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Have been a Netflix customer since about 2000. I used to blog about them all the time in 2000-2001, did full writeups on their UI design, even the red envelope design. Had a dialog going to Neil Hunt their CTO/product guy. Even visited Netflix and had lunch with him once over the blog posts. I'd say they made about half the changes I urged them to make. Which was fun to see, that it made a difference.

As for their recommendation system: I always found it to be abysmal and worthless. It recommended films in genres I had never watched, had no interest in, like children's films, sports films, other niche genres. So as an experiment I started rating films Netflix would recommend in those genres to me, as having 1 out of 5 stars, the lowest rating you could give. [At some point they added "Not Interested" and I'd give it that rating. Ha! It was about as effective as pressing a pedestrian walk button at an intersection.]

I did this for months. Any spare time I had while waiting for something else to get done, I'd pop into Netflix and rate rate rate. Got really good at it. Kept doing it for more months. Eventually I rated over 20,000 movies, all in genres I had absolutely zero interest in ever watching anything in.

It made no difference. Netflix still recommended films in all kinds of genres, regardless of even if I had rated EVERY TITLE IN THAT GENRE as "Not Interested" or 1 out of 5 stars.

I once got on an elevator with Reed Hastings at a conference. As we rode the elevator I told him the story. He was ROTFL by the end. Laughter but as in a "too bad for you, I could care less" kind of way. He said no way they would not fix anything. He absolutely did not care whatsoever that Netflix recommended movies at the genre level when I absolutely hated the genre.

It was quite revealing, his "I couldn't care less" reaction.

Probably the same thing going on inside Google with user feedback on search results and ads.

At some point, after years of clicking the almost invisible [x] on the top of "hot singles near you" and ads for mail order brides from various countries and patiently telling Google it wasn't relevant, I got fed up, tilted, clicked the ad, found the contact address and explained in sufficient detail how Google scammed them by including me and others who absolutely weren't interested at all.

Sometime after that it suddenly stopped and now I only get irrelevant ads, not disgusting, embarrassing or insulting ones.

I can't say if what I did made the difference or not, but I can say that years of telling Google did change nothing. (Or to be fair: when I said I didn't want Russian mail order brides they would admittedly show me some other nationality next time).

Also today I have almost completely[1] given up Google and I don't feel I break an unspoken contract by blocking ads anymore.

[1]: Visited Google the other day and noticed they had brought back a working context menu with a working "view cached result" option, but it would take 200 more such fixes, many of them much bigger, to restore Google.

Pedestrian buttons change the lights. This is easily testable. What an odd analogy.

In many places in the US, pedestrian buttons don't change the lights, certainly not within 1-3 min, if it's a busy or major intersection with lots of vehicle traffic. Also, the controller behavior can change during the day/night depending on traffic volume, or maybe time of day. One time I counted it took the lights 7 minutes to change at a three-lane intersection late at night, even though there were no cars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330251

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17900576#17906527

BBC: "Does pressing the pedestrian crossing button actually do anything?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6326588

It depends on the light. Some lights don't change unless they sense a car or pedestrian going the other way. Some run on a timer so they change automatically. On others, the light will change but the walk light will not come on if you didn't push the button (these ones drive me insane). Then there's the ones that only activate a chirp for the blind people. Then, finally, there are the fabled buttons of lore that do absolutely nothing. Oh, and some are just broken.

I still haven't come across the placebo buttons though so I'm willing to doubt their existence.

> I still haven't come across the placebo buttons though so I'm willing to doubt their existence.

IIRC the "placebo" buttons, where they exist, were not installed as such, but simply deactivated after the traffic light control system changed, since uninstalling them would be more expensive.

In my home town in Germany (and probably other cities as well, only I've realised I've never really paid attention to that subject while visiting other cities), the little tactile arrow marking the crosswalk direction plus a tactile buzzer for blind people is mounted together with those buttons, so even when a certain direction and its parallel crosswalk always get green by default (and therefore there's no need ever to push a button), a button housing still gets installed for the buzzer and arrow.

