Hacker News Reader

Someone once pointed out to me how "engagement" is often misread by companies. The product team makes a change to their website or app and suddenly engagement skyrockets. They think, "Wow! That change really got people to use our product. Let's do more!" when, in reality, the change they made is initially so confusing that their users spend more time than they would otherwise just trying to find their way around all the new changes. This, coupled with new product owners, product managers, and executives who feel like they need to justify their positions and the easiest way to do that is to "improve" the product and we have a negative feedback loop that is perceived by everyone within the company as a virtuous cycle. All the while they're just pissing their customers off.

The experienced managers know that the difference, but others could either be easily fooled or gaming the statistics to help boost their internal politics standing.

The bigger problem is when these engagement bumps are valid but destroy long term value in the cohort. The auto binge optimization makes viewers more cautious about opening the Netflix app altogether.

This happens with things like fast food restaurants. Subway expanded rapidly, and then tried holding up their sales with discounts. How long can someone eat at Subway weekly or daily before they never want to go there again? The bar is so high, you are way betting off starting a new franchise brand than trying things like removing yoga mat chemicals from your bread or hiring a new mascot who isn’t a child rapist.

> How long can someone eat at Subway weekly or daily before they never want to go there again?

Bread is one of only a very few foods that seem to be immune to "food exhaustion", the tendency to want to stop eating something you've been eating. (Milk is another, but I have a feeling that only applies to lactose-tolerant people.)

So if you varied the fillings, probably indefinitely. How long can you have cereal for breakfast before you never want to eat cereal again?

About a couple of weeks, twenty days max.

It's not just bread, though. It's subway.

I believe the veggie option is still yesterdays hummus crudely spread around a bun with bell peppers, black olives, an raw onions. The meats are cafeteria tier, in fact I think the meatball sub recipe is the exact slop served in my old dining hall.

They undermined their masterful subliminal marketing on the entire millennial generation by raising the $5 foot long sub to near chipotle bowl price points, and in my city at least cheap excellent street food is already on every corner.

I only ever settle for subway, it's not a destination.

I happen to agree about subway, but that's a personal taste that immediately implies it shouldn't be able to run a store in the first place. "This is terrible food" just isn't the same argument as "it's good, but you get tired of it after a month". High sales that taper off aren't compatible with the first.

Absolutely.

A/B testing causes way more bad decisions than good ones because people run the tests wrong and they interpret the data wrong.

But I've found explaining that to people to be an uphill battle. They get sold on an "objective" way to optimize the UI and then don't want to hear that the method is actually very subjective when not done correctly. And it's hard to execute and interpret correctly so every A/B test I've seen ran has been very subjective.

Haha. So I'll do better than the average company doing A/B testing by simply avoiding the methodology altogether? That's nice to know.

I'm a huge believer in the "expert product manager" route.

Meaning have one person who talks to all the stakeholders and every type of user. Who just knows your product backwards and forwards. And thus can drive what changes you need to make to push things forward.

What exactly the means depends on the nature of the product.

I wonder if autoplay was just a scheme to bump up these numbers for shareholders? Frequently, I'd used to leave my xbox running netflix, because the xbox takes 5 mins to start up, and just shut off the TV. Not anymore now that it would watch an entire made for netflix movie in the background and start polluting the feed with innumerable potemkin netflix series I'd never even heard of. Engagement while I'm sleeping in bed.

> I feel like Netflix is trying its hardest to stop me from watching.

Indeed. I just cancelled my Netflix subscription. I signed up as soon as possible when Netflix launched in my country, and I've been running the 4k plan since they launched it.

But for a while now, every time I've launched Netflix I've felt actively put off watching something. By far the most annoying thing is that they play trailers or the movie when I'm just trying to read what the film is about. Most of the time I ended up watching something else.

A couple of weeks ago I figured I'd vote with my wallet and cancelled, listing the autoplay as the reason for cancelling.

Maybe one day they'll get to their senses, though I'm not holding my breath.

There may be regional differences. However, in Germany it is possible to disable auto play for episodes and trailers in the settings.

Same in Greece, it's just very well hidden. I discovered it by accident one day.

I’m usually pretty good at finding hidden options like that, and I ended up canceling Netflix because of the automatic previews as well. If there’s a way to disable it now, I might come back.

The automatic previews are terrible, yeah. I haven't found an option for those, I'm afraid.

The one setting we have here in Norway is only for when credits are rolling. The one that really drives me up the wall, and the sole reason I cancelled, is the one that's pre-movie.

