Tangent.fyi VS Nullstack

Tangent.fyi's answer

Tangent is the only recommendation engine built around the idea that taste doesn't stop at format. Goodreads recommends books, Letterboxd recommends films, Spotify recommends podcasts, each one is trapped inside its own catalog. Tangent maps books, movies, TV, and podcasts into a single taste space, so it can answer questions no single-medium tool can: what's the book that feels like Everything Everywhere All at Once, or the podcast that scratches the same itch as The Good Place.

The second thing that makes it unusual is what it deliberately doesn't do. There's no feed, no streaks, no engagement loop. Just one notification per day reminding you of your daily picks. It's a tool you open when you want something to read or watch next, and then close. We want you to enjoy your recommendations.

Tangent.fyi's answer

I would call them media omnivores... people who read, watch, and listen with roughly equal enthusiasm and don't think of those as separate hobbies. They usually already track their consumption somewhere (Goodreads, Letterboxd, a notes app, a spreadsheet), and they're the kind of person who finishes a novel and immediately wants to know what film is in conversation with it.

They also tend to be people who have actively opted out of attention-extractive software. They've muted the notifications, deleted the apps with streaks, and are wary of anything designed to keep them scrolling. Tangent is built for that audience.

Tangent.fyi's answer

Tangent isn't trying to replace the tools you already use, we sit on top of them. You can import your Goodreads or Letterboxd history (or a CSV) and your library is half-built in a minute. We'll even pull in your Goodreads on a recurring basis afterwards.

What you get in return is the connection those tools can't make. Their recommendation engines are structurally limited to their own medium, so a Goodreads user who loves a particular emotional register has no way to find the film or podcast that shares it. Tangent traces the theme, mood, and shape of a work rather than its genre label, which means it surfaces things a genre-based system would never put next to each other.

It's also free, requires no account to try, and doesn't monetize your attention.

Tangent.fyi's answer

It started with a recurring frustration from my partner. She was continually finishing something great and having no good way to find its cross-media siblings. Every recommendation system she used was walled inside one format. Tangent is a solo project, built nights and weekends and self-funded. The core technical idea is that if you embed works from every medium into the same vector space, using themes, mood, structure, and the questions a work is asking rather than its genre tag, the connections across formats become findable. The catalog grows itself as people use it, which was the only way a one-person project could reach meaningful coverage.

It's a small, deliberately unambitious piece of software in the best sense: it does one thing really well, doesn't ask for your attention, and gets out of the way.