The Clickbaitification of Netflix

https://slate.com/culture/2021/08/netflix-top-10-movies-shows-clickbait.html

by thrusong • 5 years ago

346 307 5 years ago

Movie posters have used salacious and sensational words and imagery for as long as they've existed. If anything, Netflix titles have been slowly working toward parity to that standard, as opposed to devolving to actual clickbait.

Ozzie_osman• 5 years ago

I see your point, but movie posters didn't live in your home and didn't have the power of mass personalization.

An analogy might be junk food. Sure, it's advertised in all sorts of tempting ways in supermarkets, but imagine if your refrigerator suddenly gained the ability to show, prepare, and serve you customized/personalized junk food whenever you opened it.

robbedpeter2• 5 years ago

Movie posters were ubiquitous in homes, a favorite of teenagers, often the racier the better.

I see your point, but I don't see a problem with Netflix content using sensationalism to drive clicks. In fact, it's probably one of the vanishingly few legitimate uses of that type of visual manipulation. They pull visually stimulating stills from the content itself, combined with text that gives you a quick indication of what's in store. I take issue with low effort or misleading titles, but it's a constrained medium in a commercial context. Not a lot of ways to vary the interface.

The article just seems like a silly take, to me.

bryan02• 5 years ago

Yeah this makes me feel so old. This is not really different than scanning the box covers at a Blockbuster store or, as you mentioned, movie posters which have probably been misleading for nearly a century.

matheusmoreira5• 5 years ago

Would Netflix have to do this if it actually had content people wanted to watch? It's just sad watching it double down on this pulp because every other copyright holder took their ball and went home.

ocdtrekkie2• 5 years ago

Nobody was ever going to make all TV and movie content available for $9 a month to everyone. The idea that Netflix could last the way it used to be was ridiculous.

matheusmoreira5• 5 years ago

Copyright infringement makes everything ever created available for $0 a month. If streaming services can't do the same, they suck and are failing to compete.

mewse-hn• 5 years ago

Yeah, netflix saw this balkanization of streaming services coming and they started spending other people's money on original content so they couldn't have the ball taken away from them. It seems to be working for now - they've had 619 emmy nominations - but when there's 15 services that each have 1 show you want to watch, piracy will flourish

emkoemko• 5 years ago

i bet eventually they will be doing cross platform streaming rights deals, only one i can think off that might never do that is Disney. Your content can only be consumed so much on a closed platform before it losses its profitability and then you just sell its rights to bring extra profits.

otherwise i can't see how this will be sustainable this is going to be more expensive then tv channels were . Yes the content have much better production value but who will be able to afford so many stream services other then just people hopping after consuming what they wanted to watch.

maybe there will be a pay to watch service that has everything and you just pay for the right to watch the specific content.

dmitriid• 5 years ago

"Video streaming giant Netflix had a total net income of over 2.76 billion U.S. dollars in 2020, whilst the company's annual revenue reached 25 billion U.S. dollars" [1]

Yes, they can last the way it used to be. Well, they did slightly increase the price because they were forced to spend ridiculous amounts of money on their own content, but they are doing just fine.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272561/netflix-net-incom...

coldtea2• 5 years ago

Deals with content companies aside, why not?

Storage and delivery wise its much chaper than YouTube (which is 100000 times bigger in storage needs due to user generated content), and makes all this available for $9 without ads...

xmprt2• 5 years ago

A big issue for me is that Netflix now has so much content that everyone watching different things and there's no longer "the show" that you have to watch to talk about with your friends. Instead, there are a handful of good shows every year spread across all platforms and it's come to the point where if I'm just going to watch things on my own, I might as well just watch YouTube.

crateless• 5 years ago

That's been pretty much my conclusion as well. I can mostly find some kind of long-form content to consume and although the feed algorithm sucks, the recommendations on the video page itself usually make up for it.

alistairSH• 5 years ago

This.

A few years ago, I subscribed to Netflix. That was it (no cable, no other streaming). The amount of good content was reasonable.

Now, I have to cycle through Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Apple, and Amazon. I unsubscribed to most of them most of the time, and resubscribe as a show or movie comes to my attention (Dune will get me resubscribed to HBO for a month or two, etc).

I still spend less on streaming than I did on cable, but if the whole ecosystem gets any more fractured or any more expensive or any more annoying to navigate, I'll probably start cancelling and just find something else to do.

Unfortunately, finding books isn't much better, or I'd likely spend more time reading than watching TV. But a bad book, for me, is 100x worse than a bad TV show.

tornato7• 5 years ago

Netflix REALLY went for quantity over quality with their library. I'm certain that there are some great shows in there, but I have to start ten different series just to find one I like.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Disney+ library is rather small, but I find at least half the shows to be enjoyable, so that's where I turn to first.

HWR_143• 5 years ago

Netflix started out with a huge amount of content. I'm sure they're scared that no longer seeming to have everything will hurt their subscriber base. One way to make it look like you still have everything is to have an overwhelming amount of stuff.

fumblebee3• 5 years ago

Hm, I really don't understand the approach of choosing shows/films based on what the algorithm tells me I'll like. Watching a series is such an incredible time sink that it's necessary to gather more information in advance of choosing.

I've found a much better model is friends or critics' recommendations cross-checked against Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb ratings. (Which implies you need some people to use the scattergun approach, but I'd rather not be the guinea pig).

This way it doesn't matter if good Netflix shows are "needle in a haystack".

mumblemumble2• 5 years ago

I don't really feel like there's much quantity, either, though. The stuff they're doing is just so very stylistically homogenous.

I guess it's down to how you frame it? Some people see 100 different flavors of ice cream. I see 100 different flavors of chocolate ice cream. Both perspectives are accurate. Which one is more useful to you perhaps depends on how much you like chocolate ice cream.

dazc• 5 years ago

And this is the obvious answer that they somehow manage to keep overlooking.

Just cancelled my sub and won't be activating it again until Christmas. I should then get a decent month of viewing before I cancel it again.

In the meantime I'll be paying amazon much more money for stuff outside of the Prime offering that I want to watch and am willing to pay for (albeit grudgingly).

nsgi• 5 years ago

They do, though. They produce a lot of garbage but their best rivals HBO

dogman144• 5 years ago

The best get cancelled two seasons in, while HBO does not.

matheusmoreira5• 5 years ago

Their best shows were produced before they stopped caring about quality and started churning out garbage by the truckload.

tsjq2• 5 years ago

Would Netflix have to do this if it actually had content people wanted to watch?

very well said. that line is spot-on.

for my taste / prefs, I could notice a clear state of uselessness around late 2019. I stopped netflix subscription starting Jan 2020.

blahblahblogger2• 5 years ago

I also stopped Netflix at some point early in the pandemic. More and more I was seeing good shows go away and nothing decent replacing it. Then they had all these weird shows (Cuties?) coming around that left a bad impression.

Ultimately my canceling of Netflix went along with canceling big tech as my disillusion has grown across the board: * Amazon (this was hard to cancel, my prime subscription is still paid for the next 6 months) * Facebook (still use the messenger app to chat w/ friends though) * Google (search and Chrome - but still use gmail of course and at work)

I'm going to cancel something from Apple to do a full de-fanging of FAANG :)

Actually here's what I'll cancel: Apple Arcade. Everything they release now is just a "+" game from a non-Apple-Arcade title. "Somegame+" where it means no ads and maybe a little extra content. Originals on Apple Arcade are now harder to find and everything in my new/recommended/trending/etc is a "plus title".

boublepop• 5 years ago

Come on, this is beyond hyperbole and absolutely absurd.

Yes, Netflix has content people want to watch.

That’s not a fact up for debate, it’s is absolute certainty and proven beyond all reasonable doubt. To suggest otherwise is on par with arguing that the moon doesn’t exist.

milleramp• 5 years ago

It’s also due to a lack of content from the lockdown, however this trend will continue, people will learn to navigate it. For me, I’m going with the dude.

monkeybutton2• 5 years ago

After reading the article on my phone and hitting the back button to get back here, I'm instead presented with a screen showing more content and pleading me to stay on the site (Keep on reading!). Talk about the kettle calling the pot black.

