its also possible they wont show you content you really want because its licensing is expensive, and instead they nudge you to content with higher % rev split
Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
31–40 of 101 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
#32I got a tip from someone here and shifted to tracking what I want to watch with a seperate system trakt.tv.
This lets it recommend across different services and removes incentives to promote their own content (I'm assuming someone at Amazon and Netflix is trying to goose their own stats by boosting the content they self create, or that they pay the least for)
A link (and a free recommendation for an interesting show):
https://trakt.tv/shows/giri-haji
It lets you do nerdier searches like by director, writer, actor and similar to openlibrary.org it has some weird old stuff too.
Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
#33Something else conspicuously missing from these services is a checkbox to make it never show me something again. Why do I have to scroll through an endless line of "nope", "nope", "nope", "definitely not", "no" every night, then look at all the same stuff tomorrow? Does someone get paid when I have to sacrifice a brain cell for each of these minor decisions?
The real problem is that each platform just doesn't have that much content. Everyone wants their own platform, and now the content is so fragmented that if you noped out of titles for very long you'd realize they have very little else.
But I have the same experience on youtube.
Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
#34Is it thinkable that after "hundreds of hours binging series and movies" you have simply exhausted the options?
Me, I haven't found a second The Wire yet, no matter how often a recommender claimed I have.
Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
#35If you are looking for movie recommendations, nothing beats movielense https://movielens.org
Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
#36These services get paid to promote content. Did you think they are going to promote legit content?
Netflix gets paid to promote content? That doesn't make sense. They buy or license content, and their incentive is to get you to like what they have to offer in order for you to keep paying them a subscription fee. Why would they pay someone for content, only to have them then pay them to promote the content?
Spotify does this too (paid recommendations).
Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
#37If you spent 20 mins looking, it's not their recommendation system that's failing. It's that you don't like their content (or how their content is portrayed). The recommendation system is the thing that shows you stuff without you needing to browse for 20 mins.
Also paradox of choice / overchoice phenomena, where the more options you have, the less you feel satisfied with any of them.
Considering you wouldn't feel satisfied most with only one option, what will be the optimal number of options?
Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
#38Totally agree, that's why I gave up on it myself and created an aggregator. https://tomatotree.tv
Very cool, just discovered something to binge :) thanks!
Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
#39A big problem on Netflix is that they don't use the original poster or description for movies, instead coming up with their own. I find that these generally don't do movies justice.
Not only that, they dynamically change the poster to try to make it more appealing to each person and it still fails miserably.
They wrote a blog post (that I can't seem to find) a few years ago about how they A/B test their thumbnails.
Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?
#40Because priority number one is getting you to watch their originals, so that you will keep subscribing as the market for movies produced outside the streaming services gets more competitive.
The big events gets featured on the home page, for anything you are probably better of searching for directors or reading reviews, and then finding where you can see it.