very, very difficult. The stickiness to get people to go back to it is difficult. Asking people to input their preferences in the first place is hard. People also simply didn't believe the recommendations, and wouldn't take chances on shows; the computer can recommend The Detectorists to as many people as it wants, but there's a high number of people who would love the show but will dismiss it looking at the cover image and having a quick read of the synopsis.
The recommendation part isn't super hard, the getting people to use a B2C app is super hard.
Even if people wanted your standalone app, they're not going to sit and enter the kind of rich data a decent recommendation engine needs. It really has to be a tool that gathers data about you as a side-effect of you using it.
This has severely fallen out of fashion since the 2000s, but it used to be not uncommon that when one web app wanted to do actions on your behalf on another web app, it would just take your username and password and log in as you. According to Cory Doctorow (I wasn't there) Facebook did this to MySpace.
For Netflix in particular, logging in from your server would probably trigger anti-account-sharing, but you could avoid that by making the requests you need from the user's app on their device, not from your server.
I think the industry feels like it's illegal now, but I don't think it's actually illegal? since there's no criminal intent. I don't think it's the same, legally, as when a criminal steals your login details and logs in as you. But I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But my evidence is that there are apps (e.g. POLi) that do this with bank accounts and still don't seem to be in any trouble. Even the banks don't seem to be locking it out as that would hurt the customer's relationship with the bank.
You need like critical mass of early adopters so that people would see „hey this is useful, maybe I can use it too”.
Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix.
Almost everybody looks at food and accommodation reviews and people bring up IMDb and rotten tomatoes when considering whether to watch a movie.
Search engines and llms make decisions on what to surface, those are a kind of recommendation as well.
So although I understand the sentiment, it's not really a great example - there's plenty of successful executions beyond the dreaded "for you recommendations" engagement bait slop on social media feeds. You're using the successful executions dozens of times a day without noticing it.
Nope, HN is just an online forum. I can't tailor what I see on HN to my tastes, and there's a subset of posters who get preferential treatment on the frontpage (YC companies), so nope, HN is not a recommendation site.