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Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

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Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#141

Post by scarface74 »

cube2222 wrote: post #80
scarface74 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for me to get too upset. Personally, it seems a bit conspiracy theory to think it's people might read negative reviews. I agree. Why would I care about whether reviews are positive or negative about a movie before I started watching it? It’s not like I have spent money if 30 minutes in I realize it’s trash. I feel the same way about movie reviews now that I have AMC subscription movie service. If a movie is…

For me personally, if I lose half an hour, I lose as much money as I get for half an hour of work. That's why I love content recommendation systems which actually work. Though the downside is, that today's systems (looking at you, Spotify) close you in kind of a bubble. The best I've met was Google play music, the recommendations were great and at the same time you got to know a lot of great content unlike anything y…

I keep seeing people equate every hour they spend on X as the same amount of opportunity cost of they were working. Do you measure how much time you sleep, spend with your family, eating etc. in the same way?

I work 40-45 hours a week. Even when I am doing contract work, I limit the time I’m working. I don’t equate the 8 hours I spend working out to lost wages either.

Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#142

Post by chatmasta »

derefr wrote: post #49
evfanknitram wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me but my experience is that except for the actual streaming (after you started to watch a movie), the Netflix UI is super bad. It recommends movies which I hate, it shows series which have been on Netflix for years under "New on Netflix", it doesn't provide any usable sorting, the searching is crap and so on. I would put zero faith in a statement by Netflix saying that something is "useless". The act…

I find it interesting that there isn't yet a sort of "streaming-service library discovery/manager" app that doesn't do any streaming of its own, but rather just offers a good discovery UI for the streaming services you connect it to, where clicking "watch" in the service deep-links to the individual content item in the respective streaming app. This has been done to death in other content areas (I think there are mor…

Sounds like a great idea. You should build it!

Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#143

Post by extra88 »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #36
ajmurmann wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, wouldn't you love it if the junk was removed and one day you log on and you just get a message telling you that you've watched all the stuff the algorithm thinks you'll like and you might as well go do something else?

The one thing I liked most about Netflix back when it was a DVD service was the recommendation system. I could rate things with stars, and Netflix could figure out, with reasonable accuracy, what movies I would consider junk and what I would consider quality, rather than the opinions of the general public. They have some good shows but their streaming movie selection and recommendation system doesn't hold a candle to…

The disc service still exists, I’m a customer. It still lets users give star ratings and still has user written comments/reviews.

Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#144

Post by extra88 »

kartan wrote: post #121
CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part I don’t understand. Why do they go through so much effort to have me binge watch Netflix. It costs them bandwidth, and it makes me go through the quality stuff quicker. If they instead tried to get me watching just enough to keep the subscription it would be cheaper for them and I would have be more happy with the mean quality of available options

> Why do they go through so much effort to have me binge watch Netflix. "Focus Area #1: Engagement Engagement is, hands down, the #1 area that you should be concerned with on social media. It is the catalyst for improvement in all of the other social media KPIs we'll discuss." https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/social-media-kpis This is just an example. Everybody wants to become Facebook for some reason.

That doesn’t make any sense, getting rid of user reviews makes Netflix streaming less social. Netflix is not social media.

Trying to have people watch just enough to keep subscribing is too hard a needle to thread, it’s easier to encourage as much streaming as possible so people feel like they’re getting something for their money. I’m sure bandwidth is a minor cost compared to licensing and producing content.

Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#145

Post by extra88 »

riffraff wrote: post #72
smsm42 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One has to wonder how comes that recommendations were pretty good, but then they spent millions of dollars on improving them, including highly-publicized competitions and a lot of work inhouse I assume, and not they are not.

I have movies I have already rated (i.e. watched) in the "watch next" list. Sure, it can happen that I want to watch them again, but it seems unlikely. It seems clear netflix is optimizing for something which is not just "the movie this user would like to watch next".

Yes, I wish Netflix would hide things I’ve watched more. Obviously if it’s still in My List it should remain, having a Watch it Again section is fine but they should basically disappear from New Releases or lists based on what I liked and be at the end of the list in genre categories.

Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#146

Post by prades »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #111
ghaff wrote: post #29

It's hard for me to get too upset. Personally, it seems a bit conspiracy theory to think it's people might read negative reviews. Seems more likely it was a poorly used resource and Netflix didn't see the value in continue to support, maintain, and screen it. That aside, it points to a couple of issues. There is a lot of bad content on Netflix. It never had a good film catalog and their TV strategy has clearly evolve…

> No one has come close to solving recommendation. Recommendation is a solved problem from a computer science point of view. The problem with recommendation systems is that their outputs always get overridden by political and marketing concerns.

It's clearly what happened to Netflix. Do you remember when Netflix was the infamous leader in movie recommendations? Do you remember the Netflix prize?

Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#147

Post by scarface74 »

zouhair wrote: post #98
scarface74 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How in the world does this make sense? The entire competitive advantage of having the scale and user information that Netflix has is to be able to do personal recommendations by recommending shows based on what others with similar taste like. Heck, I know very little about big data and even I have walked through a simple sentiment analysis proof of concept demo to rate comments as positive or negative.

Imagine Amazon doing the same.

If I am going to pay for something on Amazon sight unseen, I care about reviews. But I’ve already paid for Netflix. There is no additional monetary commitment.

Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#148

Post by prades »

derefr wrote: post #49
evfanknitram wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me but my experience is that except for the actual streaming (after you started to watch a movie), the Netflix UI is super bad. It recommends movies which I hate, it shows series which have been on Netflix for years under "New on Netflix", it doesn't provide any usable sorting, the searching is crap and so on. I would put zero faith in a statement by Netflix saying that something is "useless". The act…

I find it interesting that there isn't yet a sort of "streaming-service library discovery/manager" app that doesn't do any streaming of its own, but rather just offers a good discovery UI for the streaming services you connect it to, where clicking "watch" in the service deep-links to the individual content item in the respective streaming app. This has been done to death in other content areas (I think there are mor…

This app already exists for Netflix (25 countries) and Hulu:

https://www.coollector.com/#netflix

Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#149

Post by rorykoehler »

ajmurmann wrote: post #24
apo wrote: post #22

It may also be the case that negative reviews of movies, TV shows, and stand-up specials did more to dissuade potential viewers than positive reviews did them to draw in; ... Netflix's bigger problem is that much of its content looks good on the surface, but on closer inspection is not worth the time. A lot of this stuff is produced by Netflix itself. Bill Nye's most recent show comes to mind, but there's a lot more.…

Hah, wouldn't you love it if the junk was removed and one day you log on and you just get a message telling you that you've watched all the stuff the algorithm thinks you'll like and you might as well go do something else?

That's why i unsubbed. Could never find anything compelling to watch

Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

#150

Post by MiddleEndian »

pmoriarty wrote: post #88
MiddleEndian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing I liked most about Netflix back when it was a DVD service was the recommendation system. I could rate things with stars, and Netflix could figure out, with reasonable accuracy, what movies I would consider junk and what I would consider quality, rather than the opinions of the general public. They have some good shows but their streaming movie selection and recommendation system doesn't hold a candle to…

Netflix's DVD service is still active. They just hide it under a separate URL: https://dvd.netflix.com

At some point, Netflix decided my address was fake and cancelled my account, I never bothered to address it since that seems like a silly way to deal with that scenario.
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