The later winning entries were too compute-intensive to implement, or not enough of an advantage over the existing engine to justify more compute.
So I would say it was a real competition, not just PR, even though a particular solution wasn't used.
(Factoid: It was the the last team to start the migration to Cassandra.)
- If I watched a movie and gave it a thumbs down, don't recommend it
- If I watched a movie < 1 month ago, don't recommend it
- If I browsed over a movie 50 times, read the info, and still didn't play it, stop recommending it.
- If I watched the last episode, remove the "new episodes" banner.
WTF
I just went to the frontpage of my Netflix and...:
- "My list" recommends 3 series where I have alread watched the last episode
- "Only on Netflix" recommends another two series, I have already wathed.
- A section displayed is "Watch together for older kids" - I dont have kids, never watched any kids stuff on my account.
- "Documentaries" contains six suggestions, 3 of which I have already watched on netflix".
- I am suggested several shows, which are good - but I have already watched outside Netflix earlier - and there is no way to tell Netflix (none that I know of, anyway)
9 out of 10 times when I go to Netflix, I intend to continue watching a series - but Netflix makes me scroll past SEVEN sections of recommendations to get to "Continue watching.." before showing me the series I have watched 1-2 episodes of most days for the past two weeks.
Maybe they are just too busy making sure all new series are woke-i-fied to care about how this simple stuff works?
I think the only on Netflix part works as part of positive reinforcement - it always shows me stuff it knows I watched all the way through (hence I must have liked it) mixed with things I haven't watched or haven't watched in a long time.
Thus when I see that section it is reminding me they have stuff I liked that I can only get there so please don't ever change account, and here is some more of that stuff only we got - try it out!
It seems some shows have been trending for years.
Or maybe it's not as simple as you think? "Baffled" is a strong word. It's the same "baffled" that Amazon can't find all the fake reviews. The same "baffled" that Facebook can't delete all your photos, everywhere, when you close an account.
Maybe things at scale are more challenging? These are some of the most valuable companies in the world. I'm sure they're happy to throw buckets of money at you if you can solve these "simple" problems for them.
They are clearly not using the ratings based automatic recommendations any more. It's not even relevant given the limited and generally low-quality content available. It's just about keeping enough people paying.
The Netflix prize also put Netflix on the map in terms of being a company that solves hard problems. We are still talking about it today and you'd better believe it has inspired talented people to work at Netflix; they could easily blow $1M on recruiting people and have much less to show for it. It's why Netflix is part of "FAANG".
Reed Hastings genius is that he led Netflix through a number of transitions between fundamentally different businesses: he built a strong brand with the DVD-based business without permission from the studios, transferred that brand to streaming when the studios saw it as "free money". By the time the studios understood what it was worth Netflix decided it was cheaper to buy than rent. (just as a consequence of having more customers)
The new frontier is that they use your engagement data not just to "suggest" the next movie but to design movies that will keep you engaged.
It's a little bit scary with these services that are "all you can eat" games for $10 a month because you're giving up "voting with your dollar" but creating a trail of engagement that will be fed back into satisfying your narcissism. Taking screenshots and videos of games seems fun and harmless at first but somebody knows I had a big crush on Nikola and Chiara from Valkyria Chronicles 4.
For those of us old enough to remember, it's not much different than going to Blockbuster. All of the new releases were along the walls with lots of copies to support the high demand. That's where everyone started when entering the store. If you found what you wanted, you grabbed a copy and left. In the middle of the store, the shelves were full of stuff you'd never heard of with one, maybe two, copies available. Both of those copies were covered in dust. You'd see people doing the physical version of endlessly scrolling to ultimately settle on "something" just to not be scrolling any more.
Really, the only difference now is at least you don't have drive somewhere to do the scrolling. I'd also say that there's at least the advantage of being able to do it in your PJs, but Blockbuster (any video rental place really) was the first public place that I noticed it became acceptable to not have to get dressed to visit.
With Netflix producing its own content now, and with the cost of acquiring content rights much higher than it used to be (all major streaming platforms want to offer great content), I'm wondering how much the business imperative impacts the recommendations we get -> eg. Netflix giving priority to its own content over licensed shows/movies.
Yes, Netflix’ engine is the reason I left Netflix…
That seems rather odd to me. I can believe it was a final straw after other reasons like running out of content you particularly want (absolutely or in comparison with other services), but not it begin "the" reason.