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

I was very confused by what was happening when I encountered that screen. Is there a way to block the overriding of back buttons, particularly on smartphones?

dlvktrsh• 5 years ago

I don't know the technicality of it but yes there definitely is

monkeybutton2• 5 years ago

Its called back button hijacking. How it works or why such an abusable feature exists is a mystery to me though.

perryizgr8• 5 years ago

Doesn't seem to be happening for me. Egde/Galaxy S10

darkwizard42• 5 years ago

I believe Netflix has talked about thumbnail experimentation at length in some of their engineering blogs [1]. To me, it seems perhaps Netflix has figured out a running theme in the author's viewing habits... perhaps the scandalous, soapy stuff is what they keep clicking.

Same kind of reaction I get when a guy friend tells me they keep getting ads for women's bikinis or women's underwear in their Instagram ads. It isn't sexualization of Instagram... it is a reflection of your interaction with the platform!

[1: https://netflixtechblog.com/selecting-the-best-artwork-for-v...]

puszczyk• 5 years ago

Yeah, sure. I like desserts. I’ll eat a tasty looking one if presented with the opportunity. But it doesn’t mean I want my kitchen or living room filled with desert ads.

watwut4• 5 years ago

Netflix has literally zero discoverability if you want to go outside what it suggests. If I click stuff that initially seem appealing and then based on seeing decide I dont like it, tough luck. You clicked on it, because you liked name and pic, turned out different thing that you like, but now netflix is forever convinced you want this.

I tried to go through documentaries category, because I was in mood for documentary. Pure hell and every time I viewed movie detail, it jumped back to start.

I dont have an option to click on something else and Netflix does everything possible in order to prevent me to find stuff I would like. The result is that I dont idle watch netflix, because it is too much work and we watch only shows someone else told us about and we searched by name.

biztos• 5 years ago

I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since the DVD days, and for the last several years all the best shows I’ve found, I read about elsewhere first.

Which is kind of insane, but I got used to it, and I will google around for interesting new Netflix content instead of bothering with their scroll-fest.

aaronax• 5 years ago

I unsubscribed many years ago but occasionally I am tasked by my significant other to find something on Netflix (shared account with her family).

I actually have pretty good luck with searching for random things. Like I searched for "cool" the other day and found something good that would have never shown up otherwise. Seems like a way to substantially bypass the recommendation engine "smarts".

11235813212• 5 years ago

That response to complaining about Instagram is becoming a frustrating meme because it isn’t true that Instagram doesn’t offer sex appeal to the uninitiated, and rather than discussing that issue, this simple response just shuts down criticism of the social network by embarrassing the person who brings the issue up. Lest you turn the meme on me, I’ll say don’t have an account.

bertil5• 5 years ago

I don’t think this response is dismissive: it’s a technical explanation of what is happening. Understanding it helps us find a solution.

Netflix (of Facebook) rates content along embeddings, and highlights content along embeddings that users engage with. If a given user engages with clips featuring people in bikini, that system won’t pass the judgement (one that the author is passing, a judgement you dearly regret, ‘Lest…’) — but one that the commenter didn’t pass. No one in that process (at Facebook, Instagram or Netflix Tech team) is choosing to make things sluttier, or asks someone to bend over a little more (Netflix being a film and series producer too, I’ll reserve there).

Given that context, if, like the author, you believe that the content should not engage along certain dimensions then there’s several possible takes:

* a paternalistic approach to downgrade dimensions that are deemed unhelpful; that would have been popular in my Catholic school, less so on Hacker News, I’d expect;

* a empowering approach that either:

  * name the dimensions and let users downgrade them; that’s harder than one would expect for many reasons, but roughly: naming is power and embeddings are not human-legible;

  * let users downvote some recommendation, even if they’ve engaged with it.

Both Facebook and Netflix but also YouTube, Google Search engine, all have strangely avoided building those negative feedback for click-baits. It many ways, it’s a mystery to me, especially as someone who built so many recommendation systems. I’ve always used implicit or explicit negative feedback, to just engagement and the recommendations were meaningfully better.

I’d love to hear from people who have explored that approach if there have encountered issues implementing them. I can share two details that are not sufficient but I hope are relevant:

* The biggest problem at Facebook has always been that Likes were performative: your friends saw them, by design; people refused to use them as a way to improve their recommendation because of that. When we discussed a drop in posting, or when the five other reactions where debated, there were several suggestion to make a parallel form of Like invisible. I’ve seen those ideas being shot down repeatedly; I was never told why. I assumed there was a fear those would cannibalise the public Likes, and those drove a lot of engagement opportunities, but that was speculation on my part.

* Most effort to understand recommendations (“Why am I seeing this?”) had an abysmal engagement rate. So much that maintaining it wasn't worth the effort.

watwut4• 5 years ago

This is literally author complaint:

The company seems more brazen in its strategies, more willing to promise something and then absolutely fail to deliver, often using headline tricks familiar from the social web. That’s what clickbait is: luring someone into clicking, and then delivering something other than what the headline made them want. [...] my homepage illustrates The Big Lebowski with a photo of an angry John Goodman pointing a gun, as if the Coen brothers’ comedy is actually some kind of revenge thriller.

Netflix did not figured out how author viewing habits. It is trying to figure out author clicking habits and then disappoints. It misleads author into clicking wrong stuff.

Following the success of the comically generically titled Money Heist, Netflix recently debuted the new, even more generically titled hit Heist

Because the recommendations are based on superficial but illogical similarity.

isoskeles• 5 years ago

It might be a reflection of my interaction. But I distinctly remember telling Instagram’s Discovery feed to stop showing me sexy women. This would work for a few weeks until the women would eventually come back. I’m not sure if this is an issue of the request (stop showing me X) expiring, or if I lingered too long on some other photo one time, but either way it wasn’t content that I sought out. Instagram kept finding a way to recommend it.

Notably, I kind of liked the Discovery feature when it was showing me relevant and unsexy stuff. But I’ve since deleted Instagram.

slowmotiony• 5 years ago

A friend of mine was hired to do design work for Netflix - he ended up having to create tens of different thumbnails for every show, which netflix would then run through their algorithms and decide which one to show to which user.

I've looked at my netflix page and it seems that some silicon valley psychologist decided that they should be showing me thumbnails of guys with sad faces looking at something far away. Almost every single thumbnail looks like that.

Sometimes I wonder if the engineers behind the scenes even realize how creepy it is what they are doing.

bertil5• 5 years ago

Does your friend work with User experience researcher? I know it sounds ridiculous to delegate “this looks creepy” to an expert, but that’s where those people are valuable: they can enrich an impression with detailed feedback.

Also, if your friend has any sway, can you beg him to suggest a “Stop recommending this to me” button, if they haven’t. The platform is better at removing movies I’ve stoped watching from the “Continue watching” selection after a week but… that’s still a bit long. I just want the agency of telling the machine No on occasion.

And if that works, thankfully, we can get a “stop showing me the same image” button too.

maverwa2• 5 years ago

While thats certainly part of the problem, I distinctly remember that, when I created my instagram account and followed the first few accounts (all miniature painting stuff, I use insta for exactly nothing else) the suggestions in the search where sprinkled with stuff not fitting in that genre. Like car content and barely dressed women posing. I had to do the "long tap" => "not interessted" dance for a few days to get rid of most of it.

Sure, maybe its something the algorithm connects. "This fellow likes painting small figures, other peoples who do that also like cars and women, so he will like them as well" but its harsh to say "you only get what you asked for" in this context imho.

matsemann• 5 years ago

It isn't sexualization of Instagram... it is a reflection of your interaction with the platform!

No, that "gotcha" is blatantly wrong. If you follow running people, Instagram will float you popular running content. What's popular running content? Girls posing in yogapants. Same for other niches. The most popular and thus shown content will always be a sexual version of the theme.

personjerry• 5 years ago

I worked at Facebook for some time, and did a bunch of data work. We had this culture of building something, looking at the results between the experiment groups, and then choosing the statistically more successful one -- i.e. a newsfeed algorithm that had better engagement.

This sounds great at first, and certainly is straightforward if you want a promotion. But behind the scenes some of us had this thought that our observations only amounted to short-term gains. Although we had small long-term experiment holdout groups, the truth is they were rarely reviewed because it was unsexy.

My current thinking is that features like the echo chamber effects from Facebook's algorithms, Snapchat's snap streaks, and clickbait like this, all serve to optimize short-term engagement. Yeah, I want to watch that sexy new show or keep my streak going or have my opinions validated. But there's a diminishing return on clickbait, hollow articles isn't there? I can only fill up so much time with garbage like that before I'm bored. I can only like so many posts before I feel like they're all the same. And once my snap streak is broken I hate snapping.

