“What should I watch next?...”

Why is this a hard question? Streaming services should know all they need to know about me, yet they keep pushing the same junk. I didn't click your lame new movie the first 10 times you showed it to me... please just stop.

Streaming algos suck. So I rolled my own.

I started just working with ChatGPT to see if it would do better, and after some trial/error it did. I got exposed to movies and shows I'd never heard of before (somehow!) and they were actually good! Some of them were actually astonishingly good.

A chat thread was not enough. So I built ShowReco.

It asks you about your general tastes then asks you to rate some movies and show (it can also do books). After you rate enough for it to get a sense of what you like, it gives you a watch queue. If you see things in there that you've already seen, you can mark them as watched and rate them.

The more things you rate, the better the algorithm can understand YOU. I designed it to especially focus on what makes you different from the crowd.

A great indicator of individual taste is where a person disagrees, so every rating gets lined up against the mainstream crowd rating from IMDb, and when the gap is big enough the app gets curious and works to figure out why.

You can see how well ShowReco understands you by looking at your taste profile. It shows the one sentence that sums up your taste, the ways you differ from other fans of the same genres, what you keep coming back to, and what will reliably ruin a show for you.

After a few weeks of using it, I have a movie and show recommendation queue that is actually interesting and diverse. If not for ShowReco, I would have never seen:

• Cargo (2009) a Swiss sci-fi thriller about a medic on a long haul cargo spaceship
• Upgrade (2018) follows a paralyzed man who gets an experimental AI chip implanted in his spine
• The Green Room (2015) a brutal siege thriller in which a punk band witnesses a murder at a neo-Nazi club

Now my queue looks like this, filled with recommendations that exactly match my taste and are not to be found anywhere else.

For fun, I also added a spoiler-free chat so that you can find out more about the movie or show while you are watching.

Give it a try at showreco.com and let me know what you think!