because no one watches them, so better be available, and in peoples minds, grab attention (which is the #1 commodity in the world) than fall to obscurity
i don't know if they were ever profitable. But certainly i think there's been a paradigm shift to commercializing everything (mostly through advertising) the last decade or two and if you fall behind, whatever growth you were aiming for goes away and revenues shrink.
And also almost all advertising revenues have probably become centralized with google search, social media by facebook, and youtube, etc. That combined with rising costs, and higher opportunity cost to instead do something else means these sites are biting the dust.
James Somers is awesome. Every now and then, I see another of his articles that comes up here. Really great writer, who didn't set out to be one, but switched from a career in tech I believe.
This is super interesting. I've been visiting HN every day, multiple times a day for the past year. Over the last month, as I was preparing for interviews I removed the HN bookmark on my browser tab, and almost for weeks in between interviews I would go without checking it.
And honestly I think I was healthier, and happier. Reading, and bookmarking things on HN overflowed my brain with information, and created more anxiety in me I think. Just visiting back to see what I missed after not checking it the past week, and I was better off without it I feel.
Kinda sad that Netflix opted for quantity over quality. It shows with all the inane sequels like Murder mystery 2, Extraction 2 and with the idea of just filling an uninteresting script with some stars to make the numbers like Red Notice. And many of the top 50 shows reflect just that. The last Netflix original I watched and liked was The Queen's Gambit.
You should try "Obliterated", its hilarious, it doesn't take itself aerious, it plays with almost all TV tropes we know (in a good way), references everything from Rambo to Die Hard and has an eye for detail (every scene hints at something or is important in some regard). Also, episodes 2-8, each roughly an hour, cover an in-series time frame of 7 hours, which is a bice touch. Throw in good acting, good dialogs and liekable characters and you uave a great show.
> but in reality they just couldn’t handle the data
If you mean from a "critique" standpoint then no. If you meant from a "data wrangling standpoint then yes, as binary like/dislike data is just a lot easier to work with for recommendation algorithms.
There are many good reasons to move from a five star rating system to a binary rating system, and yeah, I think many of those fall into the "people lied to themselves" category:
- People tend to note use five or ten star systems on a continuous scale with certain points on the scale being biased
- People tend to go into "movie critic"-mode when they see a 5/10-star scale, as those are usually used on sites like IMDB. That drives them to try and rate the movie "objectively" and in accordance with an intellectual image they want to portray, rather than what they actually like/dislike consuming and spend their time watching
- Netflix also displayed the ratings as 5-star "adjusted ratings for the viewer", which already took your preferences into account. Not a single person I've talked to back then was aware of that, so everyone tried to do the same mental gymnastics they do when trying to project global IMDB ratings to their personal preferences. Moving to a "XX% match for you" together with the like/dislikes is something that people understand a lot better
All-in-all, I don't think the rating system really has been an issue in the recent years. The catalog has been a much bigger issue during that time. I'm pretty sure that Netflix's rating and recommendation system has been good enough that it has served me everything that I'd like to watch on their platform and now I'm out of content.
> So to summarize, customers are dumb & recommendation algorithms are hard.
Or to not throw away all the points I argued for: There were a lot of good reasons for moving away from the five star systems, and the main motivation was providing a better less confusing UX
> I loved Netflix stuff when they started out, banger after banger was delivered. Something changed.
The main thing that changed was that media companies woke up to streaming and stopped giving away the rights to properties that many people enjoy (mainly nostalgia shows + blockbusters) for cheap. That forced Netflix much more into media production of their own, which has it's up- and downsides, and gave Netflix the same warts that media companies always had (e.g. having to make hard decisions around canceling shows). It's a very clear case of a first-mover losing its advantage over time.
Netflix, famously, had a public contents to try to improve the recommendation system, with very little success. [1] That system was a demonstrably good system, that maximizes preference, but only if you rate a bunch of content. I'm not aware if it's still in use.
But, I've rated many hundreds of shows/movies, and the rating is very accurate, for me. Very biased and scaled, but completely predictable/reliable.
In my case, the rating can be corrected with Netflix 7 being my 0, and Netflix 10 being my 10, mostly linear. For a Netflix show, 8 is my 0, since those are biased a bit more.
Although, technically, the most profitable customer is the one that has low view time, but still subscribes. The most stable customer is probably one with high view time, but they're also probably the least profitable, unless they're naturally helping promote the service.
But they are not giving people what they want. Netflix recommendations are notoriously bad and Netflix is not all that successful lately with its own shows. Even when they have actually good shows you would like, you rarely find them through Netflix recommendations - you need someone to tell you about the show.
Wealth begets wealth. Capital compounds with no effort. A reminder for myself to revisit Capital by Thomas Piketty from 2013(!)
"When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility."
Funnily enough, I was watching the Spotify series on Netflix, The Playlist, and saw Sony Music Group's fight with the Pirate Bay(which covers similar themes) before Spotify exploded on to the scene. This was a real event too covered in the early episodes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial
"took up an entire room and now I can carry more computer power on my finger"