<story><title>Last.fm turns 20</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23473358/lastfm-discord-bot-neil-young-spotify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Still use last.fm. Most &amp;quot;You might like this&amp;quot; algorithms go straight for the low-hanging fruit, and often fail to take any kind of nuance into account.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t tell you how many of the streaming services will see my Black Sabbath play history and immediately recommend, &amp;quot;If you like Black Sabbath, you should love...Slipknot!&amp;quot; But I&amp;#x27;ve never had a real person make that mistake, because a real person who looks at my last.fm history and has an understanding of the genre says &amp;quot;Gee, this guy has plenty of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and tons of doom metal on his list, but &lt;i&gt;doesn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; have Slipknot, Korn, or Pantera in his history. &lt;i&gt;Maybe that&amp;#x27;s intentional&lt;/i&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SimonPStevens</author><text>I had always assumed that recommendation algorithms didn&amp;#x27;t work on genres, but instead did a lookup based on something like:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You like X&amp;quot;
&amp;quot;Person Y also likes X&amp;quot;
&amp;quot;Person Y also likes Z&amp;quot;
&amp;quot;I should recommended Z to you&amp;quot; (proportional to the number of people there are who liked X and Z, compared to other options)&lt;p&gt;If this is the case (and perhaps I&amp;#x27;m wrong), it&amp;#x27;s nothing to do with the algorithm not understanding the subtleties of the genre, but it&amp;#x27;s actually just that on average those subtleties disappear because they are unique to you. (Forgive me, I don&amp;#x27;t know your genres at all, but), I would guess that on average people who like Black Sabbath really do typically like Slipknot as well, and that is why the algorithm recommends them to you.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not that the algo is any worse than human recommendations, it&amp;#x27;s just that it&amp;#x27;s an average of all humans likes, which will never fit your exact personal unique preferences because they aren&amp;#x27;t you.</text></comment>
<story><title>Last.fm turns 20</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23473358/lastfm-discord-bot-neil-young-spotify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Still use last.fm. Most &amp;quot;You might like this&amp;quot; algorithms go straight for the low-hanging fruit, and often fail to take any kind of nuance into account.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t tell you how many of the streaming services will see my Black Sabbath play history and immediately recommend, &amp;quot;If you like Black Sabbath, you should love...Slipknot!&amp;quot; But I&amp;#x27;ve never had a real person make that mistake, because a real person who looks at my last.fm history and has an understanding of the genre says &amp;quot;Gee, this guy has plenty of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and tons of doom metal on his list, but &lt;i&gt;doesn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; have Slipknot, Korn, or Pantera in his history. &lt;i&gt;Maybe that&amp;#x27;s intentional&lt;/i&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mahathu</author><text>&amp;gt; Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes&lt;p&gt;I completely agree. But last.fm doesn&amp;#x27;t do human review either, right? OTOH, I think the &amp;quot;radio&amp;quot; feature on spotify is wildly underrated. I used to spend hours compiling playlists for different moments&amp;#x2F;social settings&amp;#x2F;moods (still do, because it&amp;#x27;s fun), but picking any song&amp;#x2F;album&amp;#x2F;artist and then getting an endless stream of similar music is an amazing feature. Unfortunately, sometimes it screws up and will suggest me the same songs over and over again and there is no way to get a little more control over the algorithm.&lt;p&gt;I came to hate the Superstar cover by Sonic Youth and &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m So Tired&amp;quot; by Fugazi for those reasons. Great songs, but they just kept coming up as the first recommended track and I can&amp;#x27;t stand hearing those intro piano chords on the latter anymore!! According to my last.fm [0] I played it 50+ times and I don&amp;#x27;t even remember once seeking out that song or putting it in one of my playlists.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.last.fm&amp;#x2F;user&amp;#x2F;mahathu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.last.fm&amp;#x2F;user&amp;#x2F;mahathu&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>