The data/engineering/product loops at tech companies favor boosting short-term metrics; The employees are incentivized to do so and this is what they measure, so this is what they build. That's why we end up with features like this. That's why Snapchat fell off. That's why Facebook fell off. And that's why Netflix feels increasingly stale (despite there being a lot of quality content if you dig).

vasco• 5 years ago

They don't seem to have fallen off, are still the most widely used platforms in the world with billions of users in total. It is popular to think that A/B testing leaves you in local maxima, but what about alternatives? The only thing I've seen work is something like Pixar's brain trust - you do testing but you also rely on the good judgement of a small group of people with a strong sense of vision. Judging good judgement is pretty hard though, and you won't know if they're just full of it or winging it unless you try and trust. And so everyone does A/B testing which to be honest sounds much better than your average PM making decisions that are pulled out of their ass.

HWR_143• 5 years ago

It is popular to think that A/B testing leaves you in local maxima, but what about alternatives?

I mean, if corporate leadership isn't able to better direct the path of a product than the results of A/B tests, what value do they really have?

piva00• 5 years ago

It is popular to think that A/B testing leaves you in local maxima, but what about alternatives?

The alternative involves creativity to create a vision to achieve. A/B testing are pretty good tools to evaluate differing opinions on some vision, as the only deciding tool for what is worth to keep or not it's pretty short-sighted.

Is it really that much better? I lived through the rise of A/B testing, professionally I've been responsible for implementing platforms for experimentation in at least 5 different companies and over the years I saw it transition from a tool to a crutch. Everything now is "data-based" which means incessant A/B testing, it still depends on your average PM deciding the parameters of the experiment, leading to the current state of affairs: a bunch of uninspired features that are solely judged on the data produced, no soul, no vision behind most of it.

And it feels exactly like that, I can feel how tech products just became that, an incessant stream of features being tested, implemented or tossed.

I'd much rather have data-supported intuition than this statistical machine in motion.

fisf2• 5 years ago

The problem is not only that it could be a local Maxima. It might also measure the wrong metric all together.

Is the platform widely used and the business successful because content makes users happy and improves their lives?

Or is engagement high, because users have become accustomed to whatever a company is feeding them and look for something shallow to fill up their time.

If you only measure engagement as metric, without any deeper reflection and judgment, then heroin is a perfect product in terms of A/B testing.

lukestevens• 5 years ago

Yes, I'd love to see a more robust approach to novelty decay rates (to make up a metric) in A/B testing, especially around engagement.

You'd think that would be of interest to the business to know that X "successful" intervention had a typical average lifetime of Y before reverting to the mean, for example.

Then again, there's the idea that competitive advantage for social networks is just finding enough novel interventions before the novelty of the platform itself is exhausted, and FB has no short supply of other platforms to milk in that regard.

dreamer7• 5 years ago

What was the duration for which you collected results? Was it 2 weeks or a month etc?

mgraczyk2• 5 years ago

Depends on the change and effect size, also on product. Typically somewhere between 1 week and 1 quarter. Almost always there is a backtest after shipping in which a small percent of users do not receive the change for 1-6 months (a "holdout")

keiferski2• 5 years ago

This is the consequence of lack of vision. What is Netflix's long term goal? Ideally, it would be to fund and broadcast fantastic cinema. Yet, I really don't get the impression that contributing to the art form of film is very high up on the metrics chart.

pizza2342• 5 years ago

I'm of the opposite opinion. They're executing their vision perfectly.

Netflix is very aggressively pursuing the bottom line, and they're not doing it differently from a drug dealer. It's not random that the term "Netflix binge" exists.

Netflix interface is designed to shove content at the users' face at all costs, and in a very disrespectful way. Here there are some disgusting dark patterns:

- it took them a long time to give the user the option to remove movies from the watching now list

- there's no way to remove already watched movies from the panel; their trailer is even sometimes displayed in the top frame

- they randomize the global order of the horizontal lists, so that one needs every time to hunt the user list (watching now/my list) through all the panel

For a short time, I even experienced a bug where movies with (my) negative rating were not greyed out. I can imagine the engineering thinking "LOW PRIORITY!".

On my (fictional) "drug-dealing practices" rating, Netflix is high on top with Amazon.

karmasimida• 5 years ago

contributing to the art form of film

Has netflix ever committed to this vision? I would be hell bored if Netflix is filled with Oscar-ish films.

One thing to note here is, the tech community is inherently elitist, in a way many envision tech as a tool to doctrine its audience, telling them what is good or bad. I don't find this mindset, either helpful nor necessary.

Recommendation engine is the new soda machine, choices are offered, and you pick what delights you. Ofc you can choose water, but it is not the machine's fault some would like real coke.

stonemetal124• 5 years ago

A lack of understanding their own business model? They are a gym, they need to provide enough service to get you to sign up and keep paying, while minimizing your actual use.

2Gkashmiri3• 5 years ago

i do not understand snapchat and their business model. they started out as a sexting app that deletes the photos and that is where it remained for a long time. i remember news of how "deleted snapchat photos can be undeleted" tutorials and i tried to investigate for fun but i could not understand the UI back then and the tutorials didnt work so i dropped it. Apparently its pretty big these days in the kids and they have "streaks" as you mention. i hear multiple hundred thousand streaks and other things but to what end?

how is snapchat justifying the storage, bandwidth and processing of data? i mean facebook has ads which they earn, same for twitter but what about snapchat? do they have a sustainable revenue stream because no where i heard snapchat had a paid option.

reddit was user funded for a long time with daily goals and all that so that was not an issue mostly but what snapchat done to address that.

snapchat is all the rage in my city, kids who are now on online classes send snaps because i hear about it. everyone knows how to make that twistface pout or whatever but why? genuinely curious about it

cosmie• 5 years ago

i do not understand snapchat and their business model.

Ads[1]. Initially it was just promotional lenses/filters and required a high touch process and substantial media spend commitment. But looking at that site, they now have a full on self-service ad platform with minimal spend commitment, helper software to make lenses/filters, and have added several other ad formats beyond that one.

So they've essentially monetized the same way as every other "free" platform has – capitalize on all the eyeballs they have to siphon off a cut of marketing dollars for themselves.

[1] https://forbusiness.snapchat.com/

ladon86• 5 years ago

$2.5bn revenue last year.

You've heard of streaks (which were a very early feature), and you've probably heard of Stories too, right? Video ads appear in between Stories video rolls.

tomnipotent6• 5 years ago

The data/engineering/product loops at tech companies favor boosting short-term metrics

I think this hits the nail on the head. Leadership is hard, and executives can be many layers removed from the frontline. It seems that A/B tests and family have proven a really effective vehicle to communicate across leadership levels what has happened, why it happened, and the impact it had on the business. I'm definitely guilty as charged of having participated in this "pyramid scheme".

Teams get a tool to structure work and determine success/fail. Managers get a tool to detail exact impact to leadership on how they're solving business problems. Executives get a tool showing how teams are being deployed on thoughtful projects with an iterative and rigorous scientific approach that helps increase confidence around deploying capital. The board gets some slides during the quarterly meeting and maybe might even see some charts showing growth and less cash burn.

Eventually over longer periods like a year, executives will notice different trends than what the short-term numbers are showing and will have to make real hard decisions about how to steer the ship.

It's a hell of a hamster wheel.

dr_dshiv8• 5 years ago

How might a streaming service be designed to increase user happiness and wellbeing?

From a positive design perspective, could certain streaming features give users a greater sense of purpose or goal accomplishment (e.g., mastering a genre) or help users meaningfully connect to others (e.g., seeing what friends have recommended lately)?

While measuring the effects of a feature on wellbeing outcomes is substantially harder than measuring the effects of a feature on engagement (time spent), it is worth measuring/optimizing in the long run. The hypothesis is that capitalist enterprises that make their users feel happier and more fulfilled will, in the end, be more successful than enterprises that merely provide empty satisfaction. If not, the future could be very bleak.

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

Early in his term, Trump flirted with the idea of changing quarterly earnings reports to be biannual. I wonder how much that would have shook up corporate culture.

anon9001• 5 years ago

I can only fill up so much time with garbage like that before I'm bored.

Don't sell yourself short! You're surrounded by tons of people that never get their fill of content. Just relax and let it happen ;)

mgraczyk2• 5 years ago

As another former Facebook employee, I mostly agree with this.

