IME, human recommedendations are (were) generally not "an average of all human likes". The parent's comment is spot on, IMHO. Granted I have an opinion that may be biased toward a pre-internet, pre-www world, where friends and I shared vinyl, tape and later CD and DAT collections. Most of the music I collected came from friends' collections1 rather than purchases or live recordings I made myself. Recommendations were important, but also important was that we usually perused what was in our friends' collections. If I found an item that looked interesting, I could ask what the owner thought about it. That might produce another "recommendation".
1. Those whose collections were much larger. They were not purchasing LPs, recording live concerts or collecting live recordings on the basis of recommendations, they were taking chances on artists that they may have heard about but with which they were not familiar. Obviously sometimes they acquired stuff that was less interesting than what they had hoped. But it is through mistakes that we learn. The www- and smartphone-era recommendation algorithms are designed with intentions that friends never had. Friends were not collecting data on internet users and/or selling online ads.
1. Those whose collections were much larger. They were not purchasing LPs, recording live concerts or collecting live recordings on the basis of recommendations, they were taking chances on artists that they may have heard about but with which they were not familiar. Obviously sometimes they acquired stuff that was less interesting than what they had hoped. But it is through mistakes that we learn. The www- and smartphone-era recommendation algorithms are designed with intentions that friends never had. Friends were not collecting data on internet users and/or selling online ads.