Comment by icebraining
9 years ago
Seems like you dislike bad curation specifically, rather than curation itself. After all, Last.fm was already curating the songs they recommended (it wasn't like they literally threw a random sample of all their catalog).
That said, I agree with you that this kind of "finding the closest match" model is quite silly for recommendation systems. And you can see the same problems with ad matching too.
>Seems like you dislike bad curation specifically, rather than curation itself.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at by putting 'curation' in single quotes. It's not really curation if you aren't specially choosing things. For instance, if I used Google to search for "bands that sound like [x]", nobody would claim the results are 'curated'.
These systems are basically search functions that return the most similar results that are distinct from the ones you already know about.
I think the fundamental issue is that Markov Chains are actually really terrible at curating content in the long term, but in short-term they are fantastic.