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Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

help.netflix.com

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Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#61

Post by ehsankia »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #57
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…

I don't really like star systems because I spend way too much time deciding if something is 3 or 4 stars, or 4 or 5 stars. I much prefer textual descriptions; for example "Terrible", "Don't like", "Okay", "Like", "Favourite", which has the same options as a 5-star rating system, but choosing between 3/4 and 4/5 is much easier IMHO. I don't really know of any system that uses this, except this one music player I wrote…

Yep, as much as people hate it, when it comes to recommendation, up/down is all the data you need. Trying to build a system out of a 5 star system just adds unnecessary complexity, and the reality was that people used the star system differently making it even harder. up/down thumb is explicit and cleaner to work with.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#62

Post by cle »

psychometry wrote: post #41
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…

They obviously determined that thumbs up/down either generated better training data or more training data. They wouldn't intentionally make their recommendations worse just for the sake of it.

> They wouldn't intentionally make their recommendations worse just for the sake of it.

Why not? Every big platform that I know of has eventually done this with either 1p or “sponsored” content (Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.). In this case their incentive would be to push their own content above 3p content. What matters to them is their revenue, not maximizing the accuracy of their recommendations model.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#63

Post by Scottopherson »

dylan604 wrote: post #40
abhgh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with their Roku app - I quickly jump from one thumbnail to the next to avoid triggering the autoplay.

I have noticed that the loading of the preview has actually made the jumping to the next thumbnail slower on my AppleTV app

If I browse for more than a couple minutes on my appletv, the UI becomes super unresponsive. I have to force quit the app to return to normal. I wonder if disabling autoplay trailers will help prevent this behavior.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#64

Post by gdulli »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #12
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…

I'm pretty sure the new recommendation algorithm is basically just "recommend Netflix originals in a random order". Edit: I feel like I should add something besides a snarky comment: I was searching for a mid-2000s Best Picture Nominee a few days ago (something like Munich or Capote, but don't remember). Results 1 & 2 were The Irishman and Marriage Story. None of the other non-Netflix best picture nominees were anywh…

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.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#65

Post by minimaxir »

daniel_iversen wrote: post #50
minimaxir wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix still does a ton of statistical experiments. A good one is video thumbnail selection. 2016 blog post: https://netflixtechblog.com/selecting-the-best-artwork-for-v... 2018 presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjQMEjkrUGo

But that’s more about making people click right? So while those experiments serve Netflix well, the old recommendations and ratings served both Netflix and users.

True; more was addressing the point about Netflix regressing from statistical rigor.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#66

Post by ggggtez »

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…

Yes, it was discovered that when you had to order movies in the mail, you had different preferences.

If you could only watch one movie at a time, sure you want to make it good. But when it's streaming, people mostly just want to binge watch garbage. Who needs million dollar prizes when you can do just fine recommending 50 different shows, until the user gives up finding anything good and watches a Netflix original.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#67

Post by ehsankia »

joncp wrote: post #43
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…

Remember when you didn't have to wade through that awful carousel view to find what you wanted to watch? Or when they didn't try to hide your "continue watching" list in a steaming heap of inaccurate recommendations? Except for a couple of shows, I've almost completely switched to Prime.

"continue watching" being deep down is my biggest pet peeve. Nothing gets me angrier than having to scroll and search just to continue watching the same show every single day.

Statistically, if each show is 8 episodes, then 88% of the time when I come to the homepage, I want to "continue watching" not "find a new show". Why the hell is continue watching not always the very first row.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#70

Post by ajkjk »

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…

I suspect there was a really good justification for this that they can't directly share with us. These sort of decisions tend to be like that.

Probably getting rid of recommendations led to some massive increase in viewership that couldn't be ignored.

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