The Clickbaitification of Netflix

I canceled my Netflix sub. Maybe this is why? Netflix became desperate to be legitimized by "big Hollywood"/"big entertainment". It used to be the new thing that didn't need to conform with its titles.

Is the platform widely used and the business successful because content makes users happy and improves their lives?

Or is engagement high, because users have become accustomed to whatever a company is feeding them and look for something shallow to fill up their time.

If you only measure engagement as metric, without any deeper reflection and judgment, then heroin is a perfect product in terms of A/B testing.

-No autoplay and bringing you back to the main menu at the end of content would give your brain a chance to actively decide if you want to continue or do something else.

-No notifications or pushes to get you back on the service. So many services try very hard to take up space in your mind while you aren’t using them, in order to get you back on the platform.

-Suggestions allow for diversification as well as deeper understanding. This might be suggesting documentaries related to fictional subjects you are watching, critically acclaimed content in your preferred genres, or expert analysis and contextualization of content that allows for better understanding of cinematography or cultural influences on a piece of media.

-Low effort and binge content is shuffled out of immediate sight and flashy attention grabbing ways of displaying content in general is stopped.

Now you are more of a passive participant, where you keep getting notifications until you open the app, then are bombarded with easily digestible, low effort content that actively plays itself, and discourages anything that requires delayed gratification or long term focus. These things would shift the way you interact to an active participant, where you decide to engage the app without prompt, and look for something you want to engage with, or don’t and easily leave to do something else.

This really only works if every other app and service isn’t constantly battling to fill every sliver of open attention with the most easily digestible little piece of data (a 10 second meme, a couple of comments, a 30 sec friend snap) and to drag your attention back from other things through strategic notifications, gamification, and feelings of social obligation (did you wish kqr happy birthday? click here to write on his wall).

Attention and focus for long periods of time is a skill. Delayed gratification is a skill. Both of those are needed for long term growth, developing new skills, maintaining other skills, and doing activities that are fulfilling but not immediately gratifying. Being surrounded by things that constantly and perniciously attempt to carve up your attention and provide instant gratification is detrimental to those skills. I want my digital environment to help improve those skills, or at least not be actively harmful to them. In the same way we have spent the last 15 years and petabytes of data, optimizing algorithms to increase engagement by any means, we could use that data and AI to start optimizing for sleep quality, mental health, goal attainment, financial stability, physical health, minimization of insecurity, etc. If Amazon can predict when women are pregnant before they know, I’m sure we could optimize for these.

> In order to increase user well being, a service like this probably has to encourage the user to spend less time with it. But that's not a business model that generates any money.

That is really the fatal crux of a digital environment funded largely through ads. The user will always be the product and will be manipulated to benefit the customer, regardless of the effect on the user.

I assure you that even a rural kid like me knew what a Maserati was. We had movies, TV, and car magazines. People's assumptions about information delivery pre-internet are horribly warped.

In recent years though I’ve come to see the downsides of that mantra as outweighing the good of it. Because some things are either extraordinarily difficult or expensive to measure, or because understanding what the measurement is demonstrating is beyond the intellectual reach or experience of many people. By the latter sentiment I mean, it’s not enough to just show a number or a graph, it has to be interpreted, and for some things that interpretation is very challenging if you’re not a (or the) expert in that system.

As a result, it’s more like “easy to measure and understand things get fixed, everything else gets ignored”. It disdains or glosses over the idea that maybe a person or team’s subjective opinion about what’s important to fix carries any weight at all, because if it was really so important, surely they’d be able to demonstrate that in a form that someone (possibly willfully) ignorant of the system can understand.

I see the same forces at work here, in marketing and a/b testing. The simple to understand metrics are what are optimized, while the more complicated ones get ignored or drowned out. The longer term benefits are hard to measure, and more importantly, hard to understand and interpret.