Personalized Recommendations (Plus-Tier), Browse Page Overhaul

[bibliothecary]

Description of your request or bug report:
Just making @Jintor’s idea a formal request.

@Jintor

Wondering if there was a prod request for a ‘recommend around similar level’ feature on individual book pages, especially if it could filter if you had already read that book or not, were not interested so it knew to not show you that series again etc. I know you can just use the search engine to find books in that level range, but I think it might be handy on book pages.

I envision this as not being affected by tags/content/author or anything in the vein of what I presume Amazon or commercial sites do - a simple ‘hey, this book is also in this level range, do you think you might be interested’ sort of thing only, just as a way of discovering new reads.

@bibliothecary

I like the idea of recommended books appearing on book pages. As you say, there are different ways of doing it.

A recommendation section could include books that are:

• not on any of your lists
• have an average score of 3+ stars
• are good for language learning
  • have a similar natively level (give or take a couple of levels)
  • also have furigana (if applicable)
  • (possibly) are the same type (manga, light novel, etc)
• are similarly entertaining
  • people who liked this (4+ star rating) also liked…
  • similar natively level or any level up to the highest level on your finished list
  • share content tags

I haven’t thought it out, but the individual entertainment/language learning ratings may be useful here, too.

Similar / related requests:

• Link to "other books at this level" from "level nn" tag popup
• Detailed language evaluations
• Compute "affinity" and give suggestions of people to follow

Trello link: (leave in blank)

[Jintor]

Thanks for writing this one up!

[brandon]

Approved - not entirely sure of the final implementations, but these are all great thoughts!

[brandon]

So I am now actively working on this! I tweaked the title a little since we now also have movies / tv shows.

The personalized recommendations page will be plus-tier only ($5+/month supporters) which will have lots of the goodies you’re describing. In addition to that new page, we’ll be improving the current free ‘browse’ page a lot too.

Once all the features are laid out, I’ll give a quick summary to you all to see what people think.

And after the recommendations / browse page improvements are laid out, I’d also be happy to hear all your thoughts around the paid / non-paid split. We do think that personalized recommendations feel like a reasonable place to put a paid barrier but will be curious to hear your thoughts. Obviously many platforms choose to place their paid barriers in different spots so I’d love to hear honest opinions.

[Megumin]

Maybe having a trial (without card or pre-authorizing bs) would be good too once it’s live, so people get a good feeling of what the features are.

[seanblue]

@brandon

The personalized recommendations page will be plus-tier only ($5+/month supporters) which will have lots of the goodies you’re describing. In addition to that new page, we’ll be improving the current free ‘browse’ page a lot too.

Community sourced recommendations (like on AniList) is valuable too. If you decide to do that, it should be free since you would want as many people as possible to recommend/upvote other media.

Personalized recommendations that can automatically account what others have read that you might also like by looking for similarities is also good. Compute "affinity" and give suggestions of people to follow is more about user, but the same idea should apply to the books/videos themselves.