One nitpick is that although you may have not looked at the holdouts often, somebody definitely did. Different teams use their holdouts differently, but leadership probably looked at your holdouts at least a few times per quarter. And now with recent infra and changes, it's very likely that data scientists or product managers somewhere in your org are responsible for explaining results to higher ups at least quarterly.

All that is to say, the cause isn't that Facebook (and Netflix) aren't thinking about or monitoring things in the long term. It's that they are measuring the wrong things, because it's very hard to measure things like "this is clickbait".

beerandt• 5 years ago

Netflix has somehow conditioned me to expect disappointment in movies with interesting looking cover art, which I now actively ignore, and don't even click through for descriptions anymore.

"Huh, that looks interesting. Not falling for that old trick again! What's that half-off-screen ambiguous cover on the next row down?"

roystonvassey2• 5 years ago

Interesting insights.

Online Analytics is now really nuanced - you need to know what metrics are important for * your * business, not just use boilerplate kpis.

For instance, an e-commerce website is clearly looking to lead the user to a lot purchase and the more they purchase, it’s good for the business so kpis around sales conversion help and recommenders help your business increase sales.

For Netflix though, the users have already paid for the service after which they land on the website. Most users I imagine then expect to be provided all that Netflix has to offer in an easy way. So if I was a Netflix product owner, I’d be more interested in Kpis around search-ability, having an anti algorithm that “suggests” completely random obscure shows, “switchability” of users - how less of a time do users spend on a movie or show.

I imagine they’re doing this but as a user I don’t see this at least - they show the same old stale recommendations for me, I’m always trying to hack their search to find what I want and they continue to invest in content that’s mostly miss than hit. I wish they at least had a directory for me to browse through (at least I’ll be driving their engagement metrics to help them drive their valuations)

kofejnik• 5 years ago

They don’t want you to watch obscure shows, they want you to watch the top ones (in your region!) as they are preloaded into your cdn already.

qwertox• 5 years ago

i.e. a newsfeed algorithm that had better engagement.

Sometimes (but rarely) I click on something because I ask myself "Why would these a---- show me this? I want to know more about what's behind it in order to understand what could have made their algorithm chose me as a candidate for this content". Or to check where the scam-URL would lead me to, because this also happens, that ads sold on Google and Facebook are scams, links leading to malware.

Congratulations to them, if they think that this is the kind of engagement which should be valued, that any kind of engagement is a good and healthy engagement. These companies are so rotten and their engineers just don't care.

bertil5• 5 years ago

There were tools to help answer your question (predictably called “Why am I seeing this?” after the button copy). Those had so little engagement they were not worth maintaining.

uxcolumbo• 5 years ago

Off topic: To me they seem to focus on quantity over quality. Can you recommend some of that quality content? I always quit after browsing their catalogue for 20 minutes or so.

Fiahil• 5 years ago

I think you can maintain the feedback loop without degrading the user experience if you actually ask them what they want to be shown.

The problem lies in that "engagement" definition : if the user clicked on a thumb, then they must have been attracted to it. In reality, there is considerably more explanation for that click : They could be looking for a specific title, mistakenly thought _this_ actor was playing in the movie, clicked on it to reset the search, wondered if this was a show or a film, missclicked, just picked the least annoying in an ocean of shitty propositions... An algorithm alone can never find its way for better suggestions if it lacks _intent_. The outcome of this lack of data and the lack of data scientists' imagination, will always be stuck in a local minima.

So, what solution do you have to gather this precious intent and act on it ? Well, you start small on predictable things : "what would you recommend to Agatha if they liked _Expendables_ ?" "Is _RED_ a good addition to the list if I'm looking for Action/Comedy films ?"

And later "Are you looking for Action/Comedy films ? here is some proposals"

It works the same for different approaches, for picking thumbnails, or promoting movies. Just ask user for what's motivate them. If Netflix had asked me last week, I would have told them their catalog is getting worse and worse so we prefer using disney+ instead.

notafraudster• 5 years ago

The idea is that these kinds of sources of error will be noise, since they should be random with respect to experimental assignment in any kind of A/B test. In a small sample you could imagine chance imbalances, but given that I'm experimentally assigning someone to see either a thumbnail of John Krasinski or Steve Carell, it's unclear why the "I misclicked" scenario is going to have a higher rate in one rather than the other. And experiments at large companies like Netflix are almost infinitely powered.

I would think a bigger threat to this approach would be being stuck in a local maxima.

antiterra• 5 years ago

It seems even worse than that. During my stints in social media, there would be ‘research projects’ that were simply fishing expeditions for meaningful data. Something like: which user demographics have a correlation to behavior x. And then you’d just search and search and search and hope you found something. If you didn’t find something, then you’d be encouraged by a team level manager to adjust or tweak some approach to take advantage of volatility to force the correlation. Maybe you shift the sample start date, maybe you skip a normalization dimension.

The directors would ask about things like normalization and if things were measured over a ncertain time period, but if you had some excuse or answer prepared, it was enough to get a nod and some recognition for your presentation. Heck, sometimes your team manager would do the presentation on your behalf to lay claim to some of that precious impact.

Then, after the new review cycle starts, priorities change and you never have to follow up on the holes in your data. Or, you can even admit it has holes, you already got credit.

m12k2• 5 years ago

Humans are instinctively drawn to a lot of things that are really bad for us in significant amounts, because we are designed to fit into an environment where those things are scarce. Sugar, fat, inactivity, "interesting news", outrage. These all steal our attention because that response helped our ancestors survive and pick out these rare but important treats. But in typical human fashion we've now crafted a world that gives us these things all the time, and it's making us sick and miserable as a result.

"But we're just giving the people what they want" some might say. Well, depends on the definition of "want". In a taste test, junk food would win over broccoli for me, hands down - but it's broccoli that ends up on my table more often than not, because it's what makes me happier and healthier in the long run. It wasn't until my thirties before I realized just how sluggish I got after eating junk food. But if Facebook was running our diets, their algorithm would long since have "optimized" its way to junk food for all of us.

Sometimes the worst thing you can do is give people exactly what they ask for. Being healthy in a world like the one we've created requires much, much more restraint and self-discipline than it used to. "The algorithm" is basically the digital incarnation of the little devil on our shoulder whispering that we should treat ourselves.

agent008t• 5 years ago

I agree with you, particularly when it comes to information consumption. On-demand services are bad enough; cleverly optimized services that push content are even worse.

But in some ways, if you hang out in the right circles, being healthy is a lot easier today. Alcohol consumption seems to be down, people exercise a lot more, being out of shape in your 30s is not seen as 'the norm'. So it is probably easier psychologically to go for a jog now when parks are full of joggers than to do it in 1950s when people would think a 30-something person out for a jog is a bit strange.

In this way, healthy fads can actually be very positive. I find it very likely that in the near future a culture will emerge that tries to minimize the use of technology and information hygiene becomes a part of 'normal' life.

wepple• 5 years ago

But if Facebook was running our diets, their algorithm would long since have "optimized" its way to junk food for all of us.

I really, really like this comparison.

If we fed our bodies in the same way we let tech company algorithms feed our minds, we’d have three Big Macs for breakfast washed down with a shot of whiskey and a couple lines of cocaine

mojuba3• 5 years ago

Very well put!

I have another related theory that goes: Over time, everything converges into mediocrity. By everything I mean products sold to us, entertainment, media, the Internet itself. Look at the car designs of the 1970s and now. Look at cinematography then and now. As soon as marketing steps in and start telling otherwise innovative companies or artists how to sell, things begin slowly converging into mediocrity.

The semi-formal proof is that because the humanity as a whole is mediocre almost by definition, hence if you want to expand your markets (the ice-cream saleman's problem) you'd grab the middle of the bell curve first: it's where the bigger part of the market is!

I don't know if it makes sense, just something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

howaboutnope• 5 years ago

Sometimes the worst thing you can do is give people exactly what they ask for.

Alan Moore said this in the context of poetry, but with the caveat that everybody is sometimes part of "the" audience, and that every fully fledged human adult should sometimes be "the" artist, I think he has a hugely important point:

It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

stonemetal124• 5 years ago

Isn't that more because of what they are optimizing for than the fact that they are optimizing? To continue the food analogy engagement is blood sugar levels and they are seeing how high they can crank it. If they optimized for "happier and healthier in the long run" then they would probably loose short term engagement spikes, but have fewer people quitting for health reasons. Basically they could be broccoli if they wanted to be but they choose to be soda.

bertil5• 5 years ago

I’ve worked on similar experiments (starting about Stories) and we included long-term holdout experiment to measure the compounded impact of sharing. The fear at the time was more about professional content (with millions of views) vs. your friends. The worry was because people engaged more with the former but posted more if they saw the later.

