There’s a problem with movie recommenders. They’re not keeping up with the times. And they’re dying in front of our eyes.
Jinni & Foundd were two of the bigger movie recommendation hubs. Tons of people used their sites to look for movie picks presented non-randomly and tailored to them. But they both shut their doors to consumers. Why? We hear that the recommenders’ algorithms and techniques are at wizard-like levels but, if that’s the case, why aren’t the users following en masse?
We can start to answer this question by taking a look at tags and how they affect Star Wars in movie recommendation products…
Tags are an essential piece of most movie recommendation puzzles. They attribute traits to a movie. They’re extra useful because they’re standard enough for a computer to be able to understand, so a website can use algorithms that play with them. Websites also use them in a community voting format — a use based on social. In this example we’ll be focusing on the community format.
Here’s a representation of tags being used, taken from MovieLens’s page on Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
Tags have the potential to be powerful, but the problem is that they’re usually very general. ‘Sci-Fi’, ‘Action’, ‘Space’, ‘Good vs. Evil’. We as humans don’t respond to a movie just because it has any of these traits.
So we have to go deeper. What is it about these individual traits that make us think positively or negatively about a movie? What does that action entail? How are Good and Evil portrayed? And once you have those answers, what about when we blend these specifics together?
In some cases though even that blend doesn’t make enough of a difference. If it did, we wouldn’t see such a large disparity between sentiment for Star Wars: A New Hope and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
The tag-based formula is there in Phantom Menace. It’s Sci-Fi. It has a character named Anakin Skywalker in it. Action takes place. You’ll find the same tags on its MovieLens page. In all, it’s Star Wars being Star Wars. But people hate the movie.
What makes Star Wars ‘Star Wars’ is how we feel when we watch and listen its characters and their stories. That includes what they’re saying, the way they say it, how they handle interactions and situations, and so on.
If Star Wars is getting it right, it means that the characters are giving us enough to invest in them. To feel along with them. We care so much that 32 years went by and the whole world STILL desperately wanted to see the continuation of their stories in The Force Awakens. We all longed to have that same feeling that we have when reconnecting with an old friend. This experience transcends moving pictures on the screen and 1's and 0's inside a computer.
We need to begin to make the tags identify and recognize the shades of this kind of human to human connectedness. We need to improve on uncovering the true things that make people like movies. And we need to apply our theories selectively to allow for honest personalization. I’m building an on-demand curation service for Netflix called Sense, and I think we’re starting to do just that.