The only difference is that those kind of non-buttons are painted a different colour, plus with the older style of buttons that you physically have to push in order to operate a switch, on those non-buttons the push-plate is fixed in place and cannot actually be pushed. (Some people occasionally still try to.) With the newer style of button that operates via some sort of electronic touch sensor and therefore has no moveable parts to begin with, the only distinction might be the colour? (Not sure, because the intersection I regularly pass by on the way to work still uses the old-style buttons…)

> I still haven't come across the placebo buttons though so I'm willing to doubt their existence.

How do you know you haven't?

Oh phooey. It's a longstanding joke that the "Don't Walk" lights don't change to "Walk" any sooner if you press the button. Just like the "close door" button in elevators doesn't make the doors close any sooner than they normally would.

> Just like the "close door" button in elevators doesn't make the doors close any sooner than they normally would.

I recently read an article (maybe even here on HN) that explained this fully.

Basically, in the US, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the doors must stay open for a minimum time (which depends on some variables). The door close button can only have an effect after that time is elapsed, but in many (if not most bases) the time after which the door automatically closes is set to that same minimum anyway.

My understanding has always been that, at least in the US, it is usually the case that the "close door" button doesn't do anything unless there is a firefighter key inserted and the elevator in fire mode. That's really there to allow a firefighter to manually control the door open/close functions during fire-ground operations where you really don't want the elevator doing things on its own.

There are, of course, always exceptions. Some reading I did earlier suggests that there is some variation based on elevator brand, and possibly even then whims of the building owner (in terms of what instructions they gave the elevator installer about how they wanted things to work). Curiously though the "door open" button does usually pre-empt the (automatic) closing of the door, even in "normal" mode. At least IME.

> Just like the "close door" button in elevators doesn't make the doors close any sooner than they normally would.

I had never thought about this. In Thailand they definitely do close the door sooner, or straight away, and everybody does it all the time.

In europe they usually close sooner, as well. It is allmost as if the world is not made by one standard.

Not necessarily that testable.

For example I used to live near a major junction, for about 18-20 hours per day the buttons have no effect because there is traffic, the junction's computer is adding walk cycles where they fit in its schedule anyway so there's no difference. Testing would show no effect.

Late at night you can see the buttons work, there is no traffic so the junction is left with the fast through lanes green indefinitely, but pressing a pedestrian button causes your walk cycle to run immediately.

On the other hand I work on a University campus, the University would prefer to shut the road through the middle of it, local government said "No" so the pedestrian crossings are set to run very frequently with no penalty delay, meaning most of the day if you push the button you get a walk cycle immediately. During term time it's probably quicker to drive around the campus to the far side than use that road - because somebody will push the button, probably more than once, there are like four crossings with this treatment. So on campus it's very obvious that the buttons work.

Not in NYC

Ha I had the same experience renting Xbox games from Blockbuster. Got to the point where I'd rent a stack of games, rip them to my modded Xbox in my car then return them to the drop bin to perplexed faces of employees inside who had just rung me up an hour earlier.

Don't think I played any of the games, for me the game was just amassing a library.

For what its worth I'm in game development now ha so maybe I've atoned for some of these 'crimes'

Lol. My friend and I did the same with a local DVD vending machine. If you brought the disc back within a few hours the price was ridiculously low, so we had the laptop in the car with a cigarette adapter and ripped 700+ ISOs.

The irony is this was around 2002 to demo a video on demand over the Internet system to some execs at Microsoft. It was a really, really nice UI and nothing like it would be replicated for years, really until Netflix launched their own product.

The idea was summarily rejected as "people like having things on their shelves." A weird response because the same folks were paying me to destroy the CD market.

That's awesome, I've never heard of anyone ripping from their car.

It's interesting that you were collecting for the sake of collection and not gaming. It reminds me of people that go full tilt building PC gaming rigs, but never actually play anything.

I remember getting together with a high school friend when we were in our 20s and he talked about the massive amounts of pirated software he’d downloaded (over dial-up internet, no less), none of which he’d ever used.

On the gaming rig thing, I had a co-worker once who spent a lot of time buying and modding mid-level electric guitars. He was not really a player, he just liked doing the electronics work and being able to accept that was one of my milestones towards maturity.

