Netflix Kills Discussions | Hacker News Reader

Netflix Kills Discussions

matt.xerq.net

40 pointsXERQ50 comments

Yeah, and publishing a book all at once kills discussions too.

But seriously, the solution here is the same: form a club. Force yourselves to read/watch at the same pace, and you'll actually have a more social experience than if you all read/ separately and only occasionally managed to start up an ad-hoc conversation.

But that would require self-control and discipline. Who has time for those things?

Wow. A blog post about a television show and bemoaning the fact that you can't discuss it weekly anymore ends with the overly-dramatic line: "How do you want to spend your life?" Indeed, do you really want to spend your life crying over the lack of ability to discuss a TV show with your co-workers?

This complaint was raised by a lot of television critic-bloggers during the first run of Netflix releases (House of Cards and Arrested Development in particular). I think it's ludicrous. If you and all your friends really think that weekly spoiler-free discussions are the most important thing, then just agree to watch 1 episode a week. We already have to deal with this sort of thing with weekly releases, if someone misses the recent episode (or someone else is catching up with earlier seasons on VOD).

I thought this article was satirical.

I sometimes have to wonder what someone from a poor, war-ravaged country must think when they stumble across things like this.

I'm aware this happened with Season Four of Arrested Development. There was a massive hype right up until it was to premiere on Netflix and then … nothing. People watched it, then moved on.

I personally love to be able to binge a new television show, like House of Cards but at the same time I also love the discussions around it (Breaking Bad had some very cool discussions in between episodes). So I'm not quite sure what format is better in the long run.

Perhaps the future will be more like how Sherlock Series 3 was aired (only a few days between episodes, not an entire week). Whatever the case, television is only getting better from this point onwards.

> I'm aware this happened with Season Four of Arrested Development. There was a massive hype right up until it was to premiere on Netflix and then … nothing. People watched it, then moved on.

This pretty much happened with HoC season 1 as well. Massive hype for this Fincher/Spacey series and then... nothing until a month or two ago for season 2. On the contrary, shows like "Orange is the new black" didn't have much hype initially and slowly grew as more and more people binged through it and became pretty popular.

Andy Greenwald said it best: "I’ve argued before that encouraging this sort of bingeing does no favors to the art or the audience. It takes a pleasantly coursed dinner party and transforms it into a hot dog eating contest." http://grantland.com/features/breaking-bad-black-mirror-year...

This is a far more interesting point than the article's!

I wonder if we'll see a shift in the writing and flow of TV shows now that marketers can't get millions of people worked up on social media over cliffhangers anymore.

This illustrates why the best model for content distribution is a hybrid between having the full back-catalog available for binge consumption while still releasing new episodes on a consistent schedule.

Exclusively going to either end of the spectrum has clear disadvantages:

– On the binge end, if everything is released at once, almost no one on the planet will be on the exact same viewing schedule. Some people will watch the entire season at once, some will watch an episode per night, and so on. It makes it difficult to discuss the show with anyone because you first have to establish how much each of you have watched. Does it make discussion impossible? Absolutely not, but it presents a barrier.

– On the other end of the spectrum, limiting the availability of a show's back catalog will obviously limit a show's audience. Most of the successful shows of the past few years grew their audience over time, which requires access to that back catalog. Netflix, being the most popular service for this kind of thing, is the logical place to license your content if you care about improving your show's future prospects. Again, not being on Netflix does not make it impossible to catch up, but it presents another barrier.

Breaking Bad is the ideal example for this model. It's a great show that built its audience through word-of-mouth; if their back catalog wasn't available, the word-of-mouth recommendation would be DOA because most people would not have broken through the barrier. Similarly, if they had just dumped season 5 onto Netflix, it would have eliminated the week-over-week hype cycle that built over the course of the season and climaxed with a finale that was watched 700% more than the show's pilot.

Also, releasing every episode at once almost entirely eliminates cliffhangers. That's no fun.

Why is a shared entertainment media experience important? It's not as real as your own lived story, and it rarely says anything of import about the world.

> Why is a shared entertainment media experience important?

Just some thoughts:

When I was younger and Lord of the Rings made a comback, most of my friends read the books in a hurry, discussed some big events, played with sticks and that was it. With Harry Potter we had to wait in between each book. We spent hours discussing the books, re-reading them looking for clues.

I can't really watch a series alone, I have to "share" the experience with someone.

Agreed. I find that merely experiencing it (books, movies, video games, any media) is enough to form some bond with people later on down the road. "Did you watch X?" conjures up memories and emotions, enough to start a conversation to add your own thoughts to "X", so why do you have to have, "Remember that time we all watched X?" instead?