I left before conclusions were drawn, but (according to press reports) those experiments changed the goals to more leading indicator of long-term trend, like posting rather than Likes. I joined again more recently and expected to see that it influenced the company.

I’m not working there at the moment.

pdinny• 5 years ago

The employees are incentivized to do so and this is what they measure, so this is what they build

I also work in data teams and this is directly my observation too.

Closely related are Conway's Law (you ship your org chart) and Goodhart's Law (commonly paraphrased as 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.')

In Netflix's case I certainly feel the shipped product is too close of a reflection of org structure and incentives and user experience suffers as a result.

This feels particularly evident in the treatment of thumbnails and title descriptions. Often I find myself clicking through on a thumbnail in order to read the description only to find that the I've already read the description and didn't want to watch that title, but the thumbnail has since changed.

I'm sure there is some team in Netflix whose sole purpose is increasing thumbnail clickthrough rates. And they are probably succeeding in that respect by changing the thumbnails. They get to win at their portion of some funnel, even if the net result is a lousy user experience.

denton-scratch2• 5 years ago

and title descriptions

To my mind, it's the title descriptions that are the most clickbaity. I get the sense that Netflix are beding over backwards to ensure that you can't form an impression of the flic from that description.

I cancelled my Netflix subscription. Less and less of the titles are well-known 3rd-party productions; more and more are Netflix productions that I have found to be rather dull. Their ability to "divine my preferences" was never much good, but it's got worse.

Of course, they don't really care about my preferences; what matters for Netflix is what they would prefer me to watch, apparently.

Youtube's ability to discern my preferences also seems to have nosedived over the last year. I watched one programme about a certain WWII aircraft; YT then started pushing at me an unending diet of aircraft restoration docs and amateur historian channels.

omniscient_oce2• 5 years ago

Spotify's UI feels like it has succumbed to this.

stronglikedan• 5 years ago

I recently got a very gracious trial period for Youtube Music Premium, so I'm giving it a shot. It's UI is what Spotify used to be, before they crippled it nearly completely for my use cases. I'm seriously considering switching because of this. I'm just hoping that YT Music can replicate Spotify's one killer feature - Spotify Connect - before my trial is over.

criddell• 5 years ago

Definitely has. I remember when podcasts first showed up. Spotify isn't my podcast player so that is pretty much useless to me. I looked through the options for how to hide podcasts and couldn't find anything. I wish I could at least move the podcasts section to the bottom of the page.

dangus4• 5 years ago

Unfortunately it probably works because the business model depends on people forgetting about their subscription, e.g., Planet Fitness.

If you have a nice experience for a week or two and the price is low enough you'll probably never watch Netflix (e.g., ME) and keep on paying for it.

Vrondi• 5 years ago

Yes, Facebook is now almost useless. The only reason to be there is to keep track of friends and family, but it has gotten to the point where if a family member has a big life event, I'm hearing about it through traditional in-person or on-voice-call word of mouth _faster_ than through Facebook, because Facebook keeps deciding for me what it wants me to see.

Netflix has kept trying to make it harder for me to find what I want for the last few years, and I use it less and less, and now pay for fewer accounts than in the past. They are in danger of losing customers, with their annoying mouseover/autoplay/clickbait interface.

relativ575• 5 years ago

Yes, Facebook is now almost useless. T

Not my experience. A contractor recently told me almost all of his business were driven by his company's FB page. I'm also aware of a few small businesses who do most of their business via FB connections. FB is well and alive in the mainstream, even if it skews toward more older group of people.

TuringNYC• 5 years ago

> But behind the scenes some of us had this thought that our observations only amounted to short-term gains.

I'm convinced this must be the case at Facebook. I used to love the newsfeed but it has steadily declined so much for me that I stopped using it. It used to highlight a wide variety of friends updates. Then, only starred "close friends" and now mostly junk news items. Amazing things happen for friends (weddings, births) and I dont hear about it (no they aren't blocking me, i've confirmed).

I can to individually to each person's profile and see everything, but how realistic is that.

I'm sure there was a short boost as people checked more and more to news that didn't appear. Now, you check five times, you get the same 30 newsfeed items over and over and then "you're all caught up".

I can totally see the short term boost and long term decline with such a strategy.

aeoleonn• 5 years ago

Excellent. There is a silver lining:

It will lead to the end of Facebook and hopefully these practices you’ve described... once the lesson is learned.

The end of Facebook, Snap, and other scientifically-designed-to-be-attention-exploiting apps/sites would be very positive.

ckosidows• 5 years ago

Or, conversely, apps like TikTok, etc, etc will learn from past failures and develop even stronger algorithms to capture attention ad infinitum.

danjac• 5 years ago

It kind of works for me when I'm tired at the end of the day and I don't want to make choices. So yeah, I'll watch that Caitlyn Jenner documentary or whatever, fine.

It feels harder to find stuff on Netflix when I'm actively looking for something decent, though.

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

Personally although I do see “sexy” titles on Netflix strewn about, it isn’t a big distraction or problem the way this article makes it out to be. The real problem is that most of the content is B tier straight to video content. I’m drowning in choices and I don’t mean within Netflix but elsewhere - I’m simply not compelled to spend my valuable minutes there and these days I rarely load their app. I’ll probably end up cancelling it, as my household has increasingly returned to analog entertainment (books, conversations) over the pandemic, with other viewing time going to content we deliberately seek out rather than content we casually surf. At one point I was hopeful Netflix could produce first party content that was great. But each promising attempt (for example House of Cards, Marco Polo, or Altered Carbon) fizzles and gets cancelled after a season or two. Today I can’t see myself investing my time into their new content because I don’t want to be disappointed by their eventual cancellation, and I am left wondering who their service is for.

arcturus173• 5 years ago

I feel the same. I think their content is a sea of mediocrity.

I cancelled my sub and I make do with Amazon Prime which is not much better but does have some good exclusives and obviously the shipping benefits.

I’m also considering a return to piracy with a NAS since a lot of movies (esp. classics) are simply unavailable anywhere, even pay-per-view services like Amazon, Apple or Google.

lotsofpulp3• 5 years ago

I am wondering if this is what getting old is like. I get more enjoyment out of rewatching all the stuff from my youth than new content. And I am only mid 30s, but I would rather close my eyes and pick a random movie or tv show on my NAS from 80s/90s/00s and watch that over new content.

zz865• 5 years ago

Anyone have a good website that lets you find netflix shows? I like a wide variety of stuff and I think Spotify/Netflix/Youtube always gets too confused to be useful.

drexlspivey• 5 years ago

Justwatch allows you to inout your subscriptions and only shows you recommendations of the available shows in your country (based on your ratings).

bjornlouser• 5 years ago

flixable.com

Terretta3• 5 years ago

So I pulled this up, popped into Netflix tab, and…

“The top suggestion, you won’t believe!”

https://i.imgur.com/waixdBJ.jpg

yardie• 5 years ago

I can't stand Netflix's recommendation engine. Here are a few of the sites I use because my homepage is completely filled with junk.

instantwatcher.com - One of the first to do it.

justwatch.com - There was a time when IW stopped working with Netflix over API access licensing. This is almost as good.

dannyr• 5 years ago

YouTube is pretty much like this but it's the creators selecting the thumbnails.

The most common thumbnail I see is a picture of someone looks like they are blown away with their hands on their head and their mouth wide open.

xxs• 5 years ago

My version of not-logged in (which is the default) is far from that. It's regional - but again, unless you logoff on purpose, the selection is heavily based on your choices of 'creators'

Semaphor2• 5 years ago

The Clickbait remover chooses a random thumbnail instead. I rarely go to youtube, but when I do, this makes it more bearable.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

meowface2• 5 years ago

In case anyone else initially misinterpreted it like I did: it replaces the thumbnail with a random frame from the video.

ggggtez3• 5 years ago

Interesting, I wasn't sure at first how it was adjusting the title, but it seems like it lower cases it. Interesting demo, but I think you could do better by just aggressively not clicking on videos like that to begin with. I never see that style of click bait anymore, as long as I'm logged in.

tsjq2• 5 years ago

a lot of videos have thumbnails which are not part of the video at all. sad. maha clickbaity

skocznymroczny• 5 years ago

Is there some Youtube thumbnail generator or a guide? They all literally look the same. Have the same kind of thick white outline around the person and they seem to use the same fonts too.

pndy• 5 years ago

You might find this interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16803937

freetube client allows you to control how thumbnails are displayed; default - youtube one or manual fetch frame from beginning, mid or end of the video

Spellman• 5 years ago

Luckily they can't send different thumbnails to different viewers. Yet.