It starts playing trailers when you're in the library and linger for a brief second on a movie, or starts the actual movie if you click on the movie to read more about it.

That is truly obnoxious. The only thing that makes it tolerable is that you can mute the trailers when browsing using the website.

> By far the most annoying thing is that they play trailers or the movie when I'm just trying to read what the film is about.

Many times I just want to see when the movie was made and who the actors are.

Autoplay is indeed very annoying. If at least it was muted...

Another annoying feature is that you can't opt-in to 4K HDR per device. Our main TV is an OLED display which is great for 4K HDR but on the bedroom we have a lower quality 4K TV with really bad HDR. I'd rather watch Netflix on that TV in 1080p without HDR. Or what if your connection can handle 4K but it consumes all your bandwidth and someone else needs to do a skype or something.

> Autoplay is indeed very annoying. If at least it was muted...

If I understand correctly, you can mute autoplay - there's a volume icon to the left of the age rating of the screen (mid-right. You won't hear any autoplay sound again, for any session, until you click on it again.

Thanks for the suggestion but I've looked around but I don't see any speaker icon on the LG app. I guess it's different depending on the app and maybe even the country.

Yes, forced quality setting is another pet peeve. For me I'd rather wait for the 1080p or 4K to buffer than to have the start ruined by crappy 360p, just to enable insta-play.

Partly it's to make it seem like the platform has more content than it actually does. Netflix has been losing streaming rights like nobody's business, so if it removed all of the shows you've already watched or watched a bit of and didn't like, the platform would start feeling pretty empty pretty quickly.

You forgot the "recommended for you" section that contains all movies in a foreign language because you accidentally watched an artsy noir movie six months ago and didn't realize it was subtitled until almost 30 minutes into it because there was no dialog.

Machine learning is taking over the world.

And it sucks 99% of the time

aka "artificial stupidity"

"it wasn't us it was the model"

> because you accidentally watched an artsy noir movie six months ago and didn't realize it was subtitled until almost 30 minutes into it because there was no dialog.

This is a really weird thing to do, and a really weird basis for complaint about ML recommenders. I'd imagine that 99.9% of people who watched _30 minutes_ of an artsy foreign-language noir film are people who are inclined to enjoy artsy noir films (or at least trying it out). The only reasonable complaint here is that recommender systems can be overly sticky when they don't provide a way to provide strong negative feedback (eg YouTube's "not interested" option).

I know I've accidentally done it before. There's enough movies that take place in international locations that it isn't uncommon for a movie to start out subtitled while setting up the plot, then switch over to English with the main character. For the movie I watched, there was nothing in Netflix saying it's a foreign language movie, and after watching the movie for a while, I looked it up online to see if the whole movie is subtitled. If I had known the entire movie was subtitled, I'd have never started it, but Netflix doesn't tell you that in the description.

Tangent: I find subtitles easier to follow than audio dialogue. My biggest complaint about subtitles, if I were going to complain, would be that they draw my attention so much that I might miss visuals appearing elsewhere on the screen. I don't really understand why people object to them.

But this does appear to be a minority position.

This isn't Netflix specific, but I really hate how subtitles often spoil plot elements, sometimes very important ones.

For example, in a scene the main character might see a new person for the first time. There's nothing in the movie so far to indicate that the main character knows the other person. Yet the subtitles may reveal that other characters name when the subtitled dialog goes "CARL: Hello there", which might ruin an important plot point.

I really don't understand why they keep doing this.

The subtitle writers should learn a lesson from the people who write audio descriptions for the blind. At least in the best audio descriptions, a person's name isn't mentioned in the description until after it's mentioned in the dialogue. Until then, they'll say "the tall man" or whatever.

If you have 3 movies on your history, and one is an artsy one that you got away after 30 minutes, the evidence is pointing that you like artsy movies, but didn't like this one.

If you have 100 movies on your history, and one is an artsy one that you got away after 30 minutes, the evidence is pointing that you will not like anything else like it.

And when you actually try to search for a noir movie you get exactly 2 noir movies and then a bunch of other movies you wonder why they are there. I guess they just fill the page of any search by random titles.

That's what I was thinking as well. There seems to be a "dislike" button missing in the UI. If I am not interested in a movie/show, I should be able to stop it from wasting my screen real estate. There can be separate section for dislike list which the user can edit if needed.

That exists. It's the thumbs down button. Granted, I'm unsure whether they use it to reprioritize the specific show/film, or the entire genre / broader category, or both.

That button is for rating the movie/show after you watched it. I want to apriori eliminate items before even attempting to watch them.