I think this is a fascinating effect seen in almost any hobby. I wonder if there is a word for these sort of sub-hobbies or pre-hobbies. I think you can find it's parallels in cars, aquariums, 3d printers, wood working, etc.

> wonder if there is a word for these sort of sub-hobbies or pre-hobbies

In photography circles, we would call this GAS - Gear Acquisition Syndrome - when people buy a lot of gear and gadgets but hardly use them.

Electronics people use this term for collecting Test Equipment as well. Amusingly, on the EEVBlog forums, one of the largest and most active threads of all is the "Test Equipment Anonymous - Group Therapy Thread" which nominally exists to support those suffering from severe GAS.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonym...

Cyclists too, are notorious for frequently pointing out that the correct number of bicycles to own is always n+1, where n is equal to however many you currently own. :-)

Thankfully, n+1 is much cheaper as a runner than as a cyclist.

n + 1 feet?

This is called Guitar Acquisition Syndrome in guitar culture. :-)

In musician circles too.

Quite a lot of musical instruments are beautiful objects that you could display. While you could display electronic test equipment, even geeks usually don't.

There are a lot of rack shots on the Unifi subreddit.

I once owned a dozen synths but only ever played a specific one. At least I got rid of all but that one.

"I think you can find it's parallels in cars, aquariums, 3d printers, wood working, etc."

Subtly closes the garage door

nuh uh

Some people get addicted to the tools of a hobby and not the hobby itself. Sometimes thinking they need the best of the best in order to produce the best.

Completionist

The older we get, the more we and my friends tend to this nowadays. Downloading everything, legal or illegal, just "in case of" as we did our whole life, but don't have any time nor will to play anything anymore.

Size of Rom collection: 10k+

Of which have meticulously hand-picked artwork: 10k+

Of which actually played: 10

You're touching on something I've always been fascinated about...the game being the collection and building of the library itself. I suppose it's not that different from any other hobby centered around collectibles and yet with media, especially digital media, it always felt a bit different. I'm not sure why.

I think Leo Laporte once said something along the lines of some people are tool people and other people are doing people. Some like to obsess over the tools, some just want to get work done.

I saw another similar quote about amassing knowledge is pointless if you don't actually do something with it.

I think life is too complex to know if we use amassed knowledge enough. Or I tell myself that to feel better.

I’m always amused at how home cooks all have the meme $300 knives, then you see a pro chef explain their gear and it’s a $30 knife with plastic handle.

Only Hacker News could make piracy sound so eloquent and - dare I say - romantic.

Slashdot did a pretty good job of romanticizing this type of thing for a couple of decades before HN. Miss the old /.

It was perfectly fine when it was cassettes off the radio, or a friend's record or cassette. RIAA changed the rules when it changed to, "on a computer."

https://www.soundandvision.com/content/flashback-1984-suprem...

It wasn’t cassette vs computer, it was the scale of the sharing. With tapes, sharing wasn’t really practical beyond a handful of friends. With Napster, you could share with the whole world.

> With tapes, sharing wasn’t really practical beyond a handful of friends.

LOL. There were entire organizations doing copies.

I think the general rule back then was you couldn't make money off it. People would charge for the cost of the cassette or something like that. There were tons of bootlegs out there too.

https://youtu.be/81c1L8SrXcU

DVDs pre-date my youth. I used to do it with records. There was a record store where you could “buy” a used record for like $5 and they’d take it back within a week or so and refund $4. They also sold a lot of cassette tapes.

For music it makes sense to me, I’ll listen to records I like over and over. For movies, not so much. Once I watch a movie I have very little desire to watch it again.

DVDs predating your youth implies DVDs were phased out before you were young. Given that you were copying records to cassette tapes, it sounds like the opposite is true?

Yeah said it backwards. When I was a teen, there were no DVDs. Most people didn't even have a VCR, though they were starting to get popular.

Per the halting problem, it would be impossible to say if this was merely time shifting and thus fair use. (Not counting the DeCSS step, since access control circumvention is explicitly prohibited by the DMCA, although I’m not sure of the current status of that law.)

