My friends and coworkers have been playing a White Elephant game with movie titles—everyone puts in a movie title, we exchange them with White Elephant rules, then you have to go watch the movie you end up with. You end up with a movie you wouldn’t have otherwise watched, and you have people you can talk about the movie with. Even if you end up with a really bad film, it can be a lot of fun.

I’ve been meaning to turn it into an app to streamline gameplay (we just manage it with spreadsheets), but I’m really dragging my feet on it.

Awesome! I did a similar thing as my quarantine side project! It's https://couchmoney.tv

Quite a few years ago, I wrote a boardgame recommendation engine for reddit (/r/boardgamerecommender), and when the quarantine hit, I was watching movies and really scraping the bottom of the barrel with the recommendations I was getting (both automated and manual), so I made couchmoney.

I haven't done much with it - have a few hundred users, but I'm planning on keeping it going under the radar because it's transformed how I personally watch movies. I now have close to 200 couchmoney dynamic lists ("1980s Action", "Obscure Horror Comedies" etc) that update every time I watch a movie and are based on real people's tastes.

The engine isn't perfect but it's adapted from the board game thing, which I've been tinkering with for a long time now.

More than happy to help you if you hit issues or want to bounce ideas ... I spend a lot of time thinking about recommendations!

The recommender morphed into my latest quarantine side project, which is a "name that movie" game designed to be played over zoom. It's still super early (and basically only works on Chrome right now) but if you like movies, you may like that. It's at https://couchmoneytrivia.tv

Pretty cool idea. I get a lot of movie recommendations from Criterion closet videos where filmmakers come and pick out movies to take. Barry Jenkins' video got me to watch the Apu Trilogy for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7HLpe65fHY

Is your engine published on a website or otherwise open source? One good source would be letterboxed, they already have human curated lists. An example list is one where the person curated all movies that use high saturation/good color grading.

Hope you post here if you build it! Sounds like a fun app. I wish letterboxd did something like that, maybe you could partner with them?

Very nice! I have wrote a GitHub recommender engine once. Recently I started categorizing Hacker News with ML:

http://hntopics.s3-website.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/best

Hi! I would not consider myself a movie buff but I really enjoy watching movies and your project sounds very interesting. I am a frontend dev, and I would very much like to contribute to your web app. If you are interested, please shoot me an email at azatsdev@gmail.com.

Hi,

I am a big time movie buff and curious about how you tackle the recommender system problem. Especially about defining domain specific groupa. Is it hosted somewhere on the GitHub?

regards, Choesang