Veritasium actually did an interesting episode recently about how the major YouTubers optimize their titles and thumbnails using real time data now to figure out what works to go more viral. And apparently there's a convergence on "shocked" face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

bingohbangoh• 5 years ago

LinusTechTips had mentioned that he did an A/B test with "no YouTube face" and "with YouTube face" finding it had a significant impact on the number of viewers.

I suppose we're hard wired to look for shocked expressions.

crocodiletears• 5 years ago

I was having a conversation about this with a friend last night. I saw a video on plastic CPUs on his smart TV's recommendations, and searched the topic instead of clicking on it because I didn't want to encourage what I called 'Reddit face'.

rchaud3• 5 years ago

Even somewhat respectable channels do this thumbnail 'hack' because they claim they've A/B tested it and the "I am yelling loudly" look perform better. Possibly because more children click the thumbs than they otherwise would.

But, having watched the 'crate challenge' that is hot on IG and TT, I'm thinking my thumbnail comment might be giving adults too much credit.

ggggtez3• 5 years ago

The fact that Netflix can adaptively adjust their clickbait to suit each user is pretty stunning though. That's definitely a step beyond "one thumbnail to rule them all".

ggm3• 5 years ago

If I search for "streetcar named desire" I want a finder which says "nope, but here's the other work by {Elia Kazan, Tenesee Williams, Marlon Brando, Carl Malden, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter}

Oddly, I don't want "here's the abortive experimental 1970s film shot in Russia by a drug crazed student also called "streetcar"

But.. from Netflix's PoV, its equally likely I did want that because they know I watch e.g. Luis Bunel films

So.. how can they know? Answer: they can't. They simply can't get my mood right, all the time. Sometimes, they will do well and guess. Sometimes, they do really badly.

Another take: How many fans of the british "Office" wanted to be told to watch the American "Office" ?

arcturus173• 5 years ago

I do get a lot results that way on Netflix on failed searches… It doesn’t present only lexically similar results (“streetcar”) but thematically related films (classics, of the same era and related directors or cast)

My main issue with Netflix is that where I live their movie catalog (esp. classics), is very short, seemingly in favor of Netflix’s own produced “shovelware”.

Also, regarding a search for “the office”, how would Netflix know not to recommend the US version if you’re looking for the UK one and vice versa? That’s such a specific nitpick…

ggm3• 5 years ago

There are a million nitpicks in the city, this is just one of them.

Netflix and Amazon both have a strong interior belief this smart referral thing is good and who knows: A/B testing may even validate it. I just know that recommendations in books film and music creep me out, maybe it's an analogue of "uncanny valley" but being told "you may also like" kills the mood for me. Dammit, I want to like what I like, not what statistics thinks I may like.

"The office" thing, yes, that's the whole point: ask me Tuesday and I might say yes. Ask me Monday and Sunday, I might cancel my subscription. I talk about this with a lot of people and book and film recommendations are toxic to friendship. You love STNG? Oh you would love Babylon 5 no, just no.

And I don't think "I'm zany" or anything cute. I think this is a normal reaction and a common reaction. I bet Netflix has never asked "do we creep you out a bit snooping on what you watch and recommending things" that literally.

kryz• 5 years ago

Optimizing the monetization of attention to serve corporate objectives. Short term priorities for short term goals (quarterly earnings).

The incentive structure is functioning properly, it’s just the wrong one to build something enduring and truly great

mdoms3• 5 years ago

Netflix has become nearly unbearable. Just... give.... me... basic... filtering... and... sorting. Please. Simple stuff, solved problems.

Gunax2• 5 years ago

I am not sure I understand what clickbait actually is. It seems to be a term a lot of people use, but in many different ways, and often in a 'I know it when I see it' sort of way.

The author claims that basically any sexiness constitutes clickbait, that a hammer is clickbait, and wield is a gun is clickbait. I think only the last of those is plausible. Title images really give very little information, and usually suggest only what genre the film is.

If Netflix is nefarious, why even put genre labels on? Afterall, wouldn't that discourage people from watching films with outside of their genre?

And the best example they can come up with is that a show about norse mythology has as it's cover art... a hammer? As in the object that we associate with Norse mythology? What exactly did you expect? Okay, no hammers--better show a man instead. 'oh why are you putting a man there when it's about mythology?' You can't win.

I get the impression the author just wanted to beat on Netflix and tech in general.

ricardobeat3• 5 years ago

Take the Big Lebowski thumbnail on his screenshot. While that scene is in the movie, it’s not at all central to the plot. It’s not that remarkable or even show the main character. There is no shooting. But a man aggressively pointing a gun gets you curious, more than the actual movie poster.

It’s clickbait because it is simply picking the image most likely to elicit a reaction - and misrepresenting the nature of the movie in the process. I think the article did a decent job of explaining the psychology behind it.

Another simple example: imagine the title of this post was “Netflix is dying - here are three reasons why”. No actual connection to the content, just something to grab your attention. That’s clickbait.

Gunax2• 5 years ago

Yea so the Lebowski one was the only one I really agree with, and even that's is a stretch. We have to believe that the title is actually mistepresenting the genre... Maybe but it's still liated as a comedy.

The other 2 examples did not make any sense to me at all.

I guess to summarise what I mean: of course people want to make good covers. It seems these accusations depend on us really assuming a very nefarious intent. It just feels like any art couod be clickbait by that. Eg. If they used an image if a bowling ball, I could say 'Well, this movie isnt about bowling!'

sgt2• 5 years ago

Netflix has also become unbearably "woke". I've simply given up on Netflix for that reason but also due to many other reasons like the what is described here.

barneybooroo2• 5 years ago

Is your outrage that they’re commissioning content that reflects a diversity of experience?

yosito• 5 years ago

Not the commenter you're responding to, but I've found quite the opposite. Content on Netflix is increasingly trending towards one narrow "woke" way of seeing the world, and nothing that falls outside of the narrow, American left perspective, or encourages any diversity of thought is available anymore.

sgt2• 5 years ago

They're shoving the agenda down our throats. A lot of shows become overly politicized, with messages of trans rights, BLM, and other stuff being injected to such a degree that it becomes too much and frankly artificial.

I'm not against political and societal messages in TV shows and movies - that has been done for decades, but not if it takes away from the writing and quality of the show. We see that in extreme levels at the moment.

captainclam• 5 years ago

I'm going to front-load this by stating that I 100% agree that representation matters, and absolutely welcome a diversity of perspectives in media. Furthermore, I do believe that much criticism of "woke" media is a knee-jerk reaction to new, unfamiliar values and shifting power.

That said: Netflix's deployment of "wokeness" can feel completely shoehorned in and utterly arbitrary, a cynical technique that affirms the viewers' perspective, thereby increasing engagement.

I'm not "outraged" by it in the slightest. It tends to align with my own worldview. But at the end of the day it just makes for crummy content.

avnigo• 5 years ago

Veritasium talks about thumbnail and title experimentation on YouTube, and argues for the need to do so on platforms that surface up and recommend content to users:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

mdoms3• 5 years ago

Christ that guy comes across as an arrogant prick. Here, "Veritasium", let me rephrase your shitty, overly long, condescending video: "I deceive my viewers because it makes me more money".

xdennis• 5 years ago

That's every uncharitable.

I'm not going to rewatch it, because, as you said, it's long, but what he's saying is that there's a difference between baiting and never delivering and bating and delivering.

Also, educating isn't just about putting forth the facts, but also persuasion and spreading. It does coincide with him making more money, but there's nothing bad about that.

ricardobeat3• 5 years ago

users consider each title for a whopping 1.8 seconds

Users are most likely not “considering” them at all. We’re not machines going over one tile at a time and generating a score. Most of the time you’re looking for something specific and just trying to find it.

This type of metric is the worst. I really hope this data-driven fad dies down and we start designing with human factors in mind again.

fumblebee3• 5 years ago

I'm not certain what you mean by human factors, so correct me if I've misinterpreted.