Does the time shifting doctrine really apply to rentals?

I’m very out of date on this stuff, but I thought the more relevant thing was that you’re not supposed to keep permanent copies of stuff around. I believe the original court cases were about recording live TV to watch later, presumably under the assumption that the video tapes would be recorded over quickly (as was common in those days). In that case I don’t see why doing the same with a rental wouldn’t also be fair use.

The standard I used to hear for copying library materials was "lower quality reproductions for personal use".

Johnny Depp did a good job

> the ink would degrade, usually towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so.

CDs are usually read from the middle, going outward. Unlike records. If I had to guess it was probably the outside that started flaking

Yea, I don't remember if it was the outside or the inside honestly. What I do remember is that it was the side where the end of the movie was!

Had the exact same experience, ripping and dropping the dvds back at the post office a few hours later,even getting throttled towards the end of the month.

Used to use this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Shrink

Oh man! DVD Shrink. I haven’t once enough about that in the past…15 years, at least.

Man, life was complicated if you didn’t have friends with access to the markets in Aberdeen in Hong Kong. I’d just write up a list of stuff I fancied and the Hong Kong kids would show up at school at the start of term with suitcases laden with fresh VCD warez, games, you name it - everything you’d asked for, and then some, and usually stuff that hadn’t hit the cinemas yet.

This was late 90’s, so broadband was still very nascent - downloading a film was still an expensive and time consuming mission.

>Netflix started delaying how quickly DVDs would be sent out

you got throttled!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-by-mail#Throttling

I did the exact same thing in high school. I would rush home from school, and on a good day I could get all 3 DVDs ripped and back to the post office before 5pm for same-day turnaround. I even remember taking note of how the shipping delays differed based on the day of the week. I think if you got the phase right you could get two entire turnarounds per week.

For the dual layer discs I would need to keep enough hard drive space for the raw image and then do the encode and burn after the post office run. During summer break I would try to do a month or two of the 8 DVD plan, but that was too stressful.

I also remember trying a few small online businesses that did the same thing but with more interesting curated DVD collections. I don’t think any of them lasted long. Heck, some of those could have been a single person mailing out and restocking discs.

> I even remember taking note of how the shipping delays differed based on the day of the week. I think if you got the phase right you could get two entire turnarounds per week.

I need to go in and fix broken links, but I tracked 5+ years of Netflix mailings (dropped DVDs into my sixth year).

What I rented, when I got it and shipped it back, when they received and mailed another, and what mailer I got (local address or further away).

One of the posts:

https://words.strivinglife.com/post/netflix-shipping-for-mad...

It was definitely interesting to have a record of how turnaround changed over the course of the month).

I wonder if Netflix DVDs going away will create a market for some of those small businesses again.

I wonder if we’ll see a group of Netflix employees take their hoarded cash comp and buy out the business from Netflix to make a go of it.

Probably more likely that Redbox will soak up most of the business and we’ll lose out on the interesting long-tail part of this.

It’s conceivable given the laughable behavior of streaming services lately (e.g. HBO removing recent flagship original content from its streaming service is just ludicrous).

Of course if it became common again it would probably be met with a new era of IP lawsuits, even though it seemed to have been settled previously. Oh, and it would likely only be doable legally with content that had a legitimate physical media release, which is becoming somewhat rare.

I did something similar -- though I didn't burn as many discs (my friends did, however) because I've always been a collector. But like you, Netflix exposed me to so many movies and TV shows I would have otherwise not been able to see (or afford, and I used to spend a couple hundred a month on physical media!)

The recommendation system was so good -- it's a shame they had to get rid of it because of the lawsuit. I don't think it is just hindsight but I really do think it was better than the recommendation system they have now for the streaming product.

could you explain a little more about the lawsuit ? I don't understand why they'd have to stop using their recommendation system.

They had a $1 million prize for improving the recommendation algorithm. The data was anonymized and sanitized but it was apparently potentially possible to identify people from some of the data. A closeted-lesbian mother filed a class action lawsuit against Netflix (even though I do not think she was actually outed by the dataset, meaning I do not think anyone ever connected her rental history to her) on the basis that offering the dataset to researchers at all was a violation of US privacy laws over video rental records. The argument was that someone looking at her video rental records could deduce that she was actually gay.

