It's hard for me to even know if Netflix has anything I'd like to watch these days. They've stripped back the browsing features so far, it's hard filter through all the trash, and I wind up just giving up.
Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
451–460 of 491 posts
Re: Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
#452I quit because I didn't like how all of their shows pushed an ideological message. I'm quite left leaning on most issues, but Netflix writers appear to believe that preaching progressive messages is all that's required to make a compelling narrative. If they had the compelling narrative too it might be more tolerable, but they don't.
Do you have any examples?
Try She-ra and Shadow and Bone with a kid... and note the paucity of straight characters in the first or the sweaty gay sex scenes in the second. Deemed not just appropriate, but seemingly an end-goal for children to see. At least they rate them as TV-14, but kids won't let that stop you.
Netflix finally implemented rating selection filters for profiles, but a few years too late for us. Try taking those shows away after they've already been watching them.
Re: Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
#453I’m bored of Netflix. They have simply gone the assembly line direction instead of the direction of art, at least for some big niches. For example, every True Crime docuseries on Netflix is the same crap. Once you’ve seen three, you’ve seen them all. They get each cop involved in a big empty room, sit them on a solitary chair, put a dramatic light above them, and shoot them in 4k. Then they direct it at a pace to bor…
> …it is simply so cheap to pump out middling quality documentaries. Stock photography and interviews and cheap-but-good editing. You’ll notice solo YouTubers are making great documentaries. Reminds me of this hilarious video - https://youtu.be/9BUrNe3Vhtk
Never saw this video before. It absolutely made my day. Brilliant!
Re: Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Property taxes certainly have issues; they tax building improvements, but we want those, so we shouldn’t be incentivizing people to not improve their buildings. Land value tax is the proper way to go, questions of how to value land aside. The issue with a wealth tax is it’s inflationary - most taxes are deflationary but a wealth tax forces you to sell assets to get their cash from them. It does encourage rich people…
> The issue with a wealth tax is it’s inflationary If it encourages people to undervalue, or lower the value of something, I don't see how that's inflationary. Could you explain how it would be inflationary?
Because you can’t undervalue things with clear values like stocks. You have to actually sell them. The IRS doesn’t accept shares for taxes, it accepts USD. Selling -> increased money velocity -> inflation.
Lower asset values aren’t deflation because “asset inflation” isn’t inflation. You can’t eat assets and it doesn’t matter if their prices go up because you can buy fractions of them. Asset inflation (the theory that 2010 QE was causing inflation “in the stock market” even though we didn’t see it in goods) is a crank theory from online people who think central banks print money.
Re: Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a legend of when Sony bought Columbia Pictures which is probably not true but the story is, after Sony bought Columbia Pictures, some Japanese executives flew over to meet with the top management at Columbia. The Columbia management explained to the Japanese execs that only 1 in 20 movies makes a profit. The Japanese executives talked to each other in Japanese and then turned back to the Columbia management a…
This seems like a mirror to the other classic apocryphal story where the IBM ask a new Japanese manufacturer to only have a 3/1000 defect rate and the Japanese seem alarmed by this request. When the product arrives there's a seperate little box with the defective items that have been manufactured seperately to meet the spec. (There's also the "half of my advertising is effective, I don't know which half" line)
The more entertaing version of this story goes:
IBM asks Japanese manufacturer to make 100 boards, specifying 1% failure rate.
On the day of the delivery from the manufacturer, the Japanese CEO comes to inspect the final shipment.
After doing so, he discusses the contract with his chief engineer, and the engineer mentions the failure rate spec.
The CEO nods, takes a board from a box, breaks it over his knee, and says "There is our failure rate".
Re: Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
#456The quoted "competing exec" is 100% wrong when he says Netflix is making a mistake ending shows after three seasons. Shows need to be pitched and run for three seasons max, period. Everyone has a life other than the show that's "hot" for the moment, from cast to writers to the source of money - the viewers. Shows that get dragged out inevitably suck. And yeah, go to weekly releases.
Under that rule of thumb, The Wire and Babylon 5 would never have been made. And from a more recent sample, The Expanse would not have been allowed to get to the end of the story arc. All three have a few things in common. A strong cast of good-but-not-a-star actors.[ß] Writers who knew what they were doing. A story that they wanted to tell, and knew how long it would take. And above all: the integrity to end the ser…
Another thing I've noticed, they should only do about a dozen episodes per year. Anything more than that, and a much higher percentage are filler.
Re: Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My business produces storytelling videos for e-commerce and we almost got into the television/entertainment business at one point, as it is simply so cheap to pump out middling quality documentaries. Funny, I stumbled upon a documentary “Meltdown”, which is about the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979. I expected something along the lines of HBO’s Chernobyl, but it just seems like a very cheap, Discovery-st…
HBO's Chernobyl is not a documentary...
I don't see a claim that it was.
Re: Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like Netflix always kind of had an issue with poor taste. They have crappy reality shows and pseudo-documentaries about how the aliens build pyramids. A metric fuckton of content that caters to people with below average intelligence. In addition to this content being unhealthy because you either don't learn anything, or are actively being fed falsehoods, I think it just gives the platform a poor image. It's ki…
>A metric fuckton of content that caters to people with below average intelligence. The big question is how big is the fraction of people who are below average intelligence. Depending on that ratio, it could make sense to produce content for that part of the population ... Additionally, highly intelligent people earn more money and don't have to buy content wholesale. They can afford to buy movies directly which mean…
I'd say part of the problem here is that consciously or not, people tend to follow influencers, and flock to brands that are more aspirational (e.g. Apple). If you cater specifically to people who like mediocre content, you lose the interest of the people with better taste. Your brand then becomes a brand associated with people that have poor taste, and eventually, even people with poor taste see that the brand is not cool, and they leave too.
Re: Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
#459Everyone talks about their content being the problem, but it seems weird to me that Netflix’s original differentiating factor, platform and distribution, isn’t what they capitalized on. They could have sold their infrastructure and technology as a service before any other media company had a chance to build or buy their own. Now we have shitty platforms with great content, and vice-versa, instead of the best of both worlds with Netflix powering it all.
Re: Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the data teams have a lot of sway at netflix right at the top exec levels. I know this anecdotally since I am close to someone who has approached Netflix and was told it wont work for them. Their reasoning was as simple as it can get. Their data showed what shows people liked in terms of genres and runtimes. That might seem reasonable for short term gains until you realise how silly it is for longevity.
Blind allegiance to data is a grave mistake. Numbers are meaningless without context. But if you misunderstand the context that is producing the numbers, you end up being much worse informed than without the data at all. I fear that people take data and whatever default interpretation as gospel and are loathe to go against it. Faux objectivity is an acute danger that we must all be on guard against.
I agree and I think it's kind of like that quote from Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
If you look at what people like in your current library of content which you've classified into 10 different categories, you get an incomplete picture and you're kind of looking in the rear view mirror. Steve Jobs understood this too.