I don't particularly pay attention to the recommendations on either Netflix or Amazon, instead picking up things I might like to try from external sources (friends & family, discussions or records in various media, having liked something or some part of it looking into what else the performers/writers/directors/other have done it are involved in now, sometimes the does own external advertising).
I feel that the recommendation systems are more optimised for people who use TV/movies as background noise rather than actively watching. That would explain re-recommending long running series that they have already watched, amongst other things people have mentioned in this discussion.
Maybe my behaviour is a vestige from the life of piracy back when content was less readily available otherwise (somehow region locked, or simply not available on local channels yet, etc, so I often couldn't get things I cared about more legitimately for many months, if ever, and back in the scheduled TV days things were often in at inconvenient times). I seek out what I want rather than waiting for it to be handed to me by the service(s).
At least in my locale a good way to be reminded of this is searching for any movie you'd like to watch but isn't on the front page of netflix, typically they won't have it.
Presumably poorly rated movies are a lot cheaper to license; and when you're licensing 2/10 rated movies, user satisfaction is a lot higher if you don't show the ratings.
Shows with 10 seasons you hated and disliked after 5 minutes will still be in our "continue watching" or suggested.
This is a hugely important point. I'm completely uninterested in most netflix originals, but I understand why they're going to continue to recommend them to me.
I still find it a marvel that despite the majority of content introduced being not for me, I have been able to watch something unseen approximately every night and have given up on so little. In that sense, it is better than TV – even if the impression I get from the new content I scroll past is that it appears to be following all the same trends that made TV less appealing to me.
The most irritating consequence of this content problem for me is that nothing remains in the same place. Is continue watching going to be one, two or even three down button presses tonight? The reward is occasionally something gets suggested that is worth watching that would have been found anyway within a few minutes of searching.
I would imagine what they’re doing makes sense for the majority, but it would be wonderfully nice if there were some kind of alternate "advanced" mode for people who understand the lack of content where all this suggested and popular stuff went away and the search filter improved.
If I watched a movie and gave it a thumbs down, don't recommend it
I sometimes click thumbs down by accident, or upon rewatching change my opinion.
If I watched a movie < 1 month ago, don't recommend it
I like to rewatch movies, sometimes more than once in a month.
If I browsed over a movie 50 times, read the info, and still didn't play it, stop recommending it.
I have a terrible habit of browsing Netflix and watching trailers right before falling asleep, and I'm sure I've done this to the same titles over and over again.
If I watched the last episode, remove the "new episodes" banner.
I'm not in front of Netflix right now; what happens if new episodes are added while you're watching the series?
It's also trivial to put all of the things you watched recently into their own subcategory in case you want to watch them again, which is in fact something that Netflix already does. It's called "Watch It Again". There's no reason to pollute recommendations for that.
> I sometimes click thumbs down by accident
The recommendation engine should be obeying your explicit actions, not trying to subvert them. Accidentally clicking thumbs down is an outlier action that is trivial for you to rectify on your own as soon as it happens.
> or upon rewatching change my opinion.
Intentionally rewatching a movie that you expressly disliked is an outlier position.
> I like to rewatch movies, sometimes more than once in a month.
Netflix already has a personal queue+favorites list called "My List" that you can add things to. If it has been less than a month since you last watched something, the reason you're watching it again so soon is because it's on your mind already and you don't need the recommendation engine for that.
I really dislike it. I wanted it to be more like netflix so I don't get suck in.
Could be a location issue since I am not in the US.
Would you agree that these rules will quickly become unwieldy and a pain to maintain? And that these will be personalized to your taste but not to someone else's?
Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to maintain those rules and if the system were tailored to every user? Congratulations, you've just realized you'd like to use ML/AI.
I don't actually want recommendations, I want a catalog with exclusions.
- Removing a movie based on "not payed X times" would remove all popular movies for all users in a multiple of X steps.
-I agree with the new episodes banner.
yeah some movies might be more likely to be rewatchable quicker by a larger amount of the population, and some people might be more likely to be able to rewatch movies they like more quickly than a month - and those people might have preferences that indicate their liking to rewatch more often.
Thus it might be nice to do AI on this.
Wait [ ] months before recommending again a show
I already watched.
The former group is just simple filters as you point out - which informs the ranking of the second group.
However, what they do might actually work for them, i.e.
