Hacker News Reader

Comment by stedaniels | Hacker News Reader

> The key for Clubhouse will be in honing its algorithms so that every time a listener opens the app they are presented with a conversation that is interesting to them.

I think Netflix and YouTube have proven how hard this is. Watch a couple of the wrong shows and you a doomed forever it seems. It's a bit like Echo Chambers too. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

View on HN

What is maddening is that Netflix when it was just DVDs it was IMO it was pretty amazing discovery wise. I felt like the users folks posting reviews were amazing at suggesting movies / giving you a good feel for the film. But maybe it was because those folks didn't have a background motivation to push, like advertising dollars or etc.

Or maybe it was an eternal September problem or just the fact that DVDs meant there was more content that could be found, but I've not found anything as good as the old school Netflix community reviews.

Meanwhile amazon is convinced I'm a woman and won't leave me alone about that ... Google is convinced I love a college football team that is in fact a rival because I google something about them once in a blue moon .... Trump was really interested in me filling out a happy birthday card for his wife (nope, that's creepy)... and they stand to make money on that, a still get it wrong.

The library was far better when it was DVDs. They didn't have the licensing problems they do now.

Yeah the volume of good quality but not well known films available was huge.

Now those seem lost... they're often in a limbo where they only exist in DVD form now, but not streaming.

Agreed.

I used to watch quite a few older and newer movies when it was a DVD service. Now, I just get all of their branded content shoved down my throat with little if any options beyond that. Search is inconsistent at best.

I've been thinking about canceling my subscription for a while now as I feel the value of Netflix just isn't there any more.

To me, the value of these streaming services are probably 1/3 their actual price, so like many I split the account with a half dozen people. It's gotten to the point where the scale is shifting further and further, and I'm streaming content gratis using bittorrent rather than the actual platform that I have an account with because sometimes it's easier and faster to get straight to the content without being bombarded. Not to mention the latest Hulu dark pattern, where something will be labelled as "available on Hulu," then you go and look and it's only available on the Hulu plan that costs as much as your old cable bill.

Have they removed films from the DVD side of the business?

I used it until a few years ago, it seemed the same as ever back then. Now we just have more options through various services for streaming, vs waiting on DVD.

Youtube is astonishingly bad. I watched a Jordan Peterson talk just to see what all the fuss is about and now there's at least a clip of him in damn near every video Youtube recommends. And this is despite me actually watching aerospace related videos almost exclusively.

Honestly at this point while logged in I only watch videos about scientific and technical subjects. Anything else I go incognito so it won't mess up my recommendations.

I have the impression that the algorithm sees that you watched something a little more popular in general and latches into that trying to bring you to a larger more generic cluster. Same thing happens with music, for me.

Try watching something like "how to fix a washing machine"; you do this several times a week for the rest of your life, right?

if you are logged in, you can go to your watch history and delete the entry for it, that does something to get it out of the algorithm. But yes, YT really likes to latch onto you watching a single thing once.

I almost exclusively pay attention to updates from creators I've subscribed to. I'm more sure that YT will eventually remove subscriptions in an effort to college TikTok than I am that the sun will come up tomorrow.

I wonder if the algorithm has not detected that somehow people watching Jordan Peterson were spending more time watching Youtube, and so it is gently nudging you into that direction.

That's for sure what's happening. On a personal level it's extremely annoying because a machine is trying to manipulate my behavior for its own benefit.

It is what it is. That same recommendation engine does wonders for music.

For controversial stuff etc, it's better to watch it in incognito. And really any topic that you're not actually interested in. I watched a few minecraft videos to figure out a redstone thing I was working on, and my recommendations were flooded with garbage minecraft videos.

I think it is likely an attempt to beat the echo chamber. If your interests are niche, the only ways to avoid showing content that is, well, cliched is to latch on to the one offs and show a small percentage of those, or show truly random content. The former likely gets much better results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com