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Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?

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Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?

#81

Post by ZeroGravitas »

thewebcount wrote: post #53
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #32

I 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)…

FWIW, I typed in track.tv into my browser and it loads up with a blank page. I have JS turned on, so that’s not the issue, but I do also have ad blockers. This is with Orion on the iPad, if that makes a difference. Sounds interesting, but if I can’t physically get to it, it’s going to be hard to use.

It's trakt, I typoed the name when writing it but the link I added above should work.

Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?

#84

Post by thewebcount »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #81
thewebcount wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I typed in track.tv into my browser and it loads up with a blank page. I have JS turned on, so that’s not the issue, but I do also have ad blockers. This is with Orion on the iPad, if that makes a difference. Sounds interesting, but if I can’t physically get to it, it’s going to be hard to use.

It's trakt, I typoed the name when writing it but the link I added above should work.

Ah, thanks! That did the trick!

Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?

#85

Post by karmakaze »

boffinism wrote: post #6

If 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.

That's not true. Their recommendation system is failing. Often they will have content that's of interest to me, but instead I'm presented with all the popular titles that I've already watched and marked with a rating.

I get the sense that they're A/B testing the wrong metric: time spent in the app. I'll often spend more time looking than a couple episodes of a show.

Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?

#86

Post by yowzadave »

For me personally, the recommendation engines choose the wrong aspects of shows that I like. They focus too much on genre, and not enough on writing qualities, variety, surprise, etc. Just because I liked one “gritty suspenseful murder mystery” (or whatever the genre is) does not mean I will like another! The execution could be wildly uneven in different programs that fall in the same subject matter bucket. I’d rather see a recommendation that can figure out my tastes across genres.

Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?

#87

Post by JohnFen »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #7

Maybe recommendations are harder than we think because our tastes are too arbitrary and unpredictable. Maybe overlapping with someone else's tastes actually predicts nothing about whether there are any more places we will overlap, so it's not the simple data processing problem that we wish it to be. I've tried all sorts of "people who liked X also enjoyed Y" book and movie lists and it never seems any better than a g…

Also, what appeals to us is heavily dependent on our mood and situation at the moment. There are many times when something appeals to me heavily one day, and not at all another day.

Re: Ask HN: How can Netflix and Amazon Prime be this bad at recommending content?

#89

Post by shahbaby »

roboy wrote: post #68
shahbaby wrote: post #63

When I was growing up every kid watched more or less the same cartoons and played the same games. Life was simpler. Now as an adult there's too much out there and too little time. I suspect that this is a big part of why people feel there's nothing good to watch.

But if there was too much, shouldn‘t I have too many good option rather than too few?

The good is mixed with the bad and it takes more work now to find the good.

So perhaps the OP is correct in that the recommendation systems could use some improvement.

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