If by human factors you mean basic heuristics based on human intuition, that fails too. It might satisfy 50% of viewers but there's too much diversity in taste for this to be a good model.

I'm not defending the metric as described, but there's obviously good data driven approaches and bad ones. The trick is to find a solid proxy for the business problem and to try to weed out any dark side effects by applying it.

mdoms3• 5 years ago

"Human factors" could include doing something as radical as observing how someone uses your product (no, not with a computer - just watch) and then - and this is the shocking part - speak to them. Ask them why they did that or what they liked and didn't like.

de_keyboard• 5 years ago

I never use Netflix for discovery because the median quality is so low.

hamburgerwah• 5 years ago

Hollywood, of which netflix used to stand alone but has now been completely assimilated, has ceased making anything of quality in favor of only making things based on the identity politics of the people involved. There hasn't been a good netflix original since orange is the new black and there probably will never be, at least for years to come.

nxpnsv• 5 years ago

One day I realized that getting dragged into the bingebait series constantly thrown at me just made me depressed. After canceling the streaming services I feel I'm not missing any of it. Also I read more books now. Whatever makes you happy I guess..

gordon_freeman• 5 years ago

Maybe a bit off topic but wanted to share: For anyone who wants to watch classic and top films from across the world, please check out The Criterion Channel[1]. Their collection has movies such as Solaris and other films from Andrei Tarkovsky etc.

[1] https://www.criterionchannel.com

Aissen• 5 years ago

Dan just outed himself as sensible to this kind of clickbait: indeed, the Netflix homepage is different for everyone. Try to have a look at your friends or partner's homepage, it's pretty interesting.

yarcob3• 5 years ago

This is why I quit my Netflix subscription.

The algorithm seems to have picked up the fact that I like watching SciFi and Zombie movies, so my Netflix homepage was this dark place filled with Sci Fi and Zombie movies.

One problem with this is that Netflix only has a handful of good SciFi and Zombie movies, and I've seen them all. So the homepage was filled with movies I've seen already, or the dime-a-dozen copycat movies that just rehash some ideas from popular movies in a slightly different way.

The much bigger problem is that even though I like watching Zombie movies, I actually enjoy lots of different movies. But somehow the Netflix algorithm only ever shows me this one genre.

So I cancelled my Netflix subscription, and went back to occasionally renting a film on iTunes or Amazon. I watch less now, but I end up watching more diverse and more interesting films.

joe_fishfish• 5 years ago

I'm in the same boat as you. My question is, does this hyperoptimisation of preferences actually work for anyone other than children? I guess Netflix thinks it does.

maverwa2• 5 years ago

I have a similar problem with amazon music and spotify: Yes, they are good at picking music I like, but really bad at adding something new. Spotify is better at this, as it does not give you the one "your radio". At amazon music it basically played only those songs I told it about, and a few very very narrow matches, but close to nothing I did not already know.

janfoeh5• 5 years ago

Nothing I've ever seen did that better than Pandora. Unfortunately I had only sporadic access via VPN because of their inability to secure international licensing, but during those times I discovered more music than ever before or since.

Apple Musics "Create station from track" feature comes very close, though. Back when it appeared I remember reading they had humans tag and classify tracks manually, just like Pandora, which may explain the similar results.

Gys• 5 years ago

Exactly this is also my problem. I regularly find illegal downloads of Netflix movies that seem nice but are never shown in my homepage.

I cannot believe I have to manually 'find' those movies.

My default homepage always seems to show the same movies. Many of them I saw already and others that I do not want to waste time watching.

janfoeh5• 5 years ago

So I cancelled my Netflix subscription, and went back to occasionally renting a film on iTunes or Amazon.

I did that too, and then went one step further, because some fifteen years down the line, online video rental still hilariously, bafflingly sucks.

Twelve, thirteen years ago I was still renting physical DVDs. Back then, renting a physical item that was produced halfway around the world, shipped to Germany and distributed by a company with hundreds of physical locations staffed by employees was around two and a half times cheaper than downloading a file via iTunes. Apart from inflation, those prices never came down.

Adding insult to injury, the more expensive download is almost always worse:

On the majority of DVDs I get both the original and the dubbed voice track, plus subtitles in English and German.

That's important to me, because my partner vastly prefers either the dubbed version, or at least the original with German subtitles. When I watch something for myself, I vastly prefer the original - sometimes with English subtitles.

In online video rental (or purchase), I can often only get the dubbed version. If the original is available at all, it is sometimes another item to be bought separately. Either case almost never features both German and English subtitles.

And as the icing on the cake, to this day not all product pages on iTunes even _list_ the featured languages of a download, let alone their subtitle languages.

Combine that with all the other indignities of buffet streaming, such as titles being constantly rotated out or the incessant advertising on Amazon before every episode.

So — I've gone back to buying used DVDs. And since they have their own problems such as unskippables and horrible menus, I'm currently looking into building a NAS and will be ripping them into a personal media collection sometime in the future.

And then I will have come back full circle to 2005.

dangus4• 5 years ago

You can also do exactly this with Blu-rays and get really stunning above-streaming quality, though of course the selection and pricing isn't as desirable as DVDs.

What I'm saying is invest in a USB or internal Blu-ray drive, the extra cost is worth it.

vorpalhex• 5 years ago

The NAS route is a solid one. There are a lot of fantastic tools out there these days for managing media collections.

jbay8082• 5 years ago

Plus, for anything other than new releases you'd get the rental typically for up to a week, whereas now it's 24 hours even for a 30 year old film.

paulryanrogers• 5 years ago

For un-skippable DVD previews try VLC. Or if you must rip them MakeMKV can help.

peanut_worm• 5 years ago

Youtube has this same problem very badly. It never suggests me videos that I haven’t already seen.

contravariant2• 5 years ago

In the case of Youtube I've basically given up trying to get decent recommendations. At this point I just hope it keeps showing videos of the people I've subscribed to.

omniscient_oce2• 5 years ago

I've found that when I watch a Youtube video, at least half or more of the recommended videos on the right are videos that I've already seen before, often music. Does anyone know if there is way to turn this off so it can recommend me strictly new videos? It's infuriating.

The best guess for why this is that I've seen online is that it's because they're targeting younger age brackets more aggressively and kids love to rewatch the same things over and over.

yarcob3• 5 years ago

Many people use Youtube for listening to Music, makes sense to listen to a song more than once :)

reallydontask• 5 years ago

My old boss had multiple profiles sort of curated around topics said that it was a bit of hassle to set up but worked really well for him.

peeters2• 5 years ago

I do something similar, I have my main profile where I watch everything and then a "Random" profile that I regularly clear all viewing history from (if I watch something there instead of switching back to my main profile).

The problem is, as annoying as Netflix's algorithm is on my main profile, the algorithm to shovel shit to users it knows nothing about is even worse.

I honestly don't understand why Netflix had to get rid of the ability to literally just scan the full list of titles, optionally filtered by genre. The home screen is an utter failure, I can never find "My List" or "Continue Watching" because it's a heterogeneous mess and they jump around all the time.

dangus4• 5 years ago

+1 on renting films with some level of purpose. A lot of people I know refuse to pay for movie rentals.

I've seen this too many times: endless scrolling to try to find that one decent movie that comes free with the subscription.

But movie studios aren't stupid. They don't just give away their best movies for free. So those who simply aren't willing to pay are left watching Hitman or The Quake (fine Hulu content).

The price of movie rentals might seem high, but life is far too short to waste it watching things you don't even like that much.

Also: iTunes in particular happens to have very decent staff recommendations (i.e., actual human curation). I wouldn't be surprised if movie rental services like iTunes understand that their customers are looking for quality and not quantity, otherwise those customers would be on the streaming services.

yarcob3• 5 years ago

In my experience the iTunes store is such a horrible, slow piece of shit software that I only use it to search and rent films I heard about elsewhere.

peeters2• 5 years ago

My issue with renting has always been the ridiculous upselling for quality. Advertise 4.99 for a movie, but oh, you don't want the "standard definition" that hasn't been standard since 1996? Well then it's 8.99.

Edit: Just gave Play Movies another chance and it looks like perhaps they've finally stopped doing this.

brap• 5 years ago

Just fyi, you can reset your watch history and that resets the recommendations as well.

omegalulw• 5 years ago

When I found myself spending 15+ minutes looking for content and not finding anything, I just cancelled.

