[HN Gopher] Scholars once feared that the book index would destr...
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Scholars once feared that the book index would destroy reading
Author : hhs
Score : 82 points
Date : 2022-02-20 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Scholars once feared that a search engine would destroy
| intelligent reasoning.
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| It did, when it turned out you could game the system to move
| eyeballs from reality, to fiction that confirmed peoples
| biases. (both search engines and other content ranking
| systems).
| nate_meurer wrote:
| That's a good point, and undoubtedly true for some. But I
| honestly believe that the discoverability of knowledge that
| Internet search enables is the most powerful and beneficial
| tool humanity has ever made. It certainly is for me
| personally.
| [deleted]
| frostburg wrote:
| I have heard (yes, somewhat recently) some classicists argue that
| the move from scrolls to books, with the text segmented in pages,
| was also harmful with arguments along similar lines.
| blurker wrote:
| This reminds me of an episode of 99% Invisible [0] that I
| listened to. That episode also covered a bit about the history of
| indexes (which is relevant to the history of alphabetical
| sorting), including how scholars feared and resisted the adoption
| of indexes. It was super fascinating and I highly recommend
| giving it a listen if you found this article interesting!
|
| [0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| Thanks for that. Now I have 530 episodes in my podcast queue :)
| DantesKite wrote:
| On a side note, I've always wish there was an API that could
| recommend media content.
|
| Like you could just plug it into any playlist of songs,
| movies, or books, have it do some algorithmic analysis, and
| spit out what you would probably find fascinating.
| ghaff wrote:
| You've basically described recommendation engines generally
| and they tend to deliver mediocre to awful results for a
| bunch of different reasons. I remember hearing talks on the
| topic over a decade ago and things haven't really gotten
| much better--and my sense is that most people have given up
| on actually creating a _good_ engine.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've found much better results using your lists to find
| _people_ with some overlap, and then looking at what they
| have.
|
| Which is basically what HN is.
| timbeccue wrote:
| Do recommendation algorithms not take this into account
| already? Perhaps privacy policies make it harder to
| automate this effectively.
| bombcar wrote:
| The famous ones may, but it ends up taking into account
| "what do we want you to see/listen/look at" much more
| into account.
| ghaff wrote:
| The original Netflix prize also, it turned out, wasn't
| really implemented for a number of reasons. But one of
| them was apparently that Netflix doesn't necessarily want
| to give you the best recommendations; it wants you to
| keep your subscription. There's certainly some overlap
| between those objectives but they're not the same thing.
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| I have played ~5 seconds of one random episode from the
| front page on my Netflix profile since i subscribed
| around 2016. This was just to verify that it worked.
|
| It still chuckles me up when they send me an e-mail once
| in a while, about what I might like based my past viewing
| preferences.
|
| Note: My GF, has a profile that she uses sometimes, but
| mine haven't been used since the account was created.
| bombcar wrote:
| They're also incentivized to show you things that cost
| them "nothing" or "less" than others things - and if they
| KNOW the things you'd like to watch it's better for them
| to string those out so you keep subscribed.
|
| The perfect Netflix customer is one always on the cusp of
| cancelling from lack of use but never actually does ...
| ghaff wrote:
| In addition to the cost angle, they're also incentivized
| to push you towards exclusives. Things you can watch on
| other services (assuming you subscribe and know they're
| there) are much less of a hook to keep you on Netflix.
| ghaff wrote:
| It depends what the overlap is of course. Something like
| music probably has a big age component in what people
| like for example.
|
| But, yes, in general friends with at least reasonably
| similar preferences to myself are almost certainly a
| better source of recommendations for video, music, and
| books than a recommendation engine.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I remember when Pandora was attempting to compute the "DNA"
| of a song (assorted classifications like key, tempo, style)
| and recommend music based on that. You could then get a
| "station" based on a single song, and fine-tune it by
| adding more or disliking songs as they came up.
|
| The end result was underwhelming- it never really captured
| the characteristics that I actually liked about particular
| songs, and ended up being crappy or so narrowly tuned that
| it lacked enough variety to be interesting.
|
| The concept is still around, but with less scientific
| sounding fluff and, I think, more relaxed parameters for
| recommendations.
| ghaff wrote:
| >You could then get a "station" based on a single song
|
| Apple Genius did something similar and it mostly worked
| not badly because it was drawing from songs in your
| collection already.
|
| You're more likely to like songs in specific genres and
| time periods and songs that are popular generally. Once
| you get beyond that, it gets harder. And the situation is
| probably even harder with video unless you basically
| watch superhero films.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Did Pandora change at some point?
| martyvis wrote:
| As soon as I saw this post I thought it that podcast. It was
| quite interesting how we take the alphabet as so fundamental.
| (And with a surname beginning with "V" I was always frustrated
| at school at being down the back of the line unless an
| enlightened teacher occasionally mixed it up)
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