Turning Off Autoplaying Previews • Hacker News Board

underbluewaters wrote: post #20

It's amazing it took this long. I can understand how some people might be okay with this feature but it causes me actual anxiety to use the Netflix app on my AppleTV. Before autoplay I could mindlessly browse looking for content. Now I hurry through to check if there is anything new and get out as fast as possible. They must know that people use the app less since this change... right?

Yeah I'm super surprised it took this long. I mean even an "audio off on dashboard previews" setting would have sufficed. It's the single most irritating "feature" of any of my TV apps.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#125

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #116

2bitencryption wrote: post #4

Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…

Netflix now has much better sources of information than the self-reported star ratings. Self-reported ratings fail in a lot of ways. Users can upvote what they think they're supposed to upvote. They'll downvote something, then go watch the sequel, because "It's terrible but I love it". And since they're seeking out stuff that they suspect they're going to like, they either compress all of the ratings into the top tie…

All current user ratings systems for movies are terrible because new users can bury a great movie.

There are classic, important, society-changing movies from the previous century that were highly praised by contemporary critics and won scads of awards. But then people today watch them with zero context or understanding of what was happening or what the world was like and give them bad ratings because they can only compare them to the latest shoot-em-up sequel of a sequel of a sequel.

It's one of the reasons Rotten Tomatoes is worthless for anything more than 20 years old, and why the voices of movie critics are needed so badly today.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#126

Post by ukyrgf » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

Nican wrote: post #36

This might be related to a popular reddit thread that got 28.5k upvotes on reddit the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/exkrij/you_know...

I imagine a large percentage of discussions about Netflix on Reddit have at least 1 upvoted comment about autoplay. I think you are an outlier if it doesn't bother you.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#127

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 10:42 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #87

2bitencryption wrote: post #4

Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…

The Netflix Prize competition launched in 2006, before they had started streaming anything. The problem was to recommend a huge DVD-by-mail catalog to millions of users. By the time the competition finished in 2009, streaming was already growing rapidly. Nowadays their DVD business is a small footnote to their streaming business. The streaming catalog is much smaller than the DVD catalog and the consequences for star…

I'm sure there was a narrow window when you could stream seemingly every film, ancient and modern, legitimately. Then the studios twigged and had to kill it.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#128

Post by fmajid » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

I'd settle for a "I don't ever want to see this movie, do not show it to me again" button. But of course, if we used it to winnow away the chaff, it would show in stark detail how sparse their catalog really is.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#129

Post by effingwewt » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

dman wrote: post #91

This was the primary reason I cancelled my account. Secondary reason was the poor search / filtering options - they have continually gimped these features in favor of their own recommendation engine and homepage. Their recommendation engine has a recency bias and a popularity bias. As someone who liked to watch obscure world cinema Netflix makes it way too hard to find such things and to be honest their catalog doesn…

Same, and I called to cancel to let them know. For me though the autoplaying trailers were the last straw. The UI/declining quality of offerings, to the point where i would spend so much time looking for something new/interesting I'd get bored and close the app. I really dont think this alone will bring me back. Sad because I used to love Netflix, had subscribed back in the DVD days.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#130

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #88

gdulli wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a law of conservation of advertisement. It's not like you were going to get away from ads forever when switching from real TV. I prefer the purely interstitial (untargeted) commercials from real TV. With a DVR I can fast forward them, or always at least mute. Having Amazon/Netflix "recommend" things to me through what should be a functional unbiased system is more insidious.

Ads in the middle of the show? No way. It’s literally an interruption.

If it's for free OTA television, I'm OK with that. I don't know why people never rose up against it in cable/satellite-only channels that they pay for.

/I'm OTA, Netflix, and the library. But I mostly only use Netflix for the DVD service. I'm fortunate enough to have enough going on in my life that I watch very little video.