[dxbydt]

> Perhaps you value novelty... > What might not be "adequate" for you...

It isn't about what he values versus what you value. What the author complains about are well known problems with recommendation engines. Take the naive reco algo - "You just bought a 50 inch Philips TV. You might also like - 50 inch Sony TV, 50 inch LG TV, 50 inch Samsung TV, 50 inch ..." - See the problem ? I already bought my fucking TV, you can't expect me to buy more & more of the same or similar goods.

Then there's the CF algorithm & its variants, with well known problems - namely, they don't actually match content to one's preferences. Typically, one POV dominates across the board due to the sparsity of the matrix, & getting the diversity required for the matrix to fill out takes a long long time and a very large number of people with diverse opinions. You mistakenly give a five star rating to Godfather & you are bombarded with mafia movies for a long time. You attempt to confuse the system by giving Pretty Woman five stars as well. Then the system tries to gamely proceed by suggesting "Those who watched Godfather AND Pretty Woman are more likely to watch - So I married an Axe murderer."

Can't win.

There are auto-complete screenplay software that basically make a composite of the top 100 best selling screenplays & do what in the industry is called a flip. Namely, change male to female, winner to loser, comedy to tragedy etc. These data-driven screenplay software might suggest that if you take the ladies from Thelma & Louise & replace them with grizzly old men, you get Unforgiven.

There are lyric generation software with the same flavor, umpteen loop generators & infinite jukeboxes, content recommendation systems along the same lines - since you just starred this code sample on angular, you will enjoy this github repo on react,...

Hopefully you see the downside.

[api]

Exactly. I don't want what I already have. Give me what I don't have, or better yet something so creative I don't even know I want it yet.

But that's hard, while stupid hill climbers and infinite monkey machines are easy. It will keep working until people tire of it, which judging from the abysmal sales in music is happening. Won't be long before people also stop going to see Batman Redone.

[baddox]

I understand the general argument, and I don't disagree in general. My intuition is that showing 50 inch TVs to someone who just bought one is not ideal [0]. My point is that the specific examples provided (Hollywood blockbusters, etc.) are not accompanied by any evidence or reasoning to convince me that these industries are not doing a good job of satisfying the market.

[0] That said, I've seen lots of counterintuitive but very real phenomena regarding user behavior, so I won't claim to be that confident about this being ineffective. Perhaps people return TVs a lot and buy other ones. I don't have the data.

[shakethemonkey]

The data might just show that offering 50 inch TVs to someone who just bought one is actually a rich opportunity. Perhaps both televisions were stolen in a burglary. Or someone is finally upgrading all their televisions from CRT to flat screen -- maybe they moved from a house to a small apartment. It would not surprise me in the least if people were 10 times more likely to purchase a television having just bought one, compared to individuals randomly selected.

[SixSigma]

And yet you can find plenty of articles about how procedurally generated game environments create longevity.

Imagine a machine that could make procedurally generated movies, would that interest you?

Stories have already been distilled to the Seven Basic Plots [1]

Novelty needs repetion in order to be novel.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSevenBasicPlot...