It's interesting to see how different people deal with different feelings. Personally, when I'm feeling sad, I want to stay with the feeling -- not wallow in it, but let it "flow", so it eventually gets out of my system. Movies can be quite cathartic that way.
It depends on the circumstance, which I believe was the GP's point. Sometimes I do want to explore the sadness for a bit, but other times I want to be cheered up.
We experimented with this idea at Disney in 2012 with short form content. We learned a few things by building basically this exact experience.
First, it’s not really different from Netflix-style sliders, except it’s hiding more things behind clicks. Second, finding a good recommendation isn’t the hard problem…it’s getting people to hit play on what’s being recommended. I don’t know how many times I get recommended Vanilla Sky, I can’t seem to work up the fortitude of committing a couple hours to watching Tom Cruise.
This is why clips and auto-play experiences are so big these days. It takes away the need to hit play and the investment is low. It’s why Netflix is rolling out the Play Something experience.
The thing that stops me from watching movies/shows when recommended by some automated system is the lack of information. All of these systems either start playing the video or have a one line blurb "You will like this because you watched some other show."
Just give me a proper blurb about the show/movie. Just because I'm in an app to watch things doesn't mean you don't still have to sell me on watching something. Hell, personalising a text blurb to my tastes and mood could be really powerful. Even showing me the trailer rather than starting the movie would be an improvement.
This sort of stuff, plus the complete disrespect for the emotional downtime needed at the end of some episodes* makes me think the people in charge of these places don't even fucking watch TV.
* The show makers get this, the episode smash cuts to black and the credits roll with a slow, quiet song while you decompress. Then BAM next episode, no moment to think about and enjoy the experience you just had.
We explored that (I believe Netflix did, too). The challenge became making relevant promos. I don’t know a lot about the science of producing trailers, but if you look at old ones they are more dated than the movie. The cost of what you’re suggesting is high, and there isn’t a lot of evidence that it really improves conversion.
Yeah I know what you meant. If you're looking for synopsis beyond existing text promos, it's still a significant cost to watch and summarize. It's still not a lot cheaper and quite arduous.
Have you ever had something recommended to you that you really dragged your feet on watching but once you did you really enjoyed? That’s the bigger challenge than actual recommendations these days.
You have to watch Vanilla sky! I think most people's problem is that they want something easy to watch, and recent. This is because we're lazy, and we are attracted by novelty (and novelty fades away quickly).
The first thought that comes to mind upon reading your comment is that though "the recommendation" may be "good" in a narrow sense, if people don't click on it, maybe it's not a "good recommendation" in a broader sense.
More broadly, when friends recommend a book, show, movie, new snack, etc., is it possible to divorce the "content" being recommended to them from the other information in the recommendation?
I think there’s some post hoc ergo prompter hoc with blaming recommendations if someone doesn’t want to watch what’s being recommended. If you watch what’s recommended to you and you don’t like it…that’s a bad recommendation. If you don’t even watch it, then there’s likely other factors than the recommendation that are barriers to watching.
I believe this, because of how successful TT was w infinite scroll, auto-play.
RE: Vanilla Sky
There are interesting moments to that film, (like the holographic jazz player at the fancy party) but it isn't worth sitting for to see Cruise if you haven’t already seen Top Gun, Mission Impossible, Day After Tomorrow and Minority Report.
I hate, loathe, and despise auto-play solutions. I finally figured out how to kill that feature of Netflix, so that I can enjoy watching it a lot more.
If they bring back enforced auto-play, then I’m deleting the fucking account.
it completely ruins my experience as well. When I finish watching something, I want to take time to digest and reflect on what I just saw, to relish in the mood or feeling that I was put in by the show/film, not get mindlessly forced into something new.
I can't stand this whole "engagement" agenda that media/entertainment tech companies are pushing so damn hard down our throats more and more everyday.
And I really don't get it. The more we "engage" the more content we will burn through per unit time. So without auto play horse shit I might watch an episode or two a night and really marinate in it. But the auto play is always pushing my to watch more, so maybe I won't marinate, maybe I watch 4 or 5 episodes tonight.
