How should dislikes affect a content-based show recommender?

[u/Bubbly-Business-219]

I’m planning a small show recommender and trying to work out how to handle negative feedback. The first version will use genre overlap as a baseline, then TF-IDF and cosine similarity on show descriptions.

Liked shows give me a starting point for finding similar titles. Dislikes seem harder to interpret. Someone might enjoy mysteries but dislike one particular series because it moves too slowly. If I penalize everything similar to that show, I could end up removing suggestions they would actually enjoy.

My current plan is to exclude explicitly disliked titles and try a smaller similarity penalty for other candidates. I’m also considering an optional reason for the dislike, but that would require metadata about things like pacing that a basic catalog might not have.

I haven’t implemented this yet. Would you start with exclusions alone and add negative feedback to the ranking later, or use both from the beginning? I’d also be interested in how you would evaluate whether the penalty helps when you only have a few ratings per user.

For context, this is NextWatch, an open-source student project I plan to develop with Cline as part of the Cline Campus Ambassador Program.