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I was completely out of stuff to watch about a month ago. No matter what I did I could only get the same ~100 shows and movies that I'd either already watched o

I was completely out of stuff to watch about a month ago. No matter what I did I could only get the same ~100 shows and movies that I'd either already watched or had no interest in. On a whim I switched over to my step father's profile - holy shit! There were at least 15 movies I wanted to watch that I absolutely could not get to show up on my profile without searching by name. I found a handful more on other family member's as well. If we weren't on a 5 person family plan I would have cancelled long ago because from what they will show me there isn't any to watch.

FridgeSeal 8y ago
And herein lies the issue with filtering/tailoring based on what you've watched/liked before: it can never 'escape' and give you something different that you might actually really like. I don't know how many good titles I discovered browsing random titles in video stores back in the day.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  And it would be so simple to solve. Prepare a tailored list. Instead of using it on all available space, fill only 90% of the space with items from the list. Fill remaining 10% with random items that do not belong to that list.
  - Swizec 8y ago
    Yep this is how you’re supposed to escape from a local maximum. But maybe Netflix’s usual customer doesn’t stick around long enough to have this problem so it’s not worth fixing. I can’t imagine none of their machine learning engineers know how to fix this.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Yeah, I bet they know. Question is, do their managers want them to fix this? There is this hypothesis that I've seen floating on HN at times, that Netflix does this to hide the fact that their selection is very small. I'm not totally convinced, but a lot of their UI choices feel like good evidence in favour of this hypothesis.
      - prades 8y ago
        Thankfully there are alternative interfaces to browse the Netflix catalog: https://www.coollector.com/index.html#netflix https://www.coollector.com/index.html#netflix
openIce 8y ago
This so much! When I open the documentaries category I get the same 50 shitty reality shows every fucking time
tscs37 8y ago
I think that could be solved by having a button to mark something as watched, removing it from recommendations and the catalog other than the list of things you watched. You could hide episodes you've seen or entire seasons up to entire shows. Would fix a lot of the issues I'm having.

FridgeSeal 8y ago

And herein lies the issue with filtering/tailoring based on what you've watched/liked before: it can never 'escape' and give you something different that you might actually really like. I don't know how many good titles I discovered browsing random titles in video stores back in the day.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
And it would be so simple to solve. Prepare a tailored list. Instead of using it on all available space, fill only 90% of the space with items from the list. Fill remaining 10% with random items that do not belong to that list.
- Swizec 8y ago
  Yep this is how you’re supposed to escape from a local maximum. But maybe Netflix’s usual customer doesn’t stick around long enough to have this problem so it’s not worth fixing. I can’t imagine none of their machine learning engineers know how to fix this.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Yeah, I bet they know. Question is, do their managers want them to fix this? There is this hypothesis that I've seen floating on HN at times, that Netflix does this to hide the fact that their selection is very small. I'm not totally convinced, but a lot of their UI choices feel like good evidence in favour of this hypothesis.
    - prades 8y ago
      Thankfully there are alternative interfaces to browse the Netflix catalog: https://www.coollector.com/index.html#netflix https://www.coollector.com/index.html#netflix

openIce 8y ago

This so much! When I open the documentaries category I get the same 50 shitty reality shows every fucking time

tscs37 8y ago

I think that could be solved by having a button to mark something as watched, removing it from recommendations and the catalog other than the list of things you watched. You could hide episodes you've seen or entire seasons up to entire shows. Would fix a lot of the issues I'm having.