The Clickbaitification of Netflix

Post by fabbari » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 11:02 AM UTC

Gunax wrote: post #103

ricardobeat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the Big Lebowski thumbnail on his screenshot. While that scene is in the movie, it’s not at all central to the plot. It’s not that remarkable or even show the main character. There is no shooting. But a man aggressively pointing a gun gets you curious, more than the actual movie poster. It’s clickbait because it is simply picking the image most likely to elicit a reaction - and misrepresenting the nature of the…

Yea so the Lebowski one was the only one I really agree with, and even that's is a stretch. We have to believe that the title is actually mistepresenting the genre... Maybe but it's still liated as a comedy. The other 2 examples did not make any sense to me at all. I guess to summarise what I mean: of course people want to make good covers. It seems these accusations depend on us really assuming a very nefarious inte…

Post by fumblebee » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 11:12 AM UTC

mdoms wrote: post #128

fumblebee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not certain what you mean by human factors, so correct me if I've misinterpreted. If by human factors you mean basic heuristics based on human intuition, that fails too. It might satisfy 50% of viewers but there's too much diversity in taste for this to be a good model. I'm not defending the metric as described, but there's obviously good data driven approaches and bad ones. The trick is to find a solid proxy for…

"Human factors" could include doing something as radical as observing how someone uses your product (no, not with a computer - just watch) and then - and this is the shocking part - speak to them. Ask them why they did that or what they liked and didn't like.

Post by omniscient_oce » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 11:31 AM UTC

personjerry wrote: post #7

I worked at Facebook for some time, and did a bunch of data work. We had this culture of building something, looking at the results between the experiment groups, and then choosing the statistically more successful one -- i.e. a newsfeed algorithm that had better engagement. This sounds great at first, and certainly is straightforward if you want a promotion. But behind the scenes some of us had this thought that our…

Post by keiferski » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 11:35 AM UTC

UntitledNo4 wrote: post #141

kmmlng wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they are taking steps which are ostensibly geared towards this drug dealer vision. But is it working? I can only look at myself and the people around me. There was a time when we would go on Netflix binges and there probably was something drug-like about it. But now? I go on Netflix, I scroll around for a bit, can't find anything I would like to watch, and I close Netflix again. The only reason I'm still paying fo…

Maybe that's really Netflix's business model these days: nobody watches anything, but it's a hassle to cancel the account, so nobody does it, so lets continue frustration our users, maybe they will stop visiting us completely while never really leaving us. Let's look at the bright side though, we're going to end up with a lot of nice thumbnails.

Post by reallydontask » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 11:42 AM UTC

yarcob wrote: post #102

This is why I quit my Netflix subscription. The algorithm seems to have picked up the fact that I like watching SciFi and Zombie movies, so my Netflix homepage was this dark place filled with Sci Fi and Zombie movies. One problem with this is that Netflix only has a handful of good SciFi and Zombie movies, and I've seen them all. So the homepage was filled with movies I've seen already, or the dime-a-dozen copycat mo…