111–120 of 243 posts
This might be related to a popular reddit thread that got 28.5k upvotes on reddit the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/exkrij/you_know...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is an option demonstrated on that very Netflix help page, if I understand your request correctly.
There is an option for "off" or "on (when the credits start)" but not "when the music finishes" or "when the video finishes".
Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…
It was right around the time their first "Originals" came out. I guess accurate recommendations is less important than shows with cheaper licensing costs or home-grown originals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Netflix used to define the ratings as "Hated It", "Didn't Like It", "Liked It", "Really Liked It", and "Loved It". I didn't find it difficult to memorize. What's to stop you from applying whatever textual descriptions you want to the numbers?
Because I might apply different ones, making them useless in aggregate if I assume anything I like has to be a 4 or 5, but you assume that you'll rate anything you like as low as a 2, and reserve just 1 for "don't watch it"
If each star rating had a textual description of what it meant, and drivers didn't have to maintain something like a 4.3 (or whatever it is) in order to stay on the platform, the ratings would actually mean something.
This was the primary reason I cancelled my account. Secondary reason was the poor search / filtering options - they have continually gimped these features in favor of their own recommendation engine and homepage. Their recommendation engine has a recency bias and a popularity bias. As someone who liked to watch obscure world cinema Netflix makes it way too hard to find such things and to be honest their catalog doesn…
These two complaints are actually two manifestations of the same complaint. With a shrinking catalog, it is vital that the UI be nerfed in order to keep it from being too obvious just how little content there is.
Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…
Self-reported ratings fail in a lot of ways. Users can upvote what they think they're supposed to upvote. They'll downvote something, then go watch the sequel, because "It's terrible but I love it". And since they're seeking out stuff that they suspect they're going to like, they either compress all of the ratings into the top tier, or they end up "hating" things that they actually thought were merely so-so.
I suspect that even the up-down ratings get little attention in their recommendation engine. They have far more information, especially in the streaming service. Did you watch all of it? Did you watch it all at once? Did you watch it more than once? Did you watch it immediately after discovering it?
That's all stuff that users can't fake or be confused about. You don't get users saying, "Citizen Kane is the greatest film of all time, but I really don't want to see it." It's more likely that you can tease out what it is that a user actually wants to see, rather than what they tell you they want.
Netflix did run a competition back in the DVD days, when they had less interaction with the user. They did get a slight improvement, but at about the same time, they introduced streaming, and a whole lot of Big Data techniques appeared that could take advantage of that new data.
So it wouldn't surprise me if the up/down buttons were completely ignored by the recommendation engine. Maybe it's just a reminder to you: "Oh, yeah, I did see that. It sucked."
The new system clearly misses some things, but a lot of the problem is that the DVD catalog is immense and full of classics, but the streaming catalog is weak and full of crap. The whole thing may be back-ported into the DVD recommendation engine, but that's the redheaded stepchild at Netflix these days. They tried to spin it off entirely.
This might be related to a popular reddit thread that got 28.5k upvotes on reddit the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/exkrij/you_know...
Goes to show how hated autoplay was.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really like star systems because I spend way too much time deciding if something is 3 or 4 stars, or 4 or 5 stars. I much prefer textual descriptions; for example "Terrible", "Don't like", "Okay", "Like", "Favourite", which has the same options as a 5-star rating system, but choosing between 3/4 and 4/5 is much easier IMHO. I don't really know of any system that uses this, except this one music player I wrote…
Yep, as much as people hate it, when it comes to recommendation, up/down is all the data you need. Trying to build a system out of a 5 star system just adds unnecessary complexity, and the reality was that people used the star system differently making it even harder. up/down thumb is explicit and cleaner to work with.
Scenario: I'm considering some odd looking sci-fi movie to watch that I never heard of before. Ratings between 2-4 stars might not tell me much, but very reliably titles with only one star were terrible movies. Now Netflix happily recommends any and all sci-fi titles, saying they are a "98% match" for me! Sure by category, but when the movie is a low budget dumpster fire I no longer have that instant signaling that the previous rating system gave me.
It's amazing it took this long. I can understand how some people might be okay with this feature but it causes me actual anxiety to use the Netflix app on my AppleTV. Before autoplay I could mindlessly browse looking for content. Now I hurry through to check if there is anything new and get out as fast as possible. They must know that people use the app less since this change... right?
While I'm ranting about Netflix, I absolutely hate the feature where if you leave a show paused for more than five seconds, it starts showing spoilers (the episode description). I often open Netflix before I eat a meal, get it to the start of the next episode of a show I'm watching, and pause it until I'm ready to watch. And then I carefully avoid looking at the screen to avoid the episode description/spoilers. The descriptions are only useful after I've watched the show and want to find a specific episode. I don't want to see them before I've watched the episode!
The Netflix app just seems so actively hostile. I'm used to apps being unpleasant because of bugs, but being unpleasant because of features is unusual.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They used the equivalent of the thumb system. Many people give 5 stars, or 1 star. There are some that give in between. Many places consider anything less than 5 star to mean there was a problem (Uber, Amazon, reviews for phone support).
Do you have statistics on that? I’m not sure I believe you, given Amazon ratings seem to have quite a broad range, so the pattern is established. edit: specifically, that people only give 1 or 5 stars
It's mostly just looking at trends. A few things I've purchased from Amazon come with a little advertising slip that says "if this product is anything less than 5 stars, let us know what we can do to make it better!" I've seen plenty of stories from people complaining that their less than 5 star reviews got removed for X reason (often because it's "dishonest").
Maybe that'll be my next learning exercise: scraping the count of reviews from Amazon to support this hypothesis.