Hacker News Reader

Comment by gathersnow | Hacker News Reader

Netflix became so user-hostile and it is truly baffling to me. They act as if they are paid by amount of time you spend watching movies and have all of these dark patterns shoving the user all over the place and disorienting them. I remember when they had tools to see what your friends were watching and to discover hidden gems which was always such a fun experience.

Does Netflix have such content nowadays? I really wouldn't know. They optimize the experience for binge-watching and nothing else. I wish so badly that they'd do a letterboxd thing and allow for curation of their catalog but it all goes back to the ephemeral nature of their content and how they have to hide that fact.

They care so little about that approach now it's no wonder they never used this algorithm.

View on HN

One thing I dislike about Netflix is that there's a category for 'top ten in [your region]'. This doesn't really show the aggregate top ten pieces of media for a region, it is actually personalised to you. If I compare across accounts, the top ten are are different, sometimes overlapping but usually in a different order. This dark pattern exploits the 'join the crowd' bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum).

Also, constant price increases and laying off large numbers of employees...

True, that is anti-personalization

I agree. Netflix died the day they switched to thumbs-up and thumbs-down versus 5-star rating content. My recommended list was so solid for so long and all of that went down the drain.

Can you even vote now? I think they do a lot of it by inferring from what you watch.

Their death was presaged when their executives decided to "become HBO before HBO can become us" and when they spun out Roku for lack of appetite to be a proper tech company. Reed Hastings wasn't capable of running that business and so their vision shrank to match.

Netflix sold a lot of people a lie, their customers, their employees and their investors. We jumped on board thinking Netflix was serious about the living room experience in a wholistic way.

how was netflix ever going to continue being a "tech company." Video streaming is a commodity at this point, they are not longer doing anything technologically revolutionary.

Once every other media company could do what they were doing they realized they have to become an entertainment company. It was shrewd foresight on their end, otherwise they wouldnt exist anymore. Unless they tried to license out their infrastructure or something

You can say streaming is commodity and uninteresting now but back in 2012 when these decisions were being made, they had the ability to pivot into making proprietary, higher-end TVs and set top boxes that improved streaming significantly to where it is today or further. I understand they didn't want to become TiVO, but this is where Netflix had the ability to change things by publishing exclusive content directly to their customers without relying on cable/satellite providers. I can't say it would be easy -- and that is what I mean about Reed Hastings not being capable.

Strategically, Netflix is beholden to its manufacturing partners and never had a wholistic story for the living room the way they claimed to want because they never had control. They never had control because they didn't come up with a compelling prototype. This would necessarily include gaming and other content.

Netflix's technology is incredibly advanced. The term 'revolutionary' is somewhat subjective, but what isn't subjective are achievements like streaming video at 400GB/s with a single server[1], no, make that 800GB/s[2], and writing a FUSE-based filesystem that runs at gigabit speeds despite storing data on AWS[3].

[1]: https://papers.freebsd.org/2021/eurobsdcon/gallatin-netflix-...

[2]: https://papers.freebsd.org/2022/eurobsdcon/gallatin-the_othe...

[3]: https://netflixtechblog.com/mezzfs-mounting-object-storage-i...

none of that is relevant when somehow magically every major media company spun up a netflix competitor in a couple years

> wholistic

Holistic. It derives from the Greek Holos meaning whole, while ‘whole’ ironically derives from Germanic for ‘hail’ i.e. ‘well’ or healthy.

Wiktionary seems to suggest that wholistic is an acceptable alternative, and, futhermore, that both are neolgisms

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wholistic#English

IIRC, they pushed pretty hard on the idea that the thumbs up/down system was objectively better.

I was never convinced. Partly because I wanted to see the actual number of stars when choosing a video, and partly because their motives at the time were highly suspect (one of their own produced videos was getting bombed with 1-star reviews, IIRC).

The proof was(n't) in the pudding. Movielens has given me superb recommendations and led me to watch content that became some of my all-time favorite content. Netflix has never offered a useful recommendation at all.

It would actually be slightly useful, if you could actually see the thumbs up/down ratio, but they pulled a Youtube.

A simple "don't show me this thing ever again" button would make Netflix 100x more usable, but it would quickly demonstrate just how small their catalog is.

> They act as if they are paid by amount of time you spend watching movies

At least up until 2015 (last published paper that I'm aware of) this actually is how they optimised their recommender:

"However, we have observed that improving engagement—the time that our members spend viewing Netflix content—is strongly correlated with improving retention. Accordingly, we design randomized, controlled experiments, often called A/B tests, to compare the medium-term engagement with Netflix along with member cancellation rates across algorithm variants"

Gomez-Uribe, C. A., & Hunt, N. (2015). The netflix recommender system: Algorithms, business value, and innovation. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS), 6(4), 1-19.

It's probably a reasonable approach and has clearly been successful

What's wild is that it's not like they're matching industry norms. Most of the other big streaming platforms are far less chaotic and confusing. Even the shitty new "Max" interface is better than Netflix. It's the only one I will not use to just browse, I only open it with a purpose because the UI is so unpleasant.

> Even the shitty new "Max" interface is better than Netflix

I have to disagree. I don't love the Netflix interface, but Max is truly terrible. It is egregiously slow and it's difficult to locate the things that I want. And when the thing I want happens to be highlighted at the top of the homepage, it's always a dumb "just play more of this" instead of a link to the show info page, which almost always plays the end credits of the last episode I watched, and it takes 60 seconds to load that, then another 60 seconds to start the correct episode when I find it. If I get a take-out burrito and sit down to watch TV and eat it, I always think to myself "I wonder if I can actually find and start a show before I finish my entire burrito," which is an exaggeration, but not by a lot. All the accumulated UI "wait for something to load" moments add up to minutes. Netflix, on the other hand, is almost always more or less instantaneous (2-3 seconds maximum per UI navigation, 5ish seconds to start streaming).

"Its too crowded, no one goes there anymore"

Could still be true, though if nobody you care about goes there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com