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Comment by stratospark | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it's a beneficial thing to add extrinsic motivation to view a work of art. Shouldn't most of the value come from the work itself?

I imagine some people thinking: "This show sucks, but if I watch 3 more seasons I can get the badge like all my friends." Then the notion of Netflix could shift from highly individualized recommendations to novel social game to lowest common denominator social chore.

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I like the idea, but not everything needs to be social. I've been slowly working through certain collections of movies, and if I could add them automatically to my queue, that would be great.

I have no need to 'show off' to my friends, because my Netflix queue is highly personalized to me. But, it would certainly make it easier to feel like you had a grasp on any certain body of work (such as my current obsession: everything directed or produced by Scorsese).

On a personal perspective, the achievements feel more like a fun "to-do" list. I often don't know what movie to watch, and having a list to go through and check stuff off of (aka, "Oscar Winners in 2010") would give more direction on what to watch next.

No affiliation, but http://www.icheckmovies.com/ is based around a similar concept.

This is great. I created the achievements mock-up article primarily because I was excited about tracking my National Film Registry movies. And this site has that! Thanks!

Part of Netflix's business model is about trying to avoid encouraging everybody to watch the same things, meaning that they don't need to stock many copies of each movie.

Heck, part of Netflix's business model is encouraging you to forget to watch DVDs for weeks at a time. They've got no interest in making you power through arbitrary lists of films.

Having a todo list with predicted ratings is really great.

If I built this, I'd be sure to allow ratings without a corresponding rentals, for DVDs, DVRs, etc.

Even without achievements, I've played with Greasemonkey scripts to sort by predicted rating & made an effort to turn around the DVDs quickly. It did start feeling like work instead of play, so I cut back a bit.

Great username. Did you get that from a book?

I think Charles Stross' "Lobsters," the first part of Accelerando, was one of a couple of stories I stumbled on in quick succession that used the term "pronoiac," & I liked the idea.

Edit: If anyone else's wondering, a pronoiac's the opposite of a paranoiac - someone who thinks people are working behind his back to help him. It's a mindset I try to cultivate.

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