Now the good show I was watching is over... now what? Watch something else? Maybe I ran out of good things. Do I really need to keep paying for this service? I've already watched all the good stuff.
"100 channels and nothing's on" is an old phenomenon. People become paralyzed by choice because they feel they need to make the optimal choice, which simply doesn't exist.
I think you've taken your personal preferences and tried to apply them to everyone else.
if you're sleepy you might want to watch an action movie or a comedy
If I'm sleepy, I want to watch a calming movie, or something thoughtful because I'm going to sleep soon. Watching an action movie when I'm sleepy might be good for you, or maybe a long-haul trucker. But not for everyone.
This is where every recommendation engine from Netflix to Facebook to Apple Music falls down. People are messy. And there's too many of them to generalize.
It only fetches great movies with a rating > 6.7 on IMDb
Using online ratings services is a bad idea. They've become polluted. Movies that are enormously important or entertaining or just plain good are losing more and more ratings points because they're being re-rated by non-experts and people who don't understand the context or history. The movies haven't changed. The people rating then have. So what you end up with is the lowest common denominator films getting the highest ratings.
It hasn't happened yet. And this has been going on for years.
That's why some web sites show separate ratings based on who's rating them. They tally the ratings of professional film critics separately from those of the hoi polloi.
1. I'm not really sure what making this so interactive accomplishes. The result seems akin to a listicle: "X Great Movies to Watch When You're Feeling Y", except with a lot more clicks required and, importantly, no curation. I think I would prefer to see a static list of recommendations with a "random" button and a cool blog post linked about how the recommendations were generated. Furthermore, it seems fairly safe to say (?) that the site isn't dynamically generating recommendations because the list exhausts rather quickly, after 10 or so. Just make a list!
2. The lack of curation leads to a lot of strangeness in the recommendations. For example, my first choice was feeling "weird". I got a bunch of blockbuster action films: Justice League, Avengers: Endgame, Thor: Ragnarok, Interstellar, Black Panther, Captain Marvel.
Ironically, I feel like the abundance of movies is making it harder to pick one.
This sounds like the difference between Optimizing and Satisficing personality traits.
An optimizer wants to find the best choice. The more choices, the harder that is.
The Satisficer just wants to find one that's good enough. Having more choices generally makes that easier, if it comes with a directory or some way to search.
I like the idea of the site but it doesn't match what I want when I'm in a particular mood. If I'm sleepy, I'm more likely to want to watch something chill. If I'm sad, I'm more likely to want to watch something sad. But there are also situations where I want the opposite, so it's not like there's a hard rule. I feel like the site would be better asking what mood they want to be in, instead of trying to guess it based on their current mood.
I quite like it, I am not sure if I’m the popular opinion but I feel like you should remove the back button/history update for every movie. There is no reason it needs to add a new history entry for every carousel change.
Author tweeted[1] their open traffic, interesting if you've ever wondered what a "Show HN" looks like from the other side https://plausible.io/mood2movie.com
I am a huge movie fan. And always lost in thoughts. So I guess I will go through the whole "reflective" list and see if there is a movie I don't know yet.
Lists of "popular movies" on Netflix etc never click with me. Most stuff out there is too kitchy for me.
One tool that works for me is Gnovies, which finds a mix of 3 movies you put in:
The reason I mostly use Gnovies is that I often watch together with my girlfriend. So we each put one movie into Gnovies "enter 3 movies you like" form and after some experimentation we usually find a new one we both enjoy.
This didn't work for me at all. Of 8 or so recommendations it included "Red" "Blue" and "White". Huh? It's also pretty useless without including a year or link to an imbd page.
It makes sense. It's the only one that makes you wonder what kind of commercial mainstream films it will recommend? All others clicks will be distributed randomly among all the other buttons.
But, based on the fact that the author offers 'happy' movies if you're feeling sad, he would probably provide some movies that would try to stop you from being horny. :) Now, the question is - what kind of movies can make you stop being horny? :)
I chose "idyllic", expecting titles like Kiki's Delivery Service, but all the recommendations were either fighting or sports-related movies (Raging Bull, Southpaw, Rocky, etc). Sometimes there's also an issue where the same page loads inside the video frame.
