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Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

help.netflix.com

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Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#141

Post by low_key »

2bitencryption wrote: post #4

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…

The algorithm requirements changed. It used to be to recommend the "best" content for you and now it is to recommend the cheapest content for them.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#142

Post by gknoy »

ixwt wrote: post #120
t-writescode wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, it's anecdata. A lot of stuff I see tends to have a large amount of 5s and 1s. There is often 2-4s, but the amount is very often less than 5s or 1s. 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 complainin…

It might be that people are less motivated to take the effort to rate something if it was "meh, okay" -- whereas a 1 or 5 star rating is something you might want others to know about, so they can see/avoid the show.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#143

Post by scubbo »

_bxg1 wrote: post #96
vikramkr wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did they define viewership? Because viewership of previews definitely increased.

Presumably they can tell the difference between viewership of previews and resulting viewership of the actual shows :P

You're assuming that anyone would be incentivized to tell that difference. Goodhart's Law is a thing.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#144

Post by adrianmonk »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #57
2bitencryption wrote: post #4

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…

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…

Not only that, but I don't trust myself to remember how I calibrated myself to the rating system in the past. If I'm more stingy with the 5-star ratings now than I was 2 years ago, then I'm going to skew things in a way that the system probably can't understand.

In other words, it not only expects me to define my own scale, it also expects me to stay consistent with it over time. I don't think that's realistic.

I honestly wouldn't mind if from time to time, a service asked me to stack-rank movies. Because that would be a question I feel confident I can answer. Give me two movies and ask me to say I prefer A, prefer B, or don't have a clear preference. Or give me 5 movies and have me put them order from best to worst, allowing me to say two of them tied or exclude some. Maybe the UI on this would be too weird for average users, though.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#145

Post by dman »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #115
dman wrote: post #91

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…

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 doesnt even have a lot of such content anymore. 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.

If netflix replaced their UI with a single excel spreadsheet containing data about their content, I would consider it an improvement.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#146

Post by Lammy »

wvenable wrote: post #137
forrestbrazeal wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They deliberately switch around the placement of the homepage queues. The goal is to keep you engaging with the product and discovering new things. They don't want you holding a Netflix subscription just for Friends, or whatever.

But why? Isn't watching Friends a viable reason to own that subscription?

You're more likely to cancel when you're done watching that one show. They want to continuously give you a new reason to keep paying.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#147

Post by 2bitencryption »

philipkglass wrote: post #87
2bitencryption wrote: post #4

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…

The Netflix Prize competition launched in 2006, before they had started streaming anything. The problem was to recommend a huge DVD-by-mail catalog to millions of users. By the time the competition finished in 2009, streaming was already growing rapidly. Nowadays their DVD business is a small footnote to their streaming business. The streaming catalog is much smaller than the DVD catalog and the consequences for star…

Extremely interesting. Thanks for the reply and sources.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#148

Post by e40 »

underbluewaters wrote: post #20

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?

I definitely sometimes just bail on looking because I hate the feature. So happy to see I can turn it off.

Maybe now that they have competition, we'll see more stuff like this.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#149

Post by adrianmonk »

dmannorreys wrote: post #17

Finally. I've been so frustrated about the autoplaying previews, especially since I've experienced that after a few seconds, the menu will fade out and Netflix will play the video as if you had clicked "Play". But I haven't clicked "Play", I only happened to rise up from my couch, hear the preview starting, do whatever for 30 seconds and then come back having to stop or restart the episode. Absolutely terrible. I'm r…

Another bad thing about the fading menu is that it seems to get treated the same as if you affirmatively decided to watch it.

It shows up in "continue watching" and I believe probably stuff like "because you watched A..." (...here are B, C, D, and E).

Which is just silly because even if they want to steer me into watching it because I'm too lazy to tell them to stop, that doesn't mean it makes meaningful data for recommendations. They can tell whether I pushed a button or not, but which seems like a pretty meaningful signal to ignore.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#150

Post by prutschman »

wvenable wrote: post #137
forrestbrazeal wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They deliberately switch around the placement of the homepage queues. The goal is to keep you engaging with the product and discovering new things. They don't want you holding a Netflix subscription just for Friends, or whatever.

But why? Isn't watching Friends a viable reason to own that subscription?

They're hoping to hook you on something else so you'll keep your subscription after you get tired of watching Friends.
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