(1) The HN is probably not representative of their audience as a whole (2) What they do now might be RoE accretive for them, but not so great even for a wider section of their customers
Could still be suboptimal and probably is...
How could it work with Netflix without their explicit support? For the movie database, I assume there's some data source somewhere that lists all the movies and series Netflix currently has in any given region. As for ingesting watching history, it could parse Content Interaction History exported from Netflix via their GDPR Subject Access Request flow. Sure, they have up to 30 days to process such request, but I'd happily accept a recommendation system I have to manually update every month, over the disaster Netflix has been offering to its users.
Netflix got more than 1 million dollar in free advertising from it, and are still getting brand value out of it today. They implemented some of the algorithms, and probably got a 10X ROI through retention alone.
As mentioned in the Quora answer, they were also able to recruit top talent - and that's much harder to put an ROI figure on.
He's extremely intelligent and passionate about this space, and every time we spoke I felt like I was learning something new. You can listen to him give an in depth talk about the Netflix problem and solution here [1].
Think of it like Google's famous obsession with speed. Did returning search results 17ms faster really matter? It's hard to say for sure, but I suspect it did.
That said, I agree personally. I don't like Netflix' UI. I suspect you could hand code a browsing/ranking UI of similar value, from a casual users' perspective.
>> large enough catalog
I think this is a case where Netflix didn't end up where they expected the. I think they expected to have a vast catalogue... a "spotify of movies." It just didn't go that way.
You could also reverse the question. Does netflix have a big enough dataset to make a great recommendation system? I think this might be the more pertinent question. Google & FB have their vast ad-centric datasets. I suspect these could be used to make a recommendation engine that's a lot better.
They haven't really done this for youtube though. The priority is to match ads to users. For this, they're willing to push the envelope on how they use user data. For youtube recommendations, it doesn't seem that youtube gets access to much data from outside of youtube.
Then comes this flashy $1 million prize. Tons of universities had teams. So it really helped their recruitment.
It also likely contributed to the idea of creating Kaggle which has itself greatly contributed to data-science education by giving everyone an open forum in which to compete.
Then there were other signficant projects around this time like ImageNet which became a competition too. That open dataset led to tons of research and applications.
> Netflix is an online DVD rental company that lets people choose movies to be sent to their homes, and makes recommendations based on the movies that customers have previously rented.
It was a different and exciting time back then! I never finished that book but hope to some day... :)
[0] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-collective-...
I would have expected that a blog post would discuss how this was structured. Netflix contracted with innocentive.com, which is a website for solvers, and contracting to that website expanded Netflix's reach to a greater available pool of solvers. As far as I recall, all the allowed solvers for the netflix challenge _had_ to go through innocentive. I'm not sure if they would have been able to get the same level of improvement if they had not contracted with a set of potential solver teams like that.
The original challenge listing for Netflix is no longer listed at innocentive.com, but an industrious person may be able to find it on archive.org or somewhere similar.
It's entirely possible that as a new solver at the time I fell for innocentive's PR. The netflix challenge was actually the first I ever signed-up to work.
I think the data is still kicking around somewhere in torrent land. I also still have my own copy somewhere, I think.
A Wired article from 2010 [1] suggests it lead to some legal liability risks for Netflix.
Most notably, it taught me that it was incredibly hard to make significant progress past the most simplest and naive approach. That approach was "Take average rating a user gives, take the average rating a movie gets, multiply". (Ratings normalized to be between 0 and 1).
Just using this method would give us 95% of the accuracy of our final method. I think I calculated, and compared to the prize winning result, our method got ~90% as accurate a result.
A few percent can make a difference, especially in competitive areas; but the biggest win is just getting something in where there was nothing before. It's a bit like optimizing code.
The benefits of such a competition are pretty nebulous, and there's no way to convince an ardent skeptic. OTOH, many business decisions are like this and skepticism isn't a viable frame in many cases.
Netflix got visibility with investors and potential employees. Netflix's recommendation engine became famous, even though it doesn't seem impressive as a user. The exercise created a structured way of thinking about their recommendation algorithm. They cemented its importance. Even though they didn't implement the winning solution, they did get a useful benchmark. This was potentially very useful in further decisions in R&Ding the recommendation engine in-house.
All that for $1m?
Kaggle has been around for a long time now. If it works, I would expect them to be pumping out tons of interesting results from winners but I don't think I've heard many stories like that. It seems to be mostly useful for recruiting purposes?