As someone who is working on a YT-driven playlist for music myself, I absolutely -HATE- how YT handles deleted and unpublished videos. They strip all information from the player and it can break applications that rely on them.
Applications that leverage YouTube go far in helping Google to maintain it's market dominance, they should help reliant apps to operate smoothly because it greatly supports the company, but if the service is faulty or unreliable over a long period of time without any fixes available, it's probably just a willful handicap to drive people back to YT as a platform rather than truly enabling content sharing.
I understand that there are often valid reasons behind removing videos from display, but YT should at least allow for the title to remain, or a link back to the poster's channel, after a video is no longer available so it doesn't just display a "Video Not Available".
If someone publishes a video, but then needs to edit out parts, the video still exists, but all prior links to it are suddenly broken. That makes using YT for embedded video difficult even though they're the #1 video content platform.
App developers can't simply stand up a "bootleg" streaming service of their own with the level of diverse content that YT has, therefore YT has a bigger responsibility to fix the stability of the content they provide, possibly by allowing creators to replace videos instead of having to completely re-upload them with a new content ID. We're really not able to properly innovate unless we're truly solving traditional and not letting long-standing problems persist.
With respect, I think the recommendations are rubbish.
When I say that I’m feeling humorous, I want to see movies that are primarily comedies. Not dramas and all sorts of other things and might also have a few comedic moments.
Match on the first tag, ignore the rest.
Or, if I select that I’m feeling romantic AND humorous, then match on movies that are both romantic AND comedies, not just one or the other.
To those interested in movie recommendation engines, I've been using movielens (https://movielens.org/) for years and it's great. You rate movies you've seen and it predicts which other movies you'll like. The execution is really good: for example, it's aware of popularity, so you can look at movies that others are likely to rate low, but you high, or the opposite.
This doesn't take into account differences in personal preferences, as it doesn't know what movies I prefer, and so can't compare my preferences to other people's. Not everyone has the same tastes, and personal preferences matter.
You could improve your system's recommendations by combining your approach with a collaborative filtering algorithm. Mine's very accurate on small data sets, and a detailed description of it can be found here: fmjlang.co.uk/morse/MORSE.html
I took the title at face value and went to look for a movie for feeling sleepy…
> Karnan, a fearless village youth, must fight for the rights of the conservative people of his village, due to the torture given by a police officer.
I don’t think this would fit my mood. From skimming the comments it seems like this was intended to counteract my mood.
I guess that might be valuable to other people but for me I’d rather find something compatible with my emotional state, not challenging it, especially if I’m tired.
Interesting concept, but I prefer movielens myself. Having good grades by people who like similar movies is imo a better predictor if I will be enjoying the movie or not. How I'm feeling is of course important, but if I can see the short description of the movie I can decide for myself... Still, movielens dataset is available, maybe combination of the two approaches would be even better?
How does your site generate movies? Does it pick random ones from IMDb? If so, more movies would probably come up, even the ones less known. Or did you (developer) make a conscious selection? If so, what is your selection based on?
I was a bit alarmed that, when I said I was feeling gloomy, it recommended Midsommar! Don’t really think that’s going to help lift my spirits…. Perhaps the UI is confusing me and I’ve missed something.
Why does it recommend happy titles if I choose 'lonely' or 'gloomy'? Don't I want to augment those emotions when I feel them? There should be a NOT operator.
I always waned to makes a recommendation system based on personality type, or even better movies where two people would enjoy based on their personality type.
Reflecting on past experiences, does anybody else find that first checking IMDB for a score has ultimately been a flop of a habit? Also, IMDB, it’s not what it used to be am I right?
I think the app and the data it contains is good as it is. I would just occasionally like to check data from IMDb such as actors, directors, similar movies and all the stuff one can find on IMDb. A mere link to IMDb could provide more info to those who want it, without polluting your already great site with more data.
I was kind of being silly but I do think there's a certain type of film that is particularly enjoyable when hungover. Usually a fairly basic action film that's not too taxing on the brain with plenty of visual stimulus!
E.g., if I'm feeling sad, I'd like to get distracted to get out of this mood. Or I want to amplify this mood, so I might need another movie.