It was always weird to me that GroupLens didn't spin up a team for it, but it seemed like everyone in the research group had moved on to other things and didn't want to context switch back. Someone mentioned something like "shame they didn't do this 10 years ago, a million dollars would have been nice". I think someone was doing tagging on movielens, but I don't remember the details.
I got the sense that neither Riedl nor Konstan (or any of the current grad students it seemed) wanted to pursue it (Terveen, I think, wasn't in to recommender systems at all in the first place).
I don't think the lab had any funding problems haha, so maybe that was what it came down to.
And I know I'm (possibly) a minority on hacker news, but I prefer the new system. I was giving everything I wanted to watch more 4 or 5, even when it was clearly not the case, but because I want recommendations of things I'm going to like AND actually watch
> All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them.
This rather shows that ratings do work, but are used wrongly for giving recommendations:
If you want to create suggestions for a user, in many case the wrong answer is "suggest what has really high ratings", but rather "given the ratings that this user gave and the films that he watched, what will he also like."
The fact that these documentaries get high ratings (the same might hold for art house films) shows that there is some (niche?) audience which really loves this kind of films, but not that "John Doe" will love it, too.