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The Clickbaitification of Netflix

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Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#231

Post by captainclam »

barneybooroo wrote: post #59
sgt wrote: post #53

Netflix has also become unbearably "woke". I've simply given up on Netflix for that reason but also due to many other reasons like the what is described here.

Is your outrage that they’re commissioning content that reflects a diversity of experience?

I'm going to front-load this by stating that I 100% agree that representation matters, and absolutely welcome a diversity of perspectives in media. Furthermore, I do believe that much criticism of "woke" media is a knee-jerk reaction to new, unfamiliar values and shifting power.

That said: Netflix's deployment of "wokeness" can feel completely shoehorned in and utterly arbitrary, a cynical technique that affirms the viewers' perspective, thereby increasing engagement.

I'm not "outraged" by it in the slightest. It tends to align with my own worldview. But at the end of the day it just makes for crummy content.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#232

Post by ckosidows »

aeoleonn wrote: post #224
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…

Excellent. There is a silver lining: It will lead to the end of Facebook and hopefully these practices you’ve described... once the lesson is learned. The end of Facebook, Snap, and other scientifically-designed-to-be-attention-exploiting apps/sites would be very positive.

Or, conversely, apps like TikTok, etc, etc will learn from past failures and develop even stronger algorithms to capture attention ad infinitum.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#233

Post by nonameiguess »

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…

The answer is at the very bottom of the article and maybe Netflix is already doing it. It mentioned a producer was told his show was renewed not based on the "how many people viewed for at least two minutes" metric that gets reported to ratings publishers, but based on how many people actually watched the entire season.

It isn't this trivial for all media, but I think "watched the entire thing" is a very obvious metric to optimize for when recommending and promoting films and series.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#234

Post by kbos87 »

I found this article to be so spot on. There’s a mindset often found in tech companies that essentially comes down to “in every decision the data must win.” I see this in my day to day working at a large saas company all the time, and pushing back against this mindset is akin to heresy on some teams.

What the author points out is happening to Netflix is the inevitable late stage of this mindset. To me it looks like the home screen in Netflix is optimized for superficial engagement, at the expense of the actual value and joy customers get from the service.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#235

Post by fisf »

unethical_ban wrote: post #217
ghusbands wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can now turn off autoplay of both trailers and next episodes, in settings. (Account menu -> Account -> Profile and Parental Controls -> [your profile] -> Playback settings -> Change)

Take a moment to think about having to go through six layers of menu tree to access a frequently requested feature. Now imagine explaining this step to someone who doesn't intuitively understand computers and whose children bought them a Roku for Christmas. I'm not fussing at you, just thinking about this first-world hell.

Also: the fact that it's hidden under 'parental controls' speaks volumes.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#236

Post by mereck »

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…

Thank you for sharing. These are good examples of Albert Borgmann's focal things and the device paradigm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_paradigm

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#237

Post by dr_dshiv »

colechristensen wrote: post #178
dr_dshiv wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I generally agree. Finding numbers to measure quality almost never helps composers or cooks, but it almost always helps organizations. Why? Quality oddly lends itself to quantification. Rotten Tomatoes and Amazon stars don't always work, but i find they work shockingly well. I'm not going to naively defend the benefits of quality measurement, but i do advocate for the importance of continuously improving quality measurement systems. And key to this, imo, is making sure we take the effort to measure the values we actually want to enhance.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#238

Post by vorpalhex »

janfoeh wrote: post #117
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…

> 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…

The NAS route is a solid one. There are a lot of fantastic tools out there these days for managing media collections.

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#239

Post by meowface »

>The Clickbaitification of Netflix

>The same tricks that nearly destroyed online journalism now threaten to take over the streaming service.

One of the current front page headlines on slate.com:

>I’ve Been Telling a Lie to Trick Men Into Sex With Me. Is This Really So Bad?

Re: The Clickbaitification of Netflix

#240

Post by seph-reed »

ckosidows wrote: post #232
aeoleonn wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent. There is a silver lining: It will lead to the end of Facebook and hopefully these practices you’ve described... once the lesson is learned. The end of Facebook, Snap, and other scientifically-designed-to-be-attention-exploiting apps/sites would be very positive.

Or, conversely, apps like TikTok, etc, etc will learn from past failures and develop even stronger algorithms to capture attention ad infinitum.

I tried out TikTok for a few nights. It very, very quickly got repetitive. I think the short-form content sphere can only fit so much of an arc in what little time it has. And getting people to sit through it requires being a bit click-baity. And everything was obviously staged, and a lot of times it seemed like...

Okay, so when I was a kid, we made stupid videos too. But we never expected anyone to watch them. And they were often 5-10 minutes long in the end.

On TikTok you can tell that the priority of being filmed is to be seen. They aren't just having fun. It's like TV, and weirds me out.

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