A “Recommendation Home” by and for People
Ariana Isabel Duckett // Editor-in-Chief
Second-year computer science student Rohan Nihlani named the media recommendation app he recently launched, Rhome, literally: It’s a home for recommendations on movies, TV shows, books, and more. No recommendations are sourced from artificial intelligence (AI), as many apps commonly do nowadays.
“I built Rhome because I got tired of letting algorithms decide what I should consume,” Nihlani wrote in an email interview with The Bottom Line (TBL). “A lot of modern day social media platforms are very much focused on short form and scroll content,” according to a later interview with TBL.
I decided to try it out for myself following our conversation. The thumbnail of the app and title screen is in Roman-reminiscent font, with a ring of navy blue laurel leaves as the O. Rhome downloaded in around three seconds, faster than many other apps I have observed.
I put in my phone number and a password of at least six characters to create an account. With many requiring the password to have special characters and uppercase and lowercase letters, it felt faster and easier to reach the homepage and see what Rhome was about.
Recommendations fell under five categories — books, videos, articles, podcasts, and films and TV shows. “You probably wouldn’t follow hundreds of people like you do on Instagram because you don’t care about hundreds and hundreds of people’s opinions per se,” Nihlani said. “You just care about those … people whose taste you trust.”
Before building Rhome, Nihlani realized that some of his favorite media came from family and friends giving him recommendations. The foundational premise of the app is using it with friends, not relying on recommendations from strangers.
Although I did not recognize any of the “Suggested for you” profiles besides the founder himself, media about a variety of topics populated my search — “Why don’t poisonous animals poison themselves?” one video title asked me. “AI Doesn’t Have to Rot Your Brain,” a reposted Wall Street Journal article reported. The user who reposted it, @arunbains, wrote beneath, “There was one method the author suggested that particularly stood out to me – when thinking through ideas or forming opinions have the AI play the opposition,” which “could be a great way to stress test and refine our ideas.”
Nihlani shared that numerous people believed the name of his app originated from his own name but it truly came from his goal to be “the world’s recommendation home.”
“When people want to share something or they want to consume something, they want to see someone’s recommendation, they come on to Rhome,” Nihlani said.