But I highly encourage you to read the winners' solutions. They are full of clever data insight, augmentations, regularizations, feature engineering, and preprocessing and postprocessing tricks.
But above all, compared to the academic literature, it's shocking how much time and creativity they spend on validation. Maybe I'm reading the wrong papers, but the flashy new neural architectures rarely even mention their validation setup; Kaggle winners sometimes devote half of their explanation to it. It's part of their secret sauce.
Two personal favorites:
(1) https://www.kaggle.com/c/severstal-steel-defect-detection/di.... The "random defect blackout" was a really clever data augmentation.
(2) https://www.kaggle.com/c/ieee-fraud-detection/discussion/111.... Particularly how they reduced overfitting with adverserial validation. They trained a separate model to distinguish between train and test sets, and then dropped features that ranked highly in feature importance on that model. That's probably a well-known technique in some circles, but I had never seen anything like it before.
> But above all, compared to the academic literature, it's shocking how much time and creativity they spend on validation. Maybe I'm reading the wrong papers, but the flashy new neural architectures rarely even mention their validation setup; Kaggle winners sometimes devote half of their explanation to it
I agree, but in the end it is a competition, and the solution that scores the most is not always the solution that is "the most interesting" (or practical, or best in real world cases)
Though the details you mention are interesting, and can definitely apply at real-life solutions.
The goal of the Netflix prize wasn't to come up with the best algorithm - it was to make the Netflix brand exciting and legitimate to engineers. At the time, Netflix wasn't super high-tech and I'm sure it was hard for them to get the top talent they needed. It seems silly in retrospect now, but I'm certain the reason this was approved was because they wanted the free advertising this would provide within graduate classes and academia in general.
A few suggestions:
1. Review channels by genre
2. Trailer TV - let me leave a “comedy” trailer channel running that shows the trailer and movie rating and details at the bottom, let me easily skip to the next trailer (or let it play out)
So I think any truly personalized content channel would get exhausted quickly.
What I’d like to have is just a channel of curated or semi curated movie content that I can leave running or forward through to watch.
I recently stayed in a hotel with 6 channels of hbo. It’s kind of refreshing to have “hbo comedy” with random stuff like Beverly Hills cop and billy Madison on at 2pm in the afternoon.
Netflix doesn’t have enough content to do this, so they keep recommending the same crap originals to me over and over, knowing that I don’t watch them.
I can appreciate that you may not like said content, but they certainly aren’t lacking.
EDIT: I should add in terms of customer satisfaction, not revenue. I am sure forcing their originals down people's throats is great for their revenues.
why? what does he mean? netflix had a killer advantage with the old rating system and then dumped it why?
The contest started in 2006 and was awarded in 2009.
As a serious question, why do people include Netflix in the acronym FAANG, which I see on HN all the time? Is there something special about Netflix? Netflix is around the #14 tech company, so it's strange to see Netflix in there instead of Microsoft. Or is the use of FAANG divorced from its literal meaning?
"Put money to work in the companies that represent the future," he said. "Put money to work in companies that are totally dominant in their markets, and put money to work in stocks that have serious momentum."
I will admit that it was interesting to see what algorithms were poised to be cutting edge in media recommendation. The result was rather disappointing to me.
Netflix STILL isn't that exciting from anything but a compensation standpoint. The problems at netflix are about programming, while the technical challenges are droll at best.
And they don’t ask because users don’t provide useful answers.
But users don’t provide useful answers, because rating things doesn’t do anyone any good.
I’m of the belief that if you can make ratings useful (catalogue all movies, including not on Netflix; give useful ways to view/update your lists; have direct relationships to recommendations), you would have dramatically better recommendations for dramatically less effort/complexity.
I don’t think you’ll ever get to “good” recommendations based on usage. The data is fundamentally garbage.
Of course, the other side is that Netflix isn’t interested in recommending things I like; their goal is to recommend things I’ll put up with. They just need 1 show worth watching and subscribing for every now and then, and N shows to keep me mildly amused to stop me from dropping it between good ones
It was my understanding that there was significant business value in improving the accuracy of personalized movie recommendations. Recall that this was at a time where the majority of the business was DVDs sent via mail. A poor choice of movie created significant risk to customer satisfaction and hence retention.
