Mike is my brother, and he’s who I go to when I want something to watch.
He’s often right — and not just because he has good taste, though he does. He’s right because he knows me. He knows what I’ll love and what I won’t sit through, so when he tells me something’s worth watching, I simply believe him. That’s the whole idea: a good recommendation isn’t about the thing being good, it’s about it being good for you. It’s why the ratings sites never quite do it for me — a score everywhere else is an average drawn from strangers, and an average hides everything that matters. A 6/10 might mean everyone thought it was fine, or that half of them loved it and half hated it, and you’ve no idea which half you’re in. A stranger’s 9 tells you nothing about whether you’ll like it. But someone who knows you does.
Mike keeps top ten lists for films, television, and games, updated every year, and thinks about them properly — agonising over the order, whether something’s a five or a six, what earns its place.
For a while I kept his recommendations, and everyone else’s, in my notes app — and kept losing them. It was impossible to track what I’d watched and what I hadn’t. But I’d started randomising through that list to decide what to put on, my partner and I never being able to agree, and that part actually worked. The problem was that I was spinning through my own messy notes, when what I really wanted was to spin through the recommendations of everyone I trust — Mike, friends, anyone whose taste I rate — all in one place.
And so Mike Was Right was born. Somewhere to keep every recommendation the people you trust give you, remember who gave you what, and — when you can’t decide — spin the whole lot and let it choose for you.
Everyone has a Mike — someone whose recommendations land because they actually know you. This is for getting the most out of yours, and for being that person for someone else.
There is, however, one small problem with all of this. To build an entire app called Mike Was Right is to admit, in fairly permanent terms, that Mike was right. And he is still my brother — which means it still pains me, on principle, to concede the point.
So I haven’t told him it exists. The plan, such as it is, is that the app simply becomes popular enough that he stumbles across it on his own — at which point the world will have informed him he was right, and I won’t have had to. I’d very much like to keep it that way for as long as possible.
(Mike, if you’re reading this: how did you even get here.)