How did Netflix know I was gay before I did? | Hacker News Reader

How did Netflix know I was gay before I did?

bbc.co.uk

21 pointsmellosouls20 comments

Not sure about Netflix, as I do not have a sub, but the US entertainment industry through all the online sites is suggesting gay content in abundance to everyone, also the straight people, so the writer seems assuming too much divination on the part of the Netflix algo here.

Not sure about the causality here.

In the early days of YOShInOn I had an epic fight with it over two kinds of football. I consistently upvoted articles about the NFL and was pissed that it kept showing me articles about the other kind of football, particularly the premier league.

I started thinking through the ontology of sports for feature engineering (there is the article before the game, the article after the game, articles about players being traded, sports lowlights, etc.)

Before I knew I started seeing articles about soccer games that went 7-0, other games that were 0-1 with an own goal, and before long I was hanging on the results of every Arsenal and Manchester United Game. Either YOShInOn was right and I was wrong or YOShInOn changed my mind, or both.

I was talk with my son the other day about why YOShInOn wasn't showing me any articles about baseball: it is ingesting too many articles from MDPI journals that are crowding everything else out? No, he said, nobody cares about baseball and YOShInOn knows that.

is yoshinon an acronym or am i missing something?

Somebody else’s neologism + 8 bits of entropy to brand it. It is my RSS reader and intelligent agent.

To be honest, I'm being bombarded by LGBT content from all sides, and I have nothing to do with being gay. Lots of new movies, lots of new games, lots of new books. So it's not a surprise that people who are undecided, in the middle, or generally unaware of it, are being convinced. I don't think this has anything to do with Netflix gathering telemetry/building a profile for the user. They do it for everyone.

LGBTQ is a marketing category. Netflix wants to know which marketing categories you belong to. So it conducts experiments, feeding you types of content and seeing what you react to. Having determined the correct marketing category, it feeds you more content from that category.

As a customer of ten years, there are still marketing categories it miserably fails at recognising I am not a part of. Cartoons has been my biggest and longest battle. I could so easily volunteer that information: I do not want to watch anything animated. I wish I could.

The current ratings system is missing two verdicts:

1. Meh: I've seen it (rating is the only way to tell it that if you didn't watch it on Netflix) but thought it was neither remarkably good nor bad;

2. Not interested: I've not seen it, and know that I don't want to.

Whole market categories seem to be the most complex things to remove. I don't ever watch live blockbuster movies and there's absolutely no way to have that understood in the recommendations.

I think it comes down to the variety of people looking at those, there will always be a huge segment that 99% matches your profile and also watches them.

> I could volunteer that information

Users are giving too many false information when asked, I think this becomes a losing strategy if your goal is to maximize watch time. The LGBQT angle in the article is a prime example of that.

It is missing also "for christ sake show me something new" thing. Instead, it is attempting to out me in a box and never venture outside of it.

I agree with this. I will also add, being gay myself;

1. The television you dedicate time to watch will often (if given long enough) reflect the general values and interests you hold. It's not hard to imagine Netflix doing this with even more subtle details or personal traits.

2. Their example is extremely vague and generic:

> Spotify suggested a playlist it described as "sapphic" - a word to describe women who love women.

> After a couple of months on TikTok, I started seeing videos on my feed from bisexual creators.

> A few months later, I came to the separate realisation that I myself was bisexual.

It's an interesting story, but... not difficult to imagine? There is a sizable percentage of modern media that features queer characters or aspects. It makes sense that over the course of a few months, you could encounter that media and eventually come to a realization about your own sexuality and experiences.

It's kinda a nothingburger story. "Dear Penthouse, I never thought it would happen to me..."

> Having determined the correct marketing category, it feeds you more content from that category.

Maybe this is the aim. But in practice they recommend Netflix content which has nothing in common with your preferences.

I can't help but feel there is a selection bias here. We could pretend that Netflix's recommendation algorithm is totally random with some reinforcement factor (e.g. positive reactions to LGBTQ content leads to more of the same) and it would lead to this outcome for some people. With a large viewership even very dumb algorithms would successfully 'predict' someone is LGBTQ for someone.

Since we are taking sample sizes of one, I'm gay and it is extremely rare I get recommended LGBTQ content on Netflix.

A different anecdote: Netflix (probably) thinks I'm gay, but I'm not. It recommends categories with "LGBT" in the name, for example.

I watch a fair bit of queer content, because I'm tired of seeing the same old storylines. Queer creators often see in novel ways, and not just when it comes to sex or relationships.

I could hazard a guess that once they've thrown off one set of societally-imposed patterns of thought, maybe they're more open to others. Certainly gay people have been over-represented among actors and artists for a long time, even when they had to pretend to be straight in public.

I wouldn't put a lot of weight on that guess, but it's certainly true that I enjoy more queer-coded content than one might expect for a straight man. And maybe that's also happening for the author: it may be less about her bisexuality as about her generalized interests.

Facebook and Instagram are also really good at sussing out my interests. For example, I am a pluviophile (someone who loves rain). I don't just like rain - I absolutely love it (I would probably thrive in Seattle, Washington).

I have never sought out rain or searched for nature images or anything of the sort. But one day, it recommended that to me out of the blue. Now I get recommendations pretty regularly of all of the things that I like.

Not sure how much you would like Seattle. It rarely rains a proper amount of water, it's more an annoying drizzle most of the time.

What place has a good amount of rain without it being life-threatening?

Rainy season SEA/EA.

South-east Asia? I'm not sure moving there is an option ;)

Same for me as well. I either listen to rain sound videos on Youtube or use my own sound generator.

I would say it is probably YT that understands way more minutiae details about me than I do myself.

With a VOD like Netflix it’s always going to be a lot less granular. It’s high production value content, so you will see things that are being pushed across the entire platform regardless of individual preferences.

What I miss are the sort of larger forums or ways for the UI to expose creators. This is true for all VODs - no director, no year, no critic scores. Only maybe which actors and one-sentence descriptions, very broad categories etc.

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