I started Sense (www.wemakesense.co) because I increasingly became concerned with how Netflix was handling the recommendation portion of their product.  I saw an ever-consuming reliance on data and computers that strayed away from what recommendations should be about.  I wanted to make recommendations more human.<p>Below are some quick, short examples of the issues that Sense is working on correcting:<p>- Your recommended &#x27;Top Picks&#x27; is a list of 25+ movies<p><i></i>This is a subset list of a list.  You&#x27;re already swarmed with movie choices in Netflix.  You still have to decide between a ton of options here<i></i><p>- 1-5 star rating systems and predictors miss the point of recommendations<p><i></i>The goal of a recommender is to give you a movie that you&#x27;ll enjoy spending your time in.  It&#x27;s not to give you something you&#x27;ll like &#x27;4.223&#x27; or &#x27;3.4445&#x27; stars out of 5.  The essence of a recommender is lost in this detail<i></i><p>- Recommending fully done by computers.  No personal touch.<p><i></i>Human curation can be infused into the system without total overhaul<i></i><p>- You can love Fantasia without being a kid<p><i></i>After watching Fantasia, you&#x27;ll be presented with suggestions to watch children&#x27;s movies next.  This is because of a reliance on a &#x27;kids&#x27; tag to the movie.  But Netflix knows more about me than that.  They know I am a male in my 20s.  I can appreciate Fantasia for other reasons<i></i><p>- &#x27;Top Picks&#x27; and &#x27;More like this&#x27; are a scatterplot of all kinds of different movies<p><i></i>This does little to center in on the things people enjoy within a specific movie.  Instead it feels like darts being thrown at a dartboard<i></i>
Why I started a free, on-demand curation service for Netflix