It might be surprising given how lax the US seems to be about privacy in general, but video rental records are protected differently from some other data because of the failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (failed in part because reporters were able to get his video rental records whichI think show he had rented porn, but I don't remember all the details). As a result of the Bork situation, federal law was passed to protect video rental records. Facebook had to settle a thing with the FTC over something similar with its Beacon program.

Netflix wound up canceling the follow-up contest because of the class-action lawsuit. IIRC, a few years later they wound up settling a different lawsuit also related to the FTC stuff, but that wasn't tied to the algorithm or potentially "outing" anyone.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/2009/12/netflix-privacy-lawsuit/

Bork's VHS rentals were actually pretty boring and didn't include pornography. The indignation / backlash to the list's publication made it clear that he and his supporters were hypocrites; Bork had repeatedly argued and ruled in a way to curtail privacy rights.

I recommend reading The Bork Tapes Saga when you get a chance: https://web.archive.org/web/20071009144531/http://www.theame...

The Video Privacy Protection Act should be expanded to include all PII.

That lawsuit killed the contest but the recommendation system went on for a while longer until they realized their streaming service didn't have enough content for the original recommendation algorithm to work and they wanted to promote their own stuff.

Afaict the current algorithm is something like this:

if is_netflix_show() { return 0.95 + rand(0.00, 0.05) } else { hide_rating() }

I thought it was Clarence Thomas that was attacked over his porn rentals.

Clarence Thomas has a way, way more sordid "fetish" history than just renting porn. No normal person would care if it was just him renting an erotic video.

Believe it's referring to this: https://www.wired.com/2010/03/netflix-cancels-contest/

Interesting. But why couldn't they continue using the existing recommendation system which was excellent.

I guess they could have, but data gets stale after a while.

I have to think that the real problem is that the things Netflix wanted to start to optimize for different things rather than recommendation accuracy. They have new metrics like watch time, time engaged with the app (binge watching), watch to completion, rewatch time, watch first weekend, etc. I don't think they care about offering the best recommendations anymore, just about doing whatever they can to keep you tuned into the app as long as possible. Those two things aren't necessarily at odds, but they aren't the same thing either.

Like, today Netflix is going to want to optimize for getting the most eyeballs on its originals versus content they've merely licensed from the catalog. When it was offering DVD rentals, it didn't have original content so having good recommendations was the sort of thing that would keep the service "sticky" and prevent subscriber churn.

> having good recommendations was the sort of thing that would keep the service "sticky" and prevent subscriber churn

It's the opposite. The primary cause of churn is that there is nothing a subscriber wants to watch. You might assume that a recommendation helps a user maximise the amount of the library they will watch but it actually helps the user conclude there is nothing they want to watch and leave.

Netflix wants their library to be more like a one-armed bandit. Users have to gamble on whether they will like something and they will never know they have run out. They want the user to keep hanging on, to keep scrolling, assuming something great is just around the corner, never getting to "I'm done with this".

I noticed this effect with the DVD subscription. If you added 3 discs to your queue, they would send the first two but not the third, waiting for you to add some less desirable titles to your queue, which they would send before they sent your high priority title. If your needs get satisfied, your subscription ends. It's a fundamentally user hostile business.

>prevent subscriber churn

Netflix' key metrics are basically around retaining subscribers and attracting new ones. Except to the degree it supports those goals (and there's obviously a correlation), they don't actually care how much you watch, how much you like the content, how easily you find content you like, etc. Correlated, yes. But not one and the same.

If you open Google and type in “netflix recommendation system lawsuit” you’ll find many results on the first page explaining it. You can use this method for a lot of topics that people here on hacker news mentions.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Your low effort comment is a hundred times worse than the one you responded to. Trying to shame someone in that sarcastic juvenile tone for asking a question in good faith is itself shameful.

People naturally respond to such things and use them to segue into another topic as part of conversation, and sometimes it is nice to have someone tell their recollection of a story instead of getting the wikipedia version.

