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This, please, pretty please.

Not to mention the surveillance chill of "how will watching this flick affect what the recommendation algorithm thinks of me." At least let me turn that shit off.

Maybe that's just context though, on say youtube where you have a billion vids and I'm just watching short music clips or programming vids, sure it may be helpful to show me stuff related to what I just watched. On Netflix just give me a directory and make it easy for me to browse, maybe show me the new releases etc. There's mostly no such things as 'similar' when it comes to feature length movies except for sequels and remakes.

Or I dunno, maybe they really just didn't have a single thing I wanted to watch, which is entirely possible.

> surveillance chill...

Just do what everyone does and create a guilty pleasures profile? Bonus, your guilty pleasures account will get better guilty pleasure recommendations.

do. not. want.

I'm genuinely curious why? When I sit down to watch a movie I'm usually pretty sure if I want something with explosions or something with jokes or something with feels, is that atypical? Do you want pitch perfect and the green mile in the same set of recommendations?

I really just don't want any recommendations. They suck. Their algorithm has no idea what I want to watch. Maybe a list of things highly rated by other human beings that I could filter by genre would work. And not just other humans who've watched the same things I have.

But as the the immediate point, guess I'm just paranoid. I want to watch movies without data nerds peering through my windows, is that so wrong? I would very much like to be excluded from their preferences dataset entirely, but as an alternative I'll settle for just not watching stuff.

> surveillance chill

When bae invites you over for surveillance and chill?

bae def don't need to see all the chick flicks I've been watching

>On Netflix just give me a directory and make it easy for me to browse

If they did that, you'd see just how small their catalog really is. For Netflix, the recommendation engine is vital camouflage for the fact that they just don't have very much content. Netflix have about 4,000 movies in their catalog, of which a substantial proportion are low-budget filler. Once you remove the obvious junk, you're left with a selection of movies that's no better than a Blockbuster store circa 2005.

Fundamentally, you don't get Netflix for movies. Maybe that's why you sign up originally but if you don't watch any TV shows, Netflix is probably not worth it for you. One of their senior people told me a few years ago that "People come for movies and they stay for TV." And that's probably still the case. I doubt its catalog is anywhere near the quality of a 2005 Blockbuster for films. Unfortunately, their DVD back catalog is also rotting away to the point where I'll probably end up dropping that subscription at some point.

Agreed w/the rest of your comment but "[...] they stay for TV?" I take it they and/or you meant "series".

> how will watching this flick affect what the recommendation algorithm thinks of me

Not to mention the fact that my wife and I use a single Netflix account. She watches things that I think are objectively garbage. I watch things she feels the same about. There are several things we enjoy watching together.

Just show me what you've added in the last month and make it easy for me to browse categories. That's all I want.

And how long is Kevin Hart's 3-year old stand up special going to be in the "recently added" section? It's been there for me for at least 8-9 months.

You can create multiple profiles in an account.

Just responding to this quote:

> How do we convince you that a title is worth watching?

Here's another quote that balances that one a bit:

> We also carefully determine the label for each observation by looking at the quality of engagement to avoid learning a model that recommends “clickbait” images: ones that entice a member to start playing but ultimately result in low-quality engagement.

I read that as saying that they want to avoid tricking you into watching stuff that you won't like. Certainly an interesting problem.

I agree with your points about how hard it feels to find new, interesting stuff on Netflix sometimes. The browsing interface feels like it's set up to make low effort discovery easy, but not to find content that's really great and unusual.

I often end up using a third-party site like Rotten Tomatoes to help me find something interesting. Perhaps that's because I trust independent reviews more than Netflix recommendations, especially now that Netflix features their own content so prominently.

I feel the same way.

It's like Netflix has (at least) two different population of users - those like us, who would like a catalogue of legally streamable good movies to choose from, and the other population for whom Netflix basically replaces TV, i.e. people who don't really care what exactly they watch, and thus are open to recommendations.

I suppose it's fair if they want to target that other population. Maybe they're majority. For me, their recommendation is only an utter annoyance, and it lost any value the moment they switched from objective ratings to "percent match".

Bingo. Everything you mention could be said for social media, news, entertainment, shopping, politics, fashion, etc.

Whether the "learning" is being done by neural networks built in software or human wetware makes no difference. We're optimizing for the pervasiveness and uniformity of echo chambers in nearly every corner of our lives. Those echo chambers are largely responsible for greater polarization of political views, lack of ideological diversity, the snowflake generation, and a host of other problems that seem to be getting worse by the day.

Sales and marketing. I blame this area of human endeavour for pretty much half of the shit that goes wrong on this planet.

It's because, instead of informing about their offer honestly and letting people decide, people figured out they have to convince buyers. Given that this is mostly a highly-competitive zero-sum game (for a given established market segment you're in, you're competing with others for limited amount of potential customers), I suppose me complaining about this is like complaining that the water is wet, or that speed of light is too slow.

But pause for a minute and consider, how so many of this bullshit - including "greater polarization of political views, lack of ideological diversity, the snowflake generation, and a host of other problems that seem to be getting worse by the day" - all boil down to individual entrepreneurs who engage in convincing to bump their income a tiny little bit each step of the way.

Precisely. This is a strictly business focused/profit gaining feature, not a consumer feature. The consumer's actual wants and desires seem to have been entirely left out. The question "what does the customer want" is shaped for the assumption "The customer wants what will net our company more profit"

Their whole goal is to give you a service that keeps you paying every month and encouraging you to tell your acquaintances that they should sign up too.

So I think your interest and their interests are aligned?

’Interests’ are more complex and layered than that. Am I interested in going to the gym or is the underlying interest to feel healthy and fit? A brain may be easily misled to believe an expensive colorful drink would satisfy the interest to feel healthy. Maybe the brain kinda knows it should do x to really be healthy but y is easier. It might advertise to its brainy friends that y ‘ is pretty good in fact!’ to legitimize its preferences.

It’s your own responsibility to decide what to want and what not to want, but these days it’s pretty hard to fight the hundreds and hundreds of brightest minds that work full-time to convince you to like something. They know much more about the inner workings of your brain than you do, and you might not be equipped to tip the odds of manipulation in my favor.

I recently deleted Facebook and it was a real mind blower to realize how much they impacted my brain chemistry even though I didn’t feel like I used their service much. Since then I’m even less trusting of corporations armed with big data, big brains, big money and supposedly aligned incentives.

Is there any site tracking the popularity of the various torrents as films hit physical release (eg. high-qual editions)?

Torrentfreak publishes the 10 most pirated movies every week: https://torrentfreak.com/top-10-pirated-movies-week-bittorre...