Slowly becoming convinced that all but the simplest recommendation algorithms are not, in fact, that good. A while ago Letterboxd released a "powered by Nanocrowd" list of similar films that appear at the bottom of movie pages, they are universally less useful than just trawling user watchlists that contain a given film, or just searching for user watchlists called "werewolf movies" or something.
Then I recently started getting into Rate Your Music, which is a delightfully web-2.0 music rating/list website, and so far I've discovered more new music in the past week based on user playlists and top-ten lists than I have in 6 months of Spotify's personalized playlists.
"The Youtube and TikTok algorithms keep on trying to spray raw sewage directly into my corneas" is basically a joke at this point. IDK man maybe this stuff just sucks. Half the internet is jerking their dicks raw talking about AI but "random goth girl on the internet tells you her favorite post-punk albums" still seems like the best way to actually discover new stuff.