Except they're using that rating to influence what you're recommended, even if you don't watch (which they're also tracking). They document more of this than I expected.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/9898

>>If you liked a TV show or movie, give it a "thumbs up." If you didn't like a TV show or movie, give it a "thumbs down."

True, it does affect their recommendations but still the inherent purpose of a thumbs down is to tell them I watched it but didn't like. I would love for them to provide a "not interested" option as well.

Considering Netflix's infuriating decision to reduce the 5-star rating to the thumbs-up/down, I highly doubt they'll be adding any more buttons soon.

Edit: I continue to have hope that some higher-ups from Netflix are reading these comments, and someday will create a GUI for "pros" and a GUI for everyone else (as it is now), where the "pro" version allows at least some level of customization beyond this dark-pattern insanity.

That button infuriates me, as it appears to do nothing except grey out the cover of the show - the show is still shown in my "currently watching", it comes up in "trending", and it's even in my "recommended" section!

What was the point of even providing me the option? I suspect it might be part of an A/B test to see how many people engage with a button that does nothing. I absolutely loathe this sort of dark pattern but I have yet to convince a manager that "gathering data!" is bad thing...

Twitch has "I am not interested in " button, but when you investigate deeper under under https://www.twitch.tv/settings/recommendations it turns out to be a ROLLING FILO list limited to ~100 entries :D

YT "not interested" is similar but worse, forgets your dislikes after few days.

I'm the same. It has never once recommended something I'd actually consider watching. And the rest of the UI is so openly user-hostile that I can't bear using it. In particular, playing video if I pause too long on any one show. Baffling that they won't let you turn that off. And it's so difficult to just look for new stuff!

i've had similar complaints in the past, though my real pain point has been Hulu on AppleTv. i cannot stand the UX, despite actively training myself on how to navigate the UI. the UX of many AppleTv app implementations has been less than stellar in my opinion. i will say this has driven me straight into the "just talk at it" workflow...which for brings its own set of struggles.

The autoplaying of the thumbnail thing has me flitting around in the UI so it doesn't trigger, because I think not-as-worse when I am flitting compared to when I am trying to focus on something and the video is blaring.

I almost feel like there should be an ADA lawsuit against the top streaming video purveyors to have a low tech distraction free consistent interface. Just give me the full catalog in XML format or SQLite, I'll do the rest.

> Next line, "Continue Watching": 2 shows that I found so bad I stopped watching them

At least your "continue watching" is relevant; mine tends to show movies I already watched in full, with a progress bar showing them being 98% done. Well, that last 2% is obviously the ending credits. Perhaps people over at Netflix do watch the couple of minutes of names rolling on black screen. I don't.

I wonder if that's intentional, as it's not the first occurrence.

For example, movies that the user has already watched keep showing in the grid. If one stops watching a series mid-season, there's no immediate way of preventing the show from displaying in the list of current movies (removing the entire series from history works, but it's not immediate, and it's too drastic).

If I want to expand on a movie, rather than watching it, the area I can click on is tiny compared to the whole banner surface.

I think all of those are patterns of a strategy to shove content down the user's throat - it makes sense from a (dishonest) business perspective.

This has been going on for as long as I had an xbox netflix app, going back to the 360. Whats worse is that if you try to watch a series it picks up from 95% done on the episode you just finished. Feels like the VHS days.

They don’t have the timestamps set up correctly for all of their content, it’s supposed to count as ‘watched’ once you reach the credits.

Here is a blog post from Netflix staff members where they explain the recommendations: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-recommendations-... . It's from 2012 so things might very well have changed since then.

apenwarr talks about this on his blog. He claims Netflix purposely switched from a good recommendation algorithm to a worse one after the transition from their DVD-by-mail days to their streaming offering. See https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 (find the section titled "Netflix").

I recommend reading that section (or even the whole article, though the main point of the article is something only tangentially related), but I'll try to summarize.

The argument goes that Netflix doesn't need to find the best movie or TV show for you; instead it tries to find one that is just good enough for you, but at the same time good enough for lots of other people too (apparently in your case they fail at that). From their standpoint it doesn't matter if you watch something you really really like instead of something mildly entertaining: Netflix noted that the probability of people cancelling depends on the number of hours they watch Netflix content, not on the quality of that content.

Nudging people to select what they watch out of a smaller pool of offerings enables them to save on bandwidth costs because a lot of content can be served out of distributed caches.