If he started two years later and there was not a trace of the Prize work at the company, that would be an indicator that the competition was not important. If he started and could still see knock-on effects from the competition, that's an indicator that it was important.
Plus, he didn't just start at Netflix. He "took over the small team that was working and maintaining the rating prediction algorithm that included the first year Progress Prize solution."
Yeah, that sounds like he has some authority on the matter.
Its very possible Netflix realized they needed to course correct the UX and as a result the winners algorithm was solving for a problem that no longer applied because it was using assumptions (rating system & no existence of different profiles) that were no longer relevant.
He did work on productionize the 2007 winner, after all.
> Ten years ago, when I was leading Algorithms at Netflix
So... I think he does know a thing or two about specifically this issue.
On a funny note, Jordan Peterson used to be a well known Quora answer writer prior to his current career as an internet celebrity. Source: https://www.quora.com/profile/Jordan-B-Peterson
That's the hard part about designing software for anyone - there is no average user & you can't really make assumptions about their understanding of your system. After all, I think the intention of "My list" is clear and fairly obvious, so that makes 3 people with 3 different ideas about the feature.
Just browse some of your interest and you'll be in rabit hole. I don't know its so addictive for me.
>Wait [ ] months before recommending again a show I already watched.
does not handle that scenario, furthermore I am perhaps more pessimistic about user self knowledge than you are. I would probably make that box some high number but I am a sucker for rewatching some movies very often.
So Netflix does have more original content, I don’t care. I want to watch shows and movies and don’t care what studio produces them.
Can you imagine only listening to Spotify produced music? Or Apple Music or something?
> the codec and video encoding engineering they are doing
I am confident that is not what the vast majority are working on. Those aren't constrained problems that a single developer would be responsible for. Making unrealistic statements, is more than a little disingenuous.
Personally, the opposite has been happening in my recommendations. I've been switching over to Netflix less and less as its library thins, and the replacements seem not as compelling... can't even remember the last time I watched a full movie or TV show season on Netflix.
Guess I'm not the target demographic :( but it's not like I personally pay 'the Netflix bill' anyway.
Toddlers seems to enjoy the procedurally generated content though; maybe they're mistaking toddlers randomly bashing their screen for audience engagement?
If you are always "present" and engaged then the target is going to do most of the work themselves. If "the lights are on and nobody is home" when you try to take a step forward, you really take 10 steps back.
Anecdotally, in my own experience learning a second language, the online part of the course will play an audio or video clip, then play it again and have you answer questions on it, then do it again having you fill out missing words in a transcript, then play it again as you read the text along. I've found this extremely helpful to tune my ears.
I worked in a video store, back when there were such things, and can attest that the vast majority of people wanted the new thing and ignored the back catalog. It was my job to get them interested in the back catalog. I didn't do very well.
I joined Netflix because they had that back catalog available. But now that I'm old and grumpy, I've seen most of what I want to see in that back catalog, too. There's a ton of stuff in that category of "I'm sure it's great but I just don't want to work that hard". Also... most of that back catalog is crap, just under Sturgeon's Law.
Sadly, Netflix has figured that out, and gotten rid of most of its back catalog of DVDs. I hope the real film buffs have some other place to go get it.
I tried downvoting unwanted featured movies, they continued to be featured.
Once my listing was filled solely with already watched or downvoted movies I cancelled account.
I suspect that Netflix had some movies that I would gladly watch, but if they show what I explicitly marked as invented...
Their catalogue of award winning, or good movies is very low.
I think the problem is the studios figured why rent them to Netflix when we can put up our own OnDemand service?
So, Netflix was at a conundrum, "How do we get material so people won't leave, and we can raise our prices?"
Overpaid Netflix MBA, "I got it! Let's throw money at directors, and writers. The directors will make make our movies because we pay well. The writers will churn out cliched filled scripts, and put every plot twist into everything they write. The average viewer isn't here to watch quality, we will give them a huge bat of lousy material. It will be like feeding the hogs with slop?"
Amazon Prime video seems to have a better library for those that appreciate good movies.
I did like The Twillight Zone, and Star Trek, when I had Netflix though.
(Years ago Netflix offered every episode of the Zone, and Trek. I got every silgle episode through the mail, and copied to dvd using---dvd something? They come in handy if xfinity goes out.
Oh yea, Xfinity was charging a family member $260 a month. I painfully got. down to 130 a month. She was loosing $1390 a year for probally a decade--with pretty much the same plan.