We are social creatures who still sit around the campfire and discuss our shared experiences. What we shared has changed and where and what the campfire is has changed, but that is humanity. We connect over the common events in our lives to the point that we have events that whole generations remember, refer to, and sometimes measure time since.

Right, but a TV show isn't an experience, it's a campfire story. If all you do is sit around the campfire and listen to TV producers tell you stories, you aren't having any experiences at all.

"TV show isn't an experience"

I would say that isn't true. Entertainment be it sports, gladiators, bards, plays, movies, or TV are experiences.

I think you misinterpret what I mean by the campfire. The experience happened (in this case viewing of the TV show) before people sat down and either told what happened or discussed what happened. There is a joy in discussing life and entertainment that has been around a long time.

It's a medium for social exchange when you have no other shared topics. Similar to how alcohol is social lubricant.

> it rarely says anything of import about the world

That's a pretty bold statement to make. Do you feel the same way about books? Movies? Stage plays? If you're trying to say that "[art] says nothing of import" I think many would passionately disagree.

If you're only talking about television... I still think you're wrong.

Author kind of tanked their own argument with this one:

> (which was great if you were on the East Coast, but West Coast / Best Coast knew not to check the thread until after watching it

Same answer here -- if you haven't watched it yet, don't look at the threads.

I think the biggest assumption of the article is that Game of Thrones has an equal sized viewing audience to House of Cards. That is simply not the case. While Netflix is in fact growing their numbers at a rather nice rate, it still doesn't compare to the number of individuals that have HBO available to them with their local cable providers.

Also, what is the proportion of XERQ users that are also Netflix subscribers? That could be a telling metric as well.

I could be way off, but I have a funny suspicion that the numbers are rather different.

Netflix recently surpassed HBO in subscribers. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-fi-c...

Regardless, for this conversation, the number of people who could see the shows is not relevant. It's the number of people who did see them. I don't think anyone knows the number for House of Cards aside from Netflix.

With the invention of the telephone and email, the art of writing long well thought out letters has all but vanished.

It sucks, but with progress we sometimes (often?) lose some nice things.

In my opinion, it's worth it, in this case. I love having the freedom to watch a show when I want. I hate it when I have to wait for the next episode, especially if its release is delayed due to some football game (I'm looking at you True Detective).

Oh no, our second least meaningful form of social interaction is getting harder. I'll have to fall back to talking about the weather.

What if discussion were somehow linked to your netflix history?

So you see only filtered comments written by people who had seen the same (or less) episodes than you (at the time the comment is written).

That would be cool.

Certainly it could be an interesting phenomenon, but as written it is not really scientific as it doesn't have a very large sample size and seems to only discuss a single site's usage. While one may be able to extrapolate correct interpretations that is not a guarantee that future extrapolations will be representative or correct. What if there's just a time delay?

Maybe Netflix increases discussions but delays them a year.

An interesting point of view. With that said, my anecdotal experiences indicate that it's possible to discuss media with people even if you're not on the same page, as it were.

Consider Game of Thrones -- I'm perfectly able to discuss Seasons 1 and 2 with my friends who haven't yet seen Season 3, if I'm mindful to avoid spoilers.

Community discussion can be had, it just needs to be conscientious.

Game of Thrones has that mentality built in already though, since half of the watchers already know the story from the books. That may be a unique eco-system. I know the subreddits built around GoT and ASOIAF have intricate spoiler systems built in.

True, and it's a fair point. With that said, that isn't the case with my example -- none of my social circle has read the books.

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That's why you watch it on netflix, the episodes are only 42 minutes long without adverts

If a group of people want to be on the same page so they can discuss it, they can choose to watch it at the same pace. Just because a broadcast network isn't forcing them to do that, it doesn't mean they can't still watch it the "traditional" way. Now they have a choice!

I really hope this doesn't mean that they're going to kill the all-at-once "binge" releases for new shows.

I've been doing this for TV shows since long before Netflix streaming existed - I would wait until a season (or show) ended, and then rent the entire series from Blockbuster, one disk at a time.

I don't always have time to watch shows regularly, and it's great being able to do it at my own pace. Plus, I'm impatient when it comes to cliffhangers[0]

[0] This sort of behavior can be very lucrative for Netflix. Many episodes of Weeds ended with cliffhangers or twists that caused me to watch an episode or two more at a time than I'd originally planned. To a lesser extent, Orange is the New Black (also created by Jenji Kohan) used the same technique as well.

Do you lose anything by simply waiting for the final episode to air and then binge watching the entire season?

The only two downsides to this that I see would be the possibility of being spoiled by others' discussions of the already-aired episodes (ironic) and potentially having to wait an extra few weeks to watch the whole season.

