[BillFranklin]

This is great to hear, though I'm curious why photos on your phone / pinterest would be relevant to a recommendation system? Surely the biggest signal would be what Spotify already uses: the features of various relevant factors (your previous listening sessions, your current session, what other similar sessions look like, etc.), that said, their recommendation system is surprisingly terrible given how much easier music recommendations must be versus video, yet YouTube seems to have had this nailed for 15+ years whereas Spotify's "Discover Weekly" is so bad.

> I come up with an idea of generating playlists from images. Images that you shot on your phone yourself, or that you found on Pinterest, or a painting that you really like and feel inspired by.

This is genuinely interesting! Do you send the images to an LLM with a prompt like "generate a list of songs that would go well with this"?

[AmericanChopper]

I think spotify's playlists are quite decent. I think they used to be a lot better than they are now, but I suspect that most recommendation systems decay over time. I suspect they don't handle the recommendation feedback very well, so they can start off introducing people to new things, but then become a bit more static and just reinforce the same habits over and over.

I think YouTube's recommendations used to be excellent, especially for music, but I've personally found it to be terrible recently. It no longer recommends anything new to me, and I suspect that it's way over-tuned. If I see a video that looks mildly interesting I'm a bit hesitant to watch it, because I don't want YT to decide that it should become 50% of my feed for the next week. Which from the recommendation system's perspective is just weakening the signal I'm feeding to it even further.

[techaudible83]

This is an interesting point and I wonder if part of the issue is that a mature, extremely popular algorithm trends towards the lowest common denominator. I don't mean this as a judgement of taste, it just seems to me that people engage with art in different ways. Maybe the spotify algorithm is perfectly tuned to the majority of people who just want to be able to find more songs that fit the kind of sound they like or find something to throw on in the background. But for a significant minority of others like myself and OP, it's just not tuned to what we actually want from new music.

I also feel the same as you regarding the youtube algorithm. I actually get better recommendations sometimes by just logging out since it will try showing me new stuff.

One thing I'm not sure about is whether it's actually the algorithm's fault or if my expectations have become unrealistic and made me lazy. I used to read magazines and blogs to find new music. There are still tons of people writing about their favorite music, labels that act as curators, etc. I just don't seek them out and instead expect to be spoonfed by the algorithms. Even if this is true though, I suspect many of these algorithms could do a better job.

Also RIP Netflix's old recommendation system. I guess it wouldn't make sense when they can't license every movie like they used to, but I remember it being great. Although maybe it was just pretty good and I was younger and less familiar with the back catalog of good films.

That's the other thing I wonder - am I just getting older and less excited about new things? There used to be a real vitality to finding something new and exciting. Now it kind of feels hard for anything to feel that fresh anymore, it all seems like variations on the same core ideas. I do still find new stuff that I like, but it doesn't have the same thrill. Maybe I'll always be chasing that dragon of youth haha.

[zeynepevecen]

Thank you! I should check youtube's algorithm too.

Yes, I have a prompt like that the current prompt is this:

            'You match the vibes of the pictures with the right songs and turn them into a 3 song playlist with a playlist name. The music genre of the playlist should be consistent for each song. Be creative with music selections, explore different music, be consistent in terms of the genre of the 3 songs. The playlists should be provided in an object array format, like this: \'[{playlistName: "string", songs: [{songName: "string", artist: "string"}, {songName: "string", artist: "string"}, {songName: "string", artist: "string"}]}]\'. Do not add any other text information and only give outputs in the provided format. Your playlists must match the visual vibes and maintain the specified format without any additional information.',

Pretty basic, as i said before this was only ment for me and to explore this idea, but i loved it so I wanted to share :)

[Retric]

YouTube’s algorithm isn’t very good for users because it doesn’t really separate mildly interesting videos that you finish from awesome content you loved.

YouTube of course doesn’t care because they don’t make more money when you see something awesome.

[Mountain_Skies]

YouTube didn't help things any when they neutered the dislike button. It's still there but functionally useless. Yes, we all know why they did it to save the feelings of a few political staffers at campaigns aligned with the values of workers at Google but it's been an absolute godsend for scammers and terrible for signaling interests to the recommendation engine.

[layer8]

It does distinguish between videos you thumbed-up (or down) vs. videos you merely played. At least that works for me with YouTube Premium/Music.

[HPsquared]

It works pretty well for me. Do you use the like and dislike buttons, subscribe to channels you like, etc?

[Retric]

> subscribe to channels you like

That makes things worse IMO. My favorite videos tend to be one-offs not channels producing regular content. Unsubscribing from everything definitely improved my feed.

[im3w1l]

How would you distinguish one from the other given the data youtube has?

[Retric]

The algorithm is limited by their choices not the current system as they can update the UI.