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The Clickbaitification of Netflix

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Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#171

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

The way Netflix presents thumbnail images custom tailored to the user is ingenious. There is a lot of insight there on how people choose content based on preferences for star actors, subject matter, tone etc.

Personally however, as an avid film viewer, this massive algorithmic curation is completely not for me.

A cool example and complete opposite of the Netflix approach is the Mubi approach. There, the focus is not on giving me exactly what I think I want, but instead on offering this narrow curated selection along with content written by actual film critics. As a result I watch things that I did not expect.

This curation aspect is something Netflix strategically completely opted out of. And this makes sense - their goal is to have an active subscriber base and achieving that goal doesn't factor in the existing film/tv culture.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#172

Post by alistairSH »

xmprt wrote: post #14
matheusmoreira wrote: post #3

Would Netflix have to do this if it actually had content people wanted to watch? It's just sad watching it double down on this pulp because every other copyright holder took their ball and went home.

A big issue for me is that Netflix now has so much content that everyone watching different things and there's no longer "the show" that you have to watch to talk about with your friends. Instead, there are a handful of good shows every year spread across all platforms and it's come to the point where if I'm just going to watch things on my own, I might as well just watch YouTube.

This.

A few years ago, I subscribed to Netflix. That was it (no cable, no other streaming). The amount of good content was reasonable.

Now, I have to cycle through Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Apple, and Amazon. I unsubscribed to most of them most of the time, and resubscribe as a show or movie comes to my attention (Dune will get me resubscribed to HBO for a month or two, etc).

I still spend less on streaming than I did on cable, but if the whole ecosystem gets any more fractured or any more expensive or any more annoying to navigate, I'll probably start cancelling and just find something else to do.

Unfortunately, finding books isn't much better, or I'd likely spend more time reading than watching TV. But a bad book, for me, is 100x worse than a bad TV show.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#173

Post by janfoeh »

dangus wrote: post #167
janfoeh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I cancelled my Netflix subscription, and went back to occasionally renting a film on iTunes or Amazon. I did that too, and then went one step further, because some fifteen years down the line, online video rental still hilariously, bafflingly sucks. Twelve, thirteen years ago I was still renting physical DVDs. Back then, renting a physical item that was produced halfway around the world, shipped to Germany and d…

You can also do exactly this with Blu-rays and get really stunning above-streaming quality, though of course the selection and pricing isn't as desirable as DVDs. What I'm saying is invest in a USB or internal Blu-ray drive, the extra cost is worth it.

You're right, I probably should.. I'm just a little bit anxious of the extra fiddling required to find decent compression settings for BDs, since I've got no experience there.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#174

Post by mumblemumble »

It's interesting, because one of the earliest lessons I was taught in college was that greedy algorithms tend to lead to sub-optimal results.

Is the problem that they're not teaching that in college anymore, or is it that the people in charge of these things are non-engineers who don't necessarily even know what a greedy algorithm is, let alone that the principle might apply to business practices and not just software implementations.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#175

Post by howaboutnope »

m12k wrote: post #107
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…

Humans are instinctively drawn to a lot of things that are really bad for us in significant amounts, because we are designed to fit into an environment where those things are scarce. Sugar, fat, inactivity, "interesting news", outrage. These all steal our attention because that response helped our ancestors survive and pick out these rare but important treats. But in typical human fashion we've now crafted a world th…

> Sometimes the worst thing you can do is give people exactly what they ask for.

Alan Moore said this in the context of poetry, but with the caveat that everybody is sometimes part of "the" audience, and that every fully fledged human adult should sometimes be "the" artist, I think he has a hugely important point:

> It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#176

Post by Vrondi »

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…

Yes, Facebook is now almost useless. The only reason to be there is to keep track of friends and family, but it has gotten to the point where if a family member has a big life event, I'm hearing about it through traditional in-person or on-voice-call word of mouth _faster_ than through Facebook, because Facebook keeps deciding for me what it wants me to see.

