Imhonet

» see imhonet.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

imhonet never reached turkey and had no particular reason to. it was russian-language from the first screen to the last, built for a reading and film-watching public that had its own canon, and the whole value of the thing was the density of ratings inside one language. a recommendation engine with a thin population is worthless. that is exactly why it stayed where it was born.

it also has a start that most web products do not get: it began as a book. alexander dolgin ran the department of economics of culture at the higher school of economics in moscow from 2003, and in 2006 he published a long argument that the real problem with modern culture is not production but choice, and that the fix is a public institution of consumer expertise built on collaborative filtering. imhonet launched in april 2007 as the working version of that argument.

the mechanism was old by then and the ambition was not. you rated films or books on a ten-point scale and filled in questionnaires about taste, and the system looked for the users whose ratings tracked closest to yours. what made it unusual was the refusal to specialize. it ended up running thirteen separate sections, from theater and poetry through to a section for wine, on the theory that the same taste graph should work everywhere.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the first year brought a hundred thousand users. by autumn 2011 it was past seven hundred thousand registered, and on the first day of 2015 the company was reporting more than ten million monthly visitors with roughly half a million people using it daily. for a russian-language cultural service with no social feed and no video, that is a serious number, and it made imhonet the reference dataset for russian taste in a period when nothing else was measuring it.

dolgin also tried the stranger half of his thesis on it. the book had argued for voluntary payment after consumption, the reader deciding afterward what a book had actually been worth, with that number feeding back into the recommendation layer as a stronger signal than a star rating. imhonet ran experiments along those lines. they never became the thing people came for. the ratings did.

~ the day it died ~

in february 2017 former employees told vc.ru that the staff had been cut and the project frozen. the company that had absorbed it, data-centric alliance, said the project was not bringing the returns the investor expected. dolgin had folded imhonet into dca while concentrating on his other business, and the decision to close came from that side rather than from any collapse in traffic.

on april 28 2017 the site went to a single page reading "pioneer of recommendation services in russia" and stayed there. there was no notice period and no export tool, so nothing came out with you. people who had spent nine or ten years scoring several thousand films each found that gone on a friday, which is the part russian coverage kept returning to.

~ what got buried with it ~

some of it survived, in a form the users never got to choose. the imhonet ratings corpus is somewhere around three hundred million records, and it had already gone out to researchers, so it lives on in academic papers on cross-domain recommendation as a benchmark dataset. by december 2019 a site called kinonavigator.ru was running with the film ratings carried over, a narrower service doing one of the thirteen sections.

what did not survive was the part that was actually imhonet. thirteen kinds of culture measured against each other in one profile is a claim about people, that taste in wine and taste in poetry are the same organ working on different material. nobody has built that again. what replaced it is a set of separate recommendation engines, each one owned by whoever is selling you the thing it recommends.

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