I just don't see the value in Netflix anymore. Everyone has wisened up to the fact that creating your own streaming service is extremely important - especially when you consider ROI.

So what differentiates streaming services is the catalog. Netflix now have to compete on the quality of their originals. They have some good shows once in a while but the their lead is not groundbreaking at all anymore.

teekert• 5 years ago

I really hate it that when I'm digesting an episode of Rick and Morty I have to scramble for the remote or I'm watching some completely uninteresting series about a family in the 19th century or something. I just want the end screen and sounds to finish and then turn off the telly and go to bed. In stead I feel slapped in the face.

Consistently my watching experience ends with (increasingly large) negative feelings. How can that be a good choice for a company offering watching experiences?

ghusbands• 5 years ago

You can now turn off autoplay of both trailers and next episodes, in settings. (Account menu -> Account -> Profile and Parental Controls -> [your profile] -> Playback settings -> Change)

unethical_ban• 5 years ago

Take a moment to think about having to go through six layers of menu tree to access a frequently requested feature. Now imagine explaining this step to someone who doesn't intuitively understand computers and whose children bought them a Roku for Christmas.

I'm not fussing at you, just thinking about this first-world hell.

debarshri• 5 years ago

One of the things I have been struggling with Netflix, YouTube and other platform's recommendation systems is serendipity.

It is clickbaity, but after a while you get bored or saturated.

dangus4• 5 years ago

Let's be real about Netflix: after looking like it was going to disrupt the media conglomerates, I now think that all it has managed to do is wake the sleeping giants. Long-term, I am bearish on Netflix. I would go as far to say that Netflix is slow-declining its way into being eventually acquired by a member of the big six.

Here are the issues:

First: it's basically the most expensive streaming service, topping out at $18/month.

Hulu's most expensive plan is $12. Discovery+ is $7. Disney+ is $8. HBO Max is $15. Paramount+ is $10. (All prices ad-free plans)

I think an argument could be made that all or nearly all of those services are offering a better content library at a lower price when compared to Netflix.

Discovery+ especially...holy hell if you are into reality shows it's endless. And it's $7. I would pay $7/month just for access to every House Hunters episode imaginable without ads, lo and behold my dream came true.

Netflix is doing this clickbait stuff because their content sucks. Clickbait is what you do when your content doesn't speak for itself.

Sure, every content business has to make a "headline" to draw your attention. But when you see a "clickbait" headline in something like The New York Times you know you're being drawn into something that can be potentially rich in effort, and therefore the term "clickbait" doesn't really apply. At least there's an article behind the hook. "Clickbait" more specifically means you're being tricked into visiting something that everyone knows definitely sucks, including its creator.

Netflix knows their content sucks, and I'm not sure they care or can think of a viable business model to improve it.

scyzoryk_xyz• 5 years ago

The way Netflix presents thumbnail images custom tailored to the user is ingenious. There is a lot of insight there on how people choose content based on preferences for star actors, subject matter, tone etc.

Personally however, as an avid film viewer, this massive algorithmic curation is completely not for me.

A cool example and complete opposite of the Netflix approach is the Mubi approach. There, the focus is not on giving me exactly what I think I want, but instead on offering this narrow curated selection along with content written by actual film critics. As a result I watch things that I did not expect.

This curation aspect is something Netflix strategically completely opted out of. And this makes sense - their goal is to have an active subscriber base and achieving that goal doesn't factor in the existing film/tv culture.

mumblemumble2• 5 years ago

It's interesting, because one of the earliest lessons I was taught in college was that greedy algorithms tend to lead to sub-optimal results.

Is the problem that they're not teaching that in college anymore, or is it that the people in charge of these things are non-engineers who don't necessarily even know what a greedy algorithm is, let alone that the principle might apply to business practices and not just software implementations.

rchaud3• 5 years ago

I dumped Netflix the second it became clear that they were pulling a bait-and-switch, replacing AAA content from major networks with their own material.

Algorithm-driven content feeds simply do not work for me. I don't want to watch TV all day, nor do I have a genre that I watch to the exclusion of all others.

boredumb• 5 years ago

towards the end of 2018 netflix took a nosedive

marshray• 5 years ago

The network’s own research shows that users consider each title for a whopping 1.8 seconds

Funny, that's almost exactly how long it takes for the promo video to start auto-playing.

I know for myself I try to skip past titles before getting barraged with the promo.

kbos87• 5 years ago

I found this article to be so spot on. There’s a mindset often found in tech companies that essentially comes down to “in every decision the data must win.” I see this in my day to day working at a large saas company all the time, and pushing back against this mindset is akin to heresy on some teams.

What the author points out is happening to Netflix is the inevitable late stage of this mindset. To me it looks like the home screen in Netflix is optimized for superficial engagement, at the expense of the actual value and joy customers get from the service.

meowface2• 5 years ago

The Clickbaitification of Netflix
The same tricks that nearly destroyed online journalism now threaten to take over the streaming service.

One of the current front page headlines on slate.com:

I’ve Been Telling a Lie to Trick Men Into Sex With Me. Is This Really So Bad?

noisy_boy• 5 years ago

I think I know why Netflix keeps showing movies that we have already seen. There is just not enough high quality movies that we haven't already seen (speaking for avid movie watchers). So if they skip all the good ones that we have probably already seen, it'll be a sea of mediocre ones with an occasional unwatched gem. Then we will say Netflix has mostly B-grade junk. And they can't have that truth out in plain sight.

dcow• 5 years ago

Here’s what I don’t understand (either about the premise of the article if incorrect or Netflix as a business if correct): why does Netflix need to drive proactive short-term engagement? They don’t make money from ads. If I’m subscribed (I’m not anymore) then their business is accounted for. I’m subscribed because they’re a better platform than TV and when I want to watch a show they have, I will. They’re getting my money regardless and they aren’t getting more if it the more I watch. Maybe they really feel pressure from other streaming platforms?

kenjackson• 5 years ago

They do have pressure. But here’s my theory:

The big complaint they get about content is that there isn’t anything that is appealing enough to get customers to start watching. Once people start watching a show they usually are pretty happy. But they spend 30 minutes trying to find a show. This is why they implemented the button to pick a show for you.

In short, they want you to start something. They think you’ll like most of the stuff they recommend to you. The worst case is you click nothing and then go to Hulu and browse there.

Note: Every assertion I made is made up by me. Just my theory.

potamic• 5 years ago

They don't want you to use other platforms at the same time. Because if you spend too much time outside and start liking them, you will be at risk of unsubscribing. Heaven forbid they need to compete on content quality to retain you. This will be much easier and cheaper.

jellicle• 5 years ago

"The network’s own research shows that users consider each title for a whopping 1.8 seconds, and that if users don’t find anything in a minute and a half, they’re gone."

It's Netflix's fault this is true!

There's no way to review the content that is actually on the service. I look at an item for 1.8 seconds because I keep being shown the same five promoted shows and I've already decided about them two weeks ago, or already seen them, or whatever. I click off after a minute and half because I'm seeing the same shows and there's no way to find different ones or scroll through all the content.

What these streaming services actually need is a thorough catalog listing with a text description of each show. People will occasionally spend 20 minutes scrolling through that, tagging what they want to see (like the old TV guide). And then on a day to day basis, they'll spend 20 seconds deciding which of the already-tagged-by-yourself content they want to watch today.

All the streaming services are way over-optimized and it hurts them badly. One complete scrolling catalog with lots of ways to search it, lots of ways to page through it, and easy "I want to watch it" tagging.

jedberg• 5 years ago

FWIW, this isn't new. Netflix has been showing custom thumbnails for almost a decade now. If the author is getting nothing but scantily clad people, it's because they mostly click on thumbnails with scantily clad people.

lurtbancaster• 5 years ago

[REQUEST] a userscript that replaces the thumbnails with the description of the video/film/TVShow for YouTube and other streaming services.

I feel like replacing all thumbnails with useful text that describes what the video's going to be about would help reduce analysis paralysis for at least some people.

I still use my RSS Reader(QuiteRSS) to "subscribe" to YouTube channels, and I'm never unsure about which video to watch. I think that's due to the fact that RSS is mostly text, and I'm not overwhelmed with images from everywhere all at once.

A good description sells me on a video more than thumbnails ever could.

So my Solution: Replace images with descriptive text on every video streaming platform.

The Clickbaitification of Netflix

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