Comment by dbreunig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbreunig | Hacker News Reader

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Some wishful thinking here...

> For one thing, the promise of being able to stream the ENTIRETY of the classic shorts could generate a tremendous amount of publicity for Max, in the process providing strong incentive for T&J collectors, animation fans, historians, and adults to subscribe to the new platform.

That is a very small audience compared to the very large audience of families who would be upset if the their kids auto-played into unexpected blackface.

Yes these problems can be solved with UX, yes it would be nice if we can access everything as it existed forever... But the reality is unfettered yet contextualized access to archival Tom & Jerry episodes isn't going to be high on their backlog.

For the purposes of access for historical archive purposes...why focus your complaints on streaming? Streaming is great for ease of access, cheaper price points (at least monthly), and breadth of selection. As a format, it's doesn't deliver well for archival purposes.

> That is a very small audience compared to the very large audience of families who would be upset if the their kids auto-played into unexpected blackface.

Your point is valid regarding the size of the niche here, but there are probably a thousand other niches that would combine—long tail fashion—into a good chuck of market share.

As far as families being upset about their kids auto-playing into offensive content, HBO has already solved for this. They have Sex and the City and The Sopranos on that platform.

Mark the naughty T&J episodes as "TV-MA", and a kid-filtered view won't show them, right? (I guess the question is whether they have this ability per-episode, or only at the series level)

You've hit on the key design challenge for mass market networks with massive content libraries: how can one build the best product for the largest audience without being boring to the niches. It's why Facebook uses algos to recommend content, which spurs another interesting question.

If algos are the tool for recommending the best version of content, the idea of 'archive' and 'preservation' of original forms falls by the wayside. The FB feed you see is different than mine, as are your Google results for the same terms. How would we deal with your Tom & Jerry or other content being different? For the most part it would just be funny quirks (like film edits for airplanes or cable TV).

This gets even crazier as contemporary tools for creation can capture and store countless takes that would usually be discarded on the cutting room floor. Now they're just waiting for an alternative cut.

I wrote about this 9(!) years ago, but the issue has only accelerated: https://dbreunig.tumblr.com/post/13923466229/multisignal-too...

>Your point is valid regarding the size of the niche here, but there are probably a thousand other niches that would combine—long tail fashion—into a good chuck of market share.

What niches would those be? Why is HBO Max responsible for all of them? Their parent company made committments to censorship before HBO Max even existed back to when DVDs were being introduced, as stated in the article. I don't even know why OP and yourself are going after HBO for this, apparently Warner Bros made this decision twenty years ago.

> As far as families being upset about their kids auto-playing into offensive content, HBO has already solved for this. They have Sex and the City and The Sopranos on that platform.

Dunno if you use HBO Max or not but, like Netflix, they separate UI and content by age group of the current user

> Mark the naughty T&J episodes as "TV-MA", and a kid-filtered view won't show them, right? (I guess the question is whether they have this ability per-episode, or only at the series level)

Or just not, and not deal with any further possible ramifications. All of these "historical"/"archival purposes/I'm a sensible adult" arguments for Tom and Jerry apply just as well to Amos & Andy since we're really talking about censoring jokes about Black people's physical appearance. Almost seems like a dog whistle if I had more evidence.

> What niches would those be?

I can't enumerate all niches that exist in a large back catalog of media. My point wasn't that HBO should cater to 1,000 different "I wanna see the racist stuff" niches. Rather, there are a thousand different subsets of their subscriber base that all have an outsized interest in something otherwise obscure. Or largely unpopular. I was responding the to general point about the tradeoff between serving those small subsets vs. avoiding the ire of the wider subscriber base.

> Why is HBO Max responsible for all of them

I didn't say they were. Just reframing it as a business decision that they could make. The long tail is a thing that has been traditionally hard to cater to, but is easier with the technology we have today. (i.e. Physical video stores don't have 1/10th the floorspace that would be required, but online streaming does. Once a title has been tagged and categorized, you let your software take care of the curation with 0 marginal cost)

> I don't even know why OP and yourself are going after HBO for this.

I'm not "going after them". I was responding to the parent's comment with my own ideas how the situation could be navigated. If HBO decides that, no, they'd rather just sidestep the whole issue, I don't blame them! Their math might work out different than mine. (Okay, maybe I "blame" them, but I get it. Can't say I'd be Mr. Principled Archivist in the same situation)

As for OP, I figure he really loves Tom and Jerry, and would love to see all the episodes.

> Almost seems like a dog whistle if I had more evidence.

No. The "I'm a sensible adult" is fine by me on its own merits. I don't need to whistle. Like I said, mark these episodes "TV-MA".

I guess I'm frustrated because I wish streaming services weren't so ephemeral. The one that really got me was the episode of Community where the group played D&D for the first time. It's one of the best episodes of that show, but it's no longer available to watch. But it's reasonable for me—a non-bigot—to like that episode, right?

About the D&D episode, if you watch the series on Netflix it's not just blocked or greyed out, but is simply wiped out of existence. They even renumbered the season, so there's absolutely no way for an unsuspecting viewer to know, they're simply robbed of having that choice. I myself learned about its existence long after I was done with the season, by coincidence.

In my opinion this kind of re-writing is the worst, since the platform is not only making a decision to not serve you the content, but also actively making the decision to keep this information from you.

I miss the good ol' days of "just click the X button on the top-right corner" way of content filtering.

Pulling the D&D episode can easily be ascribed to acrimony for Dan Harmon from both tv owners and politically-motivated mobs. A bunch of right-wing trolls repeatedly tried to “metoo” Harmon; when they eventually weaponized that episode, nobody at Sony was willing to stick their neck out for it - after all the trouble Dan put them through while making the series, he likely has no friends left over there.

Chang’s makeup is such a layered gag, it’s ridiculous that it gets dropped in the same basket as Mommy Two-Shoes.

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