There's a word for it even, apparently: "satisficing" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing). It doesn't work for everyone: it doesn't work for you, and it mostly doesn't work for me (I don't watch a lot of Netflix, and when I do it's mostly based on recommendation from friends or online sources). And I'm not sure how it works in the long term.

Netflix used to be better, I always felt like they were making their UX actively worse over time. So I'd prefer whatever they did back in 2012.

What never worked was recommendations. The first time I signed up for them, I actively voted on shows I had already watched (and clicked the button that still existed back then that told them I had already watched something), ranked genres, downvoted things I had no interest in. Only for netflix to ignore 99% of what I just spent an hour telling them.

In the article, Morley focuses on the UX which appears within five seconds of the end of a show's episode, forcing viewers to quickly choose whether to watch the next.

She doesn't discuss the top level discovery UX.

> Personalized suggestions on Netflix or Amazon (in sections like “Because You Watched Working Moms…”) provide me with shows I’m more likely to binge; they work to cut down my browsing time so that I hit play quickly. Other categories like “Crime” might seem generic, but the algorithm is tailored to my specific preferences within that category.

>Onward: A bunch of shows that I finished watching and that are either canceled, finished or have no new episodes. Why would I want this information?

Because original content is expensive. There's not that much of it, and people do actually tend to repeat watch stuff. Most people are happier watching another episode of Friends than turning on something they've got no emotional bond with, haven't seen before and won't really pay attention to.

It's a little frustrating how difficult it is for the HN community (taken overall) to understand that their preferences aren't universal. I think there's a really interesting conversation to be had here about intentional or unintentional dark patterns, and where the line is between filling the user's needs and steering their activity for the company's benefit. But it's muddled by the fact that half the conversation is "I have this specific preference and Netflix is obviously evil or incompetent for not adhering to it, other users be damned".

(To be clear, this isn't direct criticism of the GP comment, which is high-quality overall)

> The only site I know with a worse UX than Netflix is Amazon Prime Video.

I've read this in a lot of places. My personal experience with this has been quite the opposite. Amazon's UX has no parallel, and I don't really mean it in a good way. It's just unique in how it lays out things. Once I got the hang of how it works, after that "aha" moment it became way more navigable.

Huh. Just went to the overview for the first time in a few months. It's much better than before and not item by season, randomized anymore.

They are now finally better than Netflix (in that regard).

Now they need to get a better player and stop it with louder-than-the-shows-I'm-watching adverts in German and clearly mark the shows they don't have English subs/dubs for and I'd be happy (well, as far as I know, they don't have as much data as, because of the bad experience, I often ended up looking for others sources than prime video)

What about other streaming services? For me, the issue isn’t with Netflix but with YouTube

YT seems pretty bad, but I can't really speak of it as I dislike videos and prefer text (TV shows are pretty much the only videos I watch). I sometimes watch music videos on YT, but that tends to just mean clicking on the first result for my search.

YouTube is great. It recommends related videos that are actually related and often interesting, and the amount of good quality content on there seems much higher than Netflix. There is also effectively no DRM and you can watch it in your favourite video player. You can subscribe to channels you are actually interested in and view a feed of new videos only from those channels, with no algorithm trying to pressure you into watching anything else.

I spend about five seconds looking at Netflix to see if any shows I watch have new episodes. It’s pretty good at getting them near the top. It’s not really a ui problem that the vast majority of shows on Netflix suck.

> The only site I know with a worse UX than Netflix is Amazon Prime Video.

Amazon Prime Video has exceptionally bad UX. But then again Amazon shopping experience is also rather abysmal.

I'm in Germany, most of the problems I read about here did not yet arrive in Germany luckily.

Maybe on some people. Personally for me it's getting harder to find stuff to watch because of changes they made. Actually considering dropping them.

Same here. They need something to hook people into watching something long. Most people are OK binging youtube because popular videos have a sweet spot in their lengths.

People like to watch trailers.

They need to fill the first row of titles with trailers. People need to get hooked via these trailers. Hell, they need to hype their future show with trailers.

Netflix I know you are reading this.

I'm people too, just not a in the middle if the bell curve people. I'm curious, why do you go to a in the middle of the bell curve type of service to find fringe material? It's not served from there.

I bet you say you don't get affected by ads either. You think you're in control but you're not. We're all just sheep.

I agree, if I had to guess which dark patterns Netflix is deploying to their apps. It would probably be striking a balance between having a subscription and offering just enough to satisfy me. This way I won't cancel and they can play the "is this content a hit?" game. People don't really care about UI, they just want something that works. It doesn't even have to work well.