The latter is the obvious downside, and the reason that most people won't wait until the end of the season for shows they're already interested in.

I do have a technical question on this one, are all of the House of Cards episodes done[1] at the same time? They are actually slowing down the releases of new episodes by dumping them all at once, right?

1) I could see it if they do all the editing at the end as a whole, but it seems unlikely

They're all done together. A typical show with a standard release cycle is actually holding back completed episodes.

The glaring exception is South Park, which is done pretty much days before release.

Also, sitcoms that are filmed in front of a studio audience tend to be filmed just a few weeks in advance, since they film whole episodes at once. Something like HOC is filmed more like a movie, where all the scenes in one place are filmed together.

Not necessarily. I don't know how HoC is produced, but with similar shows (short-season cable dramas) like Game of Thrones, the series is usually shot and produced before the first episode airs.

Maybe it's just because I'm working on product in a related space (tinj.com, launching "soon"), but this problem is perfectly solvable.

In a world where consumption is on demand, discussion groups need to be on demand as well. A way to do this is to create a new discussion group for each episode so people can connect and discuss with others that have seen up to the same point.

Sure, most of the action will be at the latest part, and spoilers might slip in, but with more people continually trickling through the system, the conversation for each episode never really needs to end.

Anyways, I could say more but time to get back to work. Feel free to reach out, contact info in my profile.

  "Previously what would be a community experience..."

For whom? Certainly not myself. If the social aspect of a show is so important to you then find some like minded people and pace yourself. I enjoy watching a season from start to finish and I couldn't care less about talking to others about it. This is a much better model in terms of how I consume content. Different strokes for different folks and all that...

More than once, I've half-seriously lamented that the death of VHS killed discussions. Before DVDs and streaming, you'd rewind the tape at the end of the movie. You'd talk quietly with your viewing partner(s) about what you had just seen and how it made you feel, over the loud noise of the VCR. Now in our instant-gratification society, this time of reflection is robbed from us.

Of course, I'd not suggest going back to VHS...

Never heard of this site. I'm going out on a limb here but my assumption is it quite simply doesn't have quite the same audience.

http://www.reddit.com/r/houseofcards has plenty of discussion

http://www.reddit.com/r/orangeisthenewblack/ has a lot of discussion as well.

If you're doing that, compare those subreddits to r/gameofthrones and r/breakingbad and that's his point. Majority of the people I know that watch GoT/BB have watched HoC/OitnB as well.

I'd rather have everything as I care to watch it than be drip-fed. The old "Accept what we give you when we give it to you" model needs to die, and the sooner the better. If I really care about discussing what I'm watching with someone, I'll either watch it with them, or schedule when we watch to ensure we don't get ahead/behind, but truthfully, I really don't care that much.

This is hardly a new problem. I am nearly always a week or two behind with some shows I have on my DVR. Due to one scheduling conflict or another, I don't always have time to watch every thing the night is airs. Couple that with needing to coordinate with my wife for some of the shows we watch together and it can be weeks sometimes before we sit down to catch up on a few shows.

In my personal experience, discussions occur just fine after the conclusion of the binge, and I've also discussed "historical" stuff with people (for instance, "Stargate: SG-1"). This doesn't seem to be obviously worse, just different, which is not the same thing despite great evident belief to the contrary.

Probably more accurate to say Binge Viewing kills discussion. And I think it may. There's less water cooler conversation than over the Walking Dead.

My take on binge viewing - I'd rather see a Greatest Hits to get current. I don't have 2 hours to sit through a movie, let alone 72 to get caught up on a series.

There's an argument to be made that shows in their third and fifth seasons would naturally have more participation than a brand new show as fans are certainly more invested and likely more numerous.

This started off being about discussions about Netflix shows, and then turned into a philosophical article about life.

Nice! I'm glad that I can watch House of Cards all at once, and that this article exists.

I got a headache from rolling my eyes so violently.

I'll stick to binge watching thank you

I think binge watching takes something away, but commercial interruptions take a lot more away, and fixed-hour availability made intelligent television a rarity (Tivo and Netflix enable TV to accommodate a smarter, busier audience and have changed the nature of what gets made).

What most people seem to do these days is: (1) binge watch, (2) discuss what it meant for the week after, (3) re-watch a few months later to get a sense of what they missed due to binge watching. Shows like Breaking Bad have enough depth that it's worth it to watch them a second time.

Still, I doubt the release-all-at-once dynamic will be the norm in 3 years, but I doubt we'll have the arbitrary winter breaks designed to make sure the season finale lands in the 20s of May. I could see an every-two-days release cycle being the norm (so a show like House of Cards would unfold over a month).

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