Hacker News Reader

Comment by malloreon | Hacker News Reader

fingers crossed this fixes the netflix recommending me things I've already rated before.

Heads up netflix: if I've rated something, I don't ever want it to be recommended again outside of "watch it again."

Another Netflix annoyance: if I watch the pilot episode of a series, then weeks and months pass, and I never watch another episode of that series, it's probably safe to infer that I didn't like it and you can stop recommending stuff to me based on my "interest" in that series. I feel like there's a few of these really common-sense things that Netflix doesn't pick up on and probably don't require some fancypants algorithm to detect.

Is it possible the fancypants algorithm knows you better than you do, knows you will like that series if you watched 3 episodes instead of just the pilot, and is hoping you'll change your mind and listen to it?

"I know the first couple episodes suck, but stick with it. You'll thank me come season 2."

AKA, the "Parks and Rec" effect.

Its actually the opposite that annoys me: if I was watching a TV series, the last time I was logged in I watched episodes, and there are still remaining episodes, stop asking me to rate the series. Its a minor but consistent annoyance that I'll be 3 episodes into a series and it wants me to rate the entire series.

Or shows that you watched months ago but Netflix does not know about.

Or why you have 5 sreens of categories to choose from, but all categories have the same shows in them, anywhere around 60-75%.

Well, don't get your hopes up. I talked with one of the 'data science' guys at Netflix and he said that user ratings are basically completely ignored in their algorithms. Apparently a large subset of their users actually rate movies before they've seen them, so hiding rated movies would only serve to decrease views overall.

Are they sure this isn't a matter of people having seen the videos through other means? I've rated movies I saw in theater or dvd in netflix before so that it can know me better. Guess that's a waste of time.

I think their data science people don't really respect the users own ability from what I have heard. If someone is rating a film not seen through your platform, it should be obvious that a) they have seen it elsewhere and b) if its a 1 they dont want to see that again

Reply on news.ycombinator.com