Awesome suggestion + fonction idea
Tue, 08/11/2011 - 21:58
It would be nice if there was a "band you might like" section. Based on what bands the person likes. Also in the band pages, something like: if you like Animals As Leaders "you might also like: Gru, etc...". People could find what they want easily.
Also, it would be great if we could be notified by email of the replies we get, and the answers we get on our threads, updates, or forum replies.
Wed, 09/11/2011 - 12:41
#2
It would be nice if there was a "band you might like" section. Based on what bands the person likes. Also in the band pages, something like: if you like Animals As Leaders "you might also like: Gru, etc...". People could find what they want easily.
it would indeed be nice, but think about how we would implement this... it's infeasible to manually indicate how similar each band is to all of the other bands. That's N*(N-1) similarities, which currently amounts to just under one million 
So the only option to build such a recommendation system is to use an automated method. Automated methods need data. We don't have such data 
The only related info we have is how many fans bands share. This is the info I used to create the 'map of djent' back in the day, but it's extremely limited and certainly not sufficient to make good recommendations.
We could try interfacing with services like last.fm and The Echo Nest, but given that performance is already such a big issue, I don't really want to add another dependency. Not to mention it would take a lot of work to develop such a system, which I absolutely don't have time for at the moment.
Also, it would be great if we could be notified by email of the replies we get, and the answers we get on our threads, updates, or forum replies.
That could actually be quite easy to implement, but of course it has to be possible to be turned off. Maybe a system where you can 'subscribe' to certain posts and topics could be more useful. Band members could then use this function to subscribe to their band page, for example.
Wed, 09/11/2011 - 16:38
#3
Note to self: this looks like it could do the job - http://drupal.org/project/watcher
Thu, 10/11/2011 - 04:06
#4
it's infeasible to manually indicate how similar each band is to all of the other bands.
Why not manually? People can edit articles, so why couldn't we add a place where people can write by themselves what bands they think other people would like according to this?
And also, maybe i'm repeating myself, but since we already have the "fan" thing, couldn't we easily have a "people who liked this also liked..." thing? I also noticed the site had a "genre" relating system... Based over the statistics of how many fans a band have and the genre of the artist, it would be kinda easy to make an automatic system on that, no?
That could actually be quite easy to implement, but of course it has to be possible to be turned off. Maybe a system where you can 'subscribe' to certain posts and topics could be more useful. Band members could then use this function to subscribe to their band page, for example.
Yes, that's exactly what I tough like 10 minutes ago, haha. A subscription option would be a great idea! Fans could follow recent updates of the bands they like and get to know about replies.. Like a "my account" button with notifications could be a good idea too.. Well anyway.
Thu, 10/11/2011 - 04:07
#5
Click on your profile picture and it will take you to a screen that shows all the threads you start as well as your most recent replies. Direct access to your ongoing conversations.
I know that, but I thought a email based system would be interesting.
Thu, 10/11/2011 - 09:55
#6
Why not manually? People can edit articles, so why couldn't we add a place where people can write by themselves what bands they think other people would like according to this?
Nobody, except you and maybe a couple of others, can be bothered to do this. We will end up with an extremely biased and incomplete recommendation system.
And also, maybe i'm repeating myself, but since we already have the "fan" thing, couldn't we easily have a "people who liked this also liked..." thing?
Yes, that is technically possible, although it might get computationally intensive seeing as it scales quadratically with the number of bands in the database. So I'm not sure if it's a good idea to implement this on our already strained web server.
Then there are some issues to overcome, like popularity bias: a naively coded system will just tell you that everyone who liked a given band also liked Periphery, Meshuggah and TesseracT. You have to come up with an efficient way to make sure that the really popular bands are less likely to show up in these lists.
I also noticed the site had a "genre" relating system... Based over the statistics of how many fans a band have and the genre of the artist, it would be kinda easy to make an automatic system on that, no?
No idea what you're talking about now but I think in general you're underestimating the time it takes to implement things like this. I have a development todo list for this site now that easily spans at least a year of work.
Yes, that's exactly what I tough like 10 minutes ago, haha. A subscription option would be a great idea! Fans could follow recent updates of the bands they like and get to know about replies.. Like a "my account" button with notifications could be a good idea too.. Well anyway.
I should get around to implementing this in the next few weeks, hopefully.
Sun, 20/11/2011 - 00:22
#7
So I haven't been able to let go of your first idea, the "you might also like..." thing
I've come up with an algorithm that seems to yield acceptable results. It has a single parameter, which ranges from 0% to 100%, that indicates how strongly the algorithm prefers popular bands. at 100%, it will constantly recommend Meshuggah and Periphery, so that's useless. At 0%, the recommendations are too obscure to make sense. But at 20%-25%, it looks pretty good (it will correctly recommend Fredrik Thordendal's Special Defects for Meshuggah fans for example, or Eggeh and worC for Uneven Structure fans).
At about 50%, it is very useful to find out what a given band sounds like, as it will recommend moderately popular bands that are similar. However, the most common use case for this system is to find new bands based on known ones, so I think I will fix it at 20% 
I have found a module that will let me implement this algorithm as a plugin, so I think I will have a go and see how far I get with this. It would definitely be helpful for people who browse our database in search of new bands.
I also want to do another edition of the 'Map of djent' using this new algorithm, as I believe it will yield much better results than the one I used in the past.
I'm also still working on the email notifications thing, but that should be finished soon
Sat, 26/11/2011 - 00:19
#8
Didn't look this post in a while! But YEAH! Great! I love it! Keep me updated! ^^
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