I encourage you to stop doing this.

yeah, I know. But as another commenter said[0], the lawsuit still does not explain why netflix changed its recommendation system.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35620957

I had a similar experience copying DVDs from the Redbox (automated rental kiosk). I felt so accomplished getting all the right software and amassing a huge collection of pirated disks (stacks of DVD organizers in my room).

Streaming went mainstream a little later, and I don't even remember what I did with all the disks, but I probably either gave them away or donated them...

I had a few binders full of movies on CDs that I had... obtained. When I ripped the movies onto them, the quality seemed acceptable. Damn good actually when you played them back on a CRT TV. Now when I try to watch them, I see how terrible they look. At that time, we didn't have DVD burners (or they were super expensive), so I would have to transcode the DVD into that weird DivX codec so it would fit on the 700MB CD.

I was going to go through the CDs one day and copy the movies back onto a hard drive, but the quality was so bad of the rips. I had also found that despite being stored in a binder in a closet, many of the discs had also deteriorated to where I couldn't copy the file back off of it.

When blockbuster was going out of business they offered a free trial of their similar service for video games. I had soft modded my wii to rip play games from a hard drive, so I got about 20 or so games ripped to my hard drive this way. Good times. Till my roommate in college formatted my hard drive and I lost all my games (not just the blockbuster ones). This guy spat on me, and I forgave him for that, but never for this. God damn it Paul :(

Yeah, I didn't rip a bunch of Netflix stuff because I'm a movie collector, but I used to abuse Blockbuster's video game service and rip Xbox and Wii games from on the reg. I still have my modded Xbox from 2002 with a bunch of old games on it (my hacked Wii still works too).

My cousin did this.

By gaming the promotions - get a free month, pay for a month, cancel, get promo for free month, repeat - i think he got maybe an 8 month subscription and only paid for 3.

And he’d do the same - as soon as a movie arrived, make a copy, drop it back in the mail that night. I think the max was maybe 24 movies a month.

He amassed a collection of over 200 movies that way. Then he cancelled and had movies to watch for the next 2-3 years.

This was me! I loved the thrill of ripping dvds to .iso and figuring out how to burn it to the 100 pack of smelly dvd-r spindles I picked up at Black Friday every year haha I probably never watched the dvds I burned again but this seriously felt like the greatest victory ever to not have to deal with/rewind clunky VCR tapes in my young adhd dopamine craving brain!

A lot of people don't remember Blockbuster reacted pretty fast to Netflix. They let you rent a couple movies out at once for something like $20/month. The killer part was when they added playstation games for a little more.

I was probably a bit bias because I was in college and taking a date to blockbuster was the norm.

Yes, going to Blockbuster with friends was a fun start to movie night. It was more of an event. But "Blockbuster and chill" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Blockbuster did amazingly at competing with Netflix. Their downfall was bad leadership and Carl Icahn

I think the UK version of Netflix DVD must have been LoveFilm, which Amazon promptly acquired, or, killed

We must have gone through about 20 free trials for Lovefilm during uni, using subtly different addresses with typos so they'd still be delivered but not show up as dupe accounts. Good times.

Netflix also (I think briefly) offered DVD rental in UK, competing with LoveFilm. LoveFilm did continue for a while after the Amazon acquisition, both as DVD rental and with streaming added (LoveFilm Instant, if I remember correctly), which eventually got rebranded into Amazon Instant Video

I lived next to a post office distribution hub. Would drop dvds at Post office in morning. Get home and new dvd would be in my mailbox. Watch all of em. Return them in morning. Rinse and repeat until they started delaying how it took for the DVDs to arrive.

What’s the deal with piracy and hoarding? I also knew big torrent users who were constantly filling disk after disk. How many of those copies did you actually watch? Maybe it was all for the thrill of the crime!

> ink would degrade, ususally towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so.

DVDs are read/written from the center out.

Ah, yes, the good old days where stormtroopers from the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) could burst through the door at any time.

> my Plex server with 10x as many movies

How did you fill your Plex server? Where did you acquire the movies?

"COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IS YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT VALUE"