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The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

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Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#951
post #908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has the best recommendation system in the world. Of course it gets lots of complaints. But the amount of fantastic content it has consistently recommended for me, including even pretty small channels, is incredible. A few points though: 1. I find YouTube to be good for general educational content. I don’t know if it’s as good for specific niches of entertainment. 2. It’s not just plug and play. You need to ac…

YouTube repeatedly tries to steer my recommendations from the content I'm watching (stuff on terrain making and miniature wargames) to decidedly alt-right content, to the point that at the moment, I mostly watch it logged out and directly searching for the channels I want to watch.

You’re not going to fix it by watching stuff logged out.

You need to hit “don’t recommend this” for a while on creepy videos and it’ll get the hint pretty quickly.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#952
post #775

All the handwringing over Netflix subscriber loss seems to be overlooking the fact that they raised their prices - significantly. Of course they could lose subscribers from doing that. But 200k subscribers out of 150 million? Combined with the end of the pandemic and sky high inflation meaning many people have less opportunity to watch and less money to spend. The fact they raised their prices something like 20% and…

Definitely a part of it for some. Me, I cancelled due to the low quality of their catalog. A decade or so ago, they had a really strong library of media. Now they don't. What they spend their money on, I find to be severely lacking.

And to combine your observations with the parent of this sub thread: Netflix raised an insane amount of debt to fund all the projects a lot of people didn’t ever end up watching, and continued to keep raising subscription costs to cover the payments on that debt they raised. I don’t really know if it could’ve turned out differently after other media outlets decided they wanted to make their own exclusive streaming services.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#953
post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this makes me realize that we have Netflix and haven't really watched or enjoyed it since, I think, the Expanse. I guess we watched the Squid Game, too, but I thought that was terrible. Like a low grade ripoff of an old (and much more intelligent) manga called The Liar Game.

Ironic that you complain about Squid Game being a rip off of Liar Game, when it's also derivative of another series, Kaiji. Reminds me of that classic Steve Jobs line where he complains about Bill Gates ripping off his idea of creating a GUI for OSes, with Bill pointing out that they were both really just ripping off Xerox.

I've never heard of Kaiji before now.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#954
post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with pay per item is that they try to stretch and tretch the amount of items/movies/episodes you watch. Netflix overdid it with making everything a serie. It's super annoying, and I simply don' have the energie to start another serie simply because Netflix's analytics say that it's better for engagement that you have use the serie format instead of a simple movie. It has very little to do with the actual…

I kind of long for the sitcoms of my youth. Something like Night Court, where it's a half an hour of jokes and then you're done . It's nice and relaxing and doesn't try and hook you into watching hours on end.

I've been watching some of them recently. It's amazing how relevant All In The Family still is today. The Jeffersons is still good, Cheers is relaxing after a stressful day. That easy-watching episodic nature is nice for a change.

There are some good recent sitcoms, but you don't get the same sort of 12 seasons of 22 episodes run.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#955
I love Netflix because they have so much non Hollywood dumb content but many foreign European good quality things. I'm always surprised when people say they don't have quality content. Do you really want that dumb latest marvel film? No how about a good British drama that is why I love Netflix

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#956
post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely a part of it for some. Me, I cancelled due to the low quality of their catalog. A decade or so ago, they had a really strong library of media. Now they don't. What they spend their money on, I find to be severely lacking.

They published some shareholder statement years back saying "The quality of the programming does not seem to correlate with how much most users consume". So there you go. I found the same, 10 years back I would read about something amazing and critically acclaimed -- and they'd have it! Now rarely do they. But, my wife and I still watch a lot of Netflix. It is the service which seems to have many things she wants to…

Same symptom happens with addiction: just because you see short term engagement because the product is designed to get users hooked, does not mean that they will not switch once better options are available. You can't retain long term loyalty with bad quality products - same thing happened with Facebook.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#957

Honestly for me I just do not know all the content Netflix has because the browsing is so bad. I wish instead of pushing shows to me best on algorithms, it would just let me browse categories and recent additions etc in a simpler way. Maybe categorised by year.

> I just do not know all the content Netflix has because the browsing is so bad

Yeah, you can't rest your mouse anywhere, all the things pop up and autoplay even without clicking. Same thing happens on Twitter, everything reacts to clicks. If 95% of the screen space is listening for clicks and mouse-over's then you have to be really careful not to misclick on something. It's even worse if you like to run everything through TTS - just try to double-click select something without triggering the click event listeners.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#958
post #322

I doubt most of the subscription loss is attributable to reasons that most HN types go on about (the rants about wokeness, not enough scifi, carousel UI, pirating etc...). What's probably going on is after after a few years of pandemic isolation and Netflix binging, the arrival of pandemic triggered inflation, and overall higher employment rates, people just have less interest, time, and money to binge watch longer f…

I haven't canceled yet but am considering it. They have a few problems for me - They don't make it easy to discover content. They still have quite a lot of good original content that isn't promoted and a slew of third party things that aren't promoted or discoverable at all unless they happen to make the trending list The majority of their original, promoted content is watered down crap designed for mass appeal. For…

> For TV shows, when they do produce something of quality they often dump it if it doesn't find an audience immediately or it doesn't drive "new subscribers".

Or they make a second season so atrocious that they lose the entire audience. For example, the first season of Altered Carbon is one of the best "hard" sci-fi I've ever seen in a TV show. The second season was supposed to have a much bigger budget and had an A-list lead. But it was so horrible that I couldn't even finish watching it.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#959
post #944

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When everything was bundled together, we complained about paying for things we didn't use. Unbundling was initially cheaper because it was just extra profit on the side. Now, it's becoming the primary business model and has to stand on its own. It turns out economy of scale is real, and we've lost it. Other people were paying for our content before, but not watching it. How does real public educational content get fu…

> a cost that needs to get covered by someone. Currently, the loyal subscribers. Those loyal subscribers don't get anything in return for that loyalty. the nash equilibrium is therefore to not be a loyal subscriber, but only subscribe for the shortest period of time and consume the maximum possible. Hence, eventually the service would lose all loyal subscribers.

There's time, effort, and cognitive load in switching. Potential self-image impacts. Some people will think past their immediate needs and want to support Netflix, because that's how they fund good content. The most price-conscious people leave. Many people don't optimize.

Fairness here would be putting the externalities of switchers on themselves, but that doesn't usually work well in the market. We'll probably just tolerate a certain amount of these 'switch freeloaders'.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#960
post #935

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racist homophobic bigots hate "woke" content, but so what? Who wants those snowflakes as customers anyway, who are so terrified of being exposed to cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Pluto having steamy hot gay sex? Let them try to cancel culture and walk away from scary cartoon animal sex all they want. How's Trump's "unwoke" social network working out? https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/ted-cruz-mickey-plut... >TED…

Without being a "racist homophobic bigot", you can be tired of seing that every single TV show they produce seems to absolutely need to play the race/gender/sexual orientation bingo. To me, it feels like the "diversity" of the characters included in a script is one of the factor that is taken into account when deciding to finance a show or not. It really shouldn't be: either a script is good enough and you should fin…

Now you know how it feels to be tired of a lifetime of seeing that every single TV show they produce seems to absolutely need to play the cis heterosexual orientation bingo.
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