Netflix has kept trying to make it harder for me to find what I want for the last few years, and I use it less and less, and now pay for fewer accounts than in the past. They are in danger of losing customers, with their annoying mouseover/autoplay/clickbait interface.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#177

Post by mojuba »

mlac wrote: post #168
mojuba wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well put! I have another related theory that goes: Over time, everything converges into mediocrity . By everything I mean products sold to us, entertainment, media, the Internet itself. Look at the car designs of the 1970s and now. Look at cinematography then and now. As soon as marketing steps in and start telling otherwise innovative companies or artists how to sell, things begin slowly converging into mediocr…

I was driving to work (a foreign experience) and Joe Walsh was singing about a Maserati. And it made me thing “man, if you grew up in middle America, hearing about a Maserati, you might not even know what it was, let alone that it existed”. Now you can hit Google and see millions of pictures, join the fan club, watch hours of videos and reviews, and become an arm chair Maserati expert. Which is cool, but if sort of t…

> I think peoples tastes have shifted to quality in more areas,

I'm genuinely curious if there's any data or research to support this. Because in my view the tastes remain more or less the same, just the information noise around us is now bigger.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#178

Post by colechristensen »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #74
tomnipotent wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The data/engineering/product loops at tech companies favor boosting short-term metrics I think this hits the nail on the head. Leadership is hard, and executives can be many layers removed from the frontline. It seems that A/B tests and family have proven a really effective vehicle to communicate across leadership levels what has happened, why it happened, and the impact it had on the business. I'm definitely guilt…

How might a streaming service be designed to increase user happiness and wellbeing? From a positive design perspective, could certain streaming features give users a greater sense of purpose or goal accomplishment (e.g., mastering a genre) or help users meaningfully connect to others (e.g., seeing what friends have recommended lately)? While measuring the effects of a feature on wellbeing outcomes is substantially ha…

Quality often escapes measurement. The naive overreliance on finding a number to optimize is an enemy of quality, and is all over the place, and can be boiled down to people being driven by somebody’s need to make a nice powerpoint slide.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#179

Post by soylentcola »

mlac wrote: post #168
mojuba wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well put! I have another related theory that goes: Over time, everything converges into mediocrity . By everything I mean products sold to us, entertainment, media, the Internet itself. Look at the car designs of the 1970s and now. Look at cinematography then and now. As soon as marketing steps in and start telling otherwise innovative companies or artists how to sell, things begin slowly converging into mediocr…

I was driving to work (a foreign experience) and Joe Walsh was singing about a Maserati. And it made me thing “man, if you grew up in middle America, hearing about a Maserati, you might not even know what it was, let alone that it existed”. Now you can hit Google and see millions of pictures, join the fan club, watch hours of videos and reviews, and become an arm chair Maserati expert. Which is cool, but if sort of t…

I can identify with the guitar example. I started learning to play in high school, right before internet access became common for average folks in the US (I knew some kids who had CompuServe at home and I was aware of some BBSes, but nothing like today).

I remember going to the music store where they had a room with sound dampening and a giant pedal board hooked up to an amp. Some friends and I would head over after school, guitars in gig bags, and plug in to "try out the pedals". I'm sure the staff loved us since we couldn't really afford to buy them ever. But we got to hear what they all did.

Other times I'd think I invented something, only to realize it had already been done. I had this little headphone-amp that ran off a 9V battery and plugged into the 1/4" jack on your guitar. It was great to play loud (through headphones) and not annoy my family.

But one time, I had some old broken headphones plugged into it and found that I could wedge the driver in the corner of my mouth, play distorted guitar through it, and shape the sounds with my mouth. Do it in front of a mic and whoa! How cool is this??

Later on I learned talkboxes were already a thing. Do you feel like I do, indeed.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#180

Post by yarcob »

omniscient_oce wrote: post #149
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…

I've found that when I watch a Youtube video, at least half or more of the recommended videos on the right are videos that I've already seen before, often music. Does anyone know if there is way to turn this off so it can recommend me strictly new videos? It's infuriating. The best guess for why this is that I've seen online is that it's because they're targeting younger age brackets more aggressively and kids love t…

Many people use Youtube for listening to Music, makes sense to listen to a song more than once :)
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