Item — HN Reader

I never understood why they don’t ask you what you like about a movie or tv show. I do not use streaming platform rating system because it’s so dumb: if I say I like “pacific rim” I get recommended all the dumbest sci-fi action contents I already know I will never watch. I love pacific rim for its esthetic, lighting, photography, and music. I couldn’t care less about mecha and generally hate modern sci-fi.

Like, just ask me instead of trying to guess incorrectly

3 comments

When the Pandora music service launched, I remember reading about how it worked (predicting what you might like next) and it explained how they don't need to know anything about the songs at all (such as genre, tempo, instrumentation, place of origin, year of release, language, etc.) to predict what else you'll like. They simply identify other users with a similar history to you, and deliver to you some of the stuff that those other users had listened to that you hadn't listened to yet. If you abandon a song (suggesting that you don't like it much) then you become a bit less associated with the users who play that song a lot.

I don’t think that works well for movies and tv shows because there is way less datapoints than music (they are way longer, meaning we don’t consume that many films/episodes). A song is also generally more focused, you generally have one tempo, level of energy, and limited instruments. A move on the other hand is a mix of so many art forms. If you only rely on what your cohort voted for you’re missing so much information to make an actual good recommendation.

Netflix system seems to work for their goal, which is to increase revenue, but it’s not a great system for the user satisfaction

I dont think they care about what your opinion is.

You don't think they have a genuine interest in providing good recommendations? A good algorithm will hook viewers more than a bad one. For the algorithm to work, they need to know what you like, and perhaps why you like it.

No, they definitely don’t care about what individual users think. They want to make the cheapest shows possible that get views. This is why they cancel shows people love. Not enough people love them. It’s not about making “good” content. It’s only about views/subscriptions. A platform that had great content that used user opinions would be nice to use, but the enshitification of publicly traded companies would prevent that from happening.

They can get more accurate results for "what keeps this person watching for longer with more ads" from your exact watching patterns than by asking you. HBO even had a very successful show along these lines.

How many survey participants would truthfully respond with "I liked when they showed nudity"? A video host might instead just see that the nudity scenes are where people gravitate towards with their pauses, plays, fast forwards, and rewinds.

That works for your specific example, not for music, atmosphere, actor performance, editing, sound effects, and all the other things that make a movie something I would be interested to watch.

I’m not saying they have to give us an extremely detailed form, but something better than “yes/no” would be good. I WANT to give them the information, I want them to recommend me good movies to watch!

Based on your watching patterns, they know your preferred atmosphere, actor performance, editing, sound effects, etc, more accurately than you do, or are willing to tell them.

Most people don't have the introspection and honesty to build an unbiased psychographic profile of themselves, much less share it with Netflix. At best, such a survey would help Netflix learn which parts of your psyche you don't know, or admit, or confront.

Given their recommendations they know close to nothing about my tastes :)

Their recommendation engine feels very naive, you’re in a cohort based on the genre of films you watch, a that’s pretty much it (I’m sure there is more details in practice but they don’t matter if the recommendations I get feel as dumb as just using the genre)

Maybe that is assuming their goal is to give you what (you think) you like.

Their actual goal is probably closer to maximizing the ads you see while minimizing 3rd-party content licensing costs and operating costs, especially if they can calculate how to keep you paying a monthly subscription cost (you are, right?).

Bonus if they can increase the ratio of `watched_netflix_content / watched_content` to juice up share value. Maybe they know exactly what you'd like, but it's never available, because Netflix doesn't want to pay the license fees to the non-Netflix rightsholders, because that cuts into Netflix's margin.