Xfinity should be broken up, or better regulated by authorities. I literally gave up trying to rectify the situation talking to three people who could barely speak english. The last Ecuadorean guy's english was so bad, I gave up, and just picked the cheapest plan on Comcast, and prayed the bill would go down.
A Xfinity employee told me the current business plan is just "milk" long term customers with confusing bills, and deals. They don't care about cord cutters. They know they will always have a large percent of people who will just pay because their isn't a real option in their county, and many older people are not computer savvy.
Hell I'm computer savvy, but their application interface is purposely confusing. I could sware they are randomenly switching prices over the phone, and through their application. I hope someone outs them if my hunch is right.
I believe it's much more in their interest to buy old TV shows. A good movie will keep you occupied for what, two hours? Seinfeld: almost 19 days of watch time. Friends: over 5 days. Community was barely ever popular before Netflix bought it, now there's plenty of people that enjoyed it for 2 days and 7 hours of watch time (its subreddit went from 266k on April 2020 to 482k right now).
I believe it's also in their interest to spread out stories that are realistically one-movie-long into 5-6 slightly drawn out 40-50 min episodes.
I just wish they fucking stick to them instead of cancelling them after like two seasons. Orange Is The New Black is the only original of theirs I know of that goes above two days of airtime.
No so sure about that, in my experience they really don't have a deep licence pool any more, at least not for movies.
I would keep seeing stuff I don’t want to watch, and they would keep switching out thumbnails to trick me into thinking it’s something I haven’t encountered. Both of those combined made browsing a chore, and I simply had no interest in using something that’s actively working against me (which is also the reason I went from being an active FB user to only using it for groups and messaging, so it’s not as if "actively working against me" is a Netflix exclusive)
A more minor reason is the lack of information displayed, but I could have handled that.
It's still tons cheaper than individual stream rentals, there's more device flexibility, a lot more choice, doesn't require blackbox DRM on the devices (they are probably going to force secure enclaves on linux for their DRM at some point once the kernel patches propagate).
https://medium.com/@paysa/tech-salaries-who-pays-more-micros...
(Note this article is from Jan of 2008): > In today's trading, all four stocks are down steeply: Apple: Down $26.65, or 17.1%, to $128.99. Amazon: Down $7.56, or 9.6%, to $70.92. Google: Down $48.15, or 8.2%, to $536.20. Research In Motion: Down $8.47, or 9.4%, to $81.61.
Even writing off RIMM to zero would give you a healthy return through 2021.
As it is, these systems are just in-house banner ads in disguise, and as trustworthy as any other ad.
For a recommendation system to work in the interest of its users, its profits would have to be completely uncorrelated to the recommendations it gives. In a more sane world, platforms would have to accept such third-party recommendation systems as first-class citizens, to be used in lieu of whatever the platform offers.
That said, Amazon Prime video is so much worse. It suggests that I would like to watch series 1 of a show when I have watched it and am part way through season 2.
I've managed to binge-watch everything I liked in two months (while working full time remotely) and cancel Prime.
With such a small catalog suggestions will mostly be wrong, as there isn't enough content to fill the whole suggestions tab :)
Given that the former is a major engineering project, while the latter is a junior-level interview question, one has to assume they're trying to confuse their users on purpose.
I must have watched Wall Street, and Platoon, a few hundred times.
I won't even estimate how many times I have watched Hictchcock films.
And the number of times I have watched Giant, or Citizen Cane, is embarrassing.
I have old movies playing all the time. I don't actually watch them, but I find them comforting in a weird way, esoecially black, and white films. I think the old, good movies take a part of my brain away from reality? I listen to them while working,
Yes--how can I find Platoon comforting? At that point in my life, Charlie Sheen's character, and his father's, reminded me there are moral people still left. Maybe only in fantasy though?
I get what you are saying though. I have The Andy Griffith show on all the time.
(fun murky fact, I think true, fact about the Andy Griffith show. They didn't bother to copyright the episodes. For years people could sell copies of the show without copyright concerns. I think it's copy written now though.)
This is a recurrent problem with US based services, as residents of the USA tend to forget that they are a very large country.
By analogy, Netflix went from being a sci-fi future of having and being able to recommend on the basis of _everything_, to having a handful of good offerings and a huge amount of b-movie-level offerings.
My gut sense is management tried to paper over this "content loss problem" by making changes:
1) to the recommendation system to push Netflix content[1]; and
2) making changes to the UI to force users to be more reliant on the recommendation system.
I suspect these changes have, generally speaking, made user-consumption metrics look decent--in my mind the core of almost all Netflix's post-streaming decisions. But, as you suggest, it is all papering over a problem of user dissatisfaction: Netflix recommends you mediocre content, and you eventually give up and watch it--and then feel meh.
[1] I can imagine Netflix executives being unwilling to report that the content Netflix had paid mightily for scored low on Netflix's own recommendation algorithm. Philosophically, Netflix went from being, essentially, content agnostic (e.g., it just bought more of X DVD), to having incentives to see particular content (e.g., its own) rank highly.
The recommendations were pretty good, because I remember we mostly picked what was recommended.
Now a days, I'm certain Netflix recommends content to feature either "no cost" (owned) or the content with the lowest licensing fee. I don't believe for a second they don't have the data suggest the best movie. They simply don't want to suggest the best movie. As you said, their goal (now) isn't to suggest the content the user is likely to enjoy most, it's to suggest content the user will tolerate. And that's exactly why they shifted away from a 5 star rating system, to a thumbs up/down approach... even if you didn't love a movie or show, you're still likely to give it a thumbs up unless it was totally awful.
Large numbers of books labelled as 'free with your membership', which likely only cost Amazon the price of delivering the files. Which makes sense, because once I have paid for my credit the worst outcome financially is that I use it.
I'm certain Netflix ran the numbers, and determined that a high-usage customer is the most valuable.
On "just ok" vs stuff actually enjoyable, "just ok" is fine until there is no better competitor for attention (e.g. a new smartphone game takes over the world). If they get to fit on the "actually enjoyable" scale instead, there is a better chance for people to keep their subscription, sometimes even if they end not viewing anything that month for whatever reason.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/net...
- lots of short content
- viewing metrics to the second
Within an hour of usage you could've browsed through hundreds of TikToks, and allowed them to classify many tastes for you.
You'd need to sit in front of Netflix for an entire month for them to get the same amount of signal.
What you need is sufficient reason to do so — the values need to actually be useful to you to make updating an act of sanity (unlike now, where it’s purely an act of futility). Feeding the algorithm is not itself sufficient (though necessary, and currently ineffective). The ideal recommendation system would encourage rating entry as a ritual act, and more importantly, rating updates an act that derives real value.
Only then will you have good data, and from good data, a dumb algorithm will suffice.
And then the realization that really the best recommendation isn’t to forge a new customized list altogether — it’s to simply find the most similar users and recommend items from their list. (MAL has/had a cosine similarity function for this, but no way to search because it’s basically an n^2 algorithm on 4M users; apparently they offered it at some point, and quickly found it untenable. That was what really kicked me off)
And then the realization that if I found users with similar taste, then shouldn’t they be friends? So then it becomes a MAL friendship algorithm..
Did a bunch of research on recommendation algorithms and weighting strategies, scraped most of the MAL users, stored it in a database, and then promptly procrastinated on actually implementing the algorithms. Been sitting on that for like 3 years now :|
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/d...
It’s correct from Netflix’s perspective, but not from mine.
That is, I’d like to catalog my own list of watched movies, and their relative ratings, so that I can have a useful system (or a direct relationship to recommendations — eg More Like This), from which Netflix can scrape for their algorithms.
That is, if I’m not honest to myself, the ratings themselves will not be honest, and not properly reflect my taste.
Specifically, there must be reason to provide negative ratings in addition to positive, to capture user taste.
For instance how Netflix's catalog is attractive to new users/markets can be checked in regular polls, but it would be way more difficult to follow with fine granularity, far less precise, and ultimately a harder to handle number than just retention or number of new accounts.
This means Netflix could see decent growth on its numbers, good retention and a steady flow of new accounts created, while struggling to reach new markets where competitors are doing great.
This is an extreme example, but Blackberry typically had very good user retention and users loved their devices. Looking only at these numbers, they were doing fine for a long time (which is nothing to sneeze at)
The users who only watch a couple of things are the ones who are more likely to “get bored”, because in any given month there is a higher chance that there won't be any single thing they'd want to watch. Whereas someone who just does it regularly (say every day after work while eating dinner or w/e) is more likely to keep that habit.