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Ex-Netflix here. When I was there we had two metrics we cared about: hours watched and retention. Whenever we introduced a new feature we carefully measured it'

Ex-Netflix here. When I was there we had two metrics we cared about: hours watched and retention. Whenever we introduced a new feature we carefully measured it's impact on those two metrics. Ultimately, retention was the most important metric, but hours watched was a leading indicator for retention. I always had a bit of a moral dilemma working at Netflix because my goal was to get people to spend more time watching Netflix, which I didn't really think was good for humanity. Either way, it was nice having very clear goals. Netflix was a great company to work for.

selestify 8y ago
That's more of a systemic problem, it's debatable how beneficial getting people addicted to Facebook, YouTube's next video, or any of a number of engagement platforms is to humanity. But everyone does it, and the ones that dont, don't make it so big.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  An excerpt from the moral philosophy of Goatee Spock Evil Dimension: Littering, theft and pollution are also systemic problems that many separate actors contribute independently to - and no individual litterer, thief or chemical plant could solve the problem entirely by cleaning up only their own actions. That's why, for thousands of years, societies have agreed that litterers, thieves, and polluters are not culpable for their actions, and why no serious effort has ever been made to bring them to justice or discourage them. After all, you might complain when you see a mob boss using underhanded methods to get ahead, but cooler heads know that touchy-feely mob bosses don't get as far in their careers; they can't be blamed. In my opinion, anti-litterers tend to be over-idealistc academics with no grasp on the real world. If I were to stop throwing cigarette butts out my car window, I would have more cigarette buts inside my car. They must not realize this, I guess, because idealists don't go on road trips. Besides, if I don't cover a square inch of grass with a chip bag, someone driving behind me will. >everyone does it, and the ones that dont, don't make it so big. Socrates was famous for posing this argument at Greek garden parties. Eventually it took root, and that's why the Athenians (and all societies inheriting their legal tradition) took every law off the books. --An excerpt from the moral philosophy of Goatee Spock Evil Dimension
  - kodisha 8y ago
    Can't google this Goatee Spock Evil Dimension, link please?
    - lozenge 8y ago
      https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeardOfEvil https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeardOfEvil https://io9.gizmodo.com/scientists-prove-that-a-goatee-makes-you-look-evil-5914836 https://io9.gizmodo.com/scientists-prove-that-a-goatee-makes...
      - provenScience 8y ago
        “Scientists prove...”
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The... It's a reference to a Star Trek episode.
  - ensiferum 8y ago
    If I were to stop throwing cigarette butts out my car window, I would have more cigarette buts inside my car." Unfortunately it seems most smokers are obnoxious asshole litterers. Disgusting ppl.
    - stevenicr 8y ago
      I think some of them are ignorant about the effects. Many smokers I have spoken with over the years believe that the butt / filter is just cotton and tobacco and paper and will decompose very quickly. I'd like to see more education about this, and the amount that end up in the oceans. Someone developed a backpack that can keep strong odors inside, there should be ashtray inserts and portable small proof boxes that smokers can use, so that their car does not get the old smoke-butt smell which is way worse than the smoked in the car smell - which I gather is one of the main reasons to get the butts out of the car as fast as possible. I'd also like to see a change in how cigarettes are made, requiring the butts to be faster to break down / decompose. Surely these things are possible, and less litter in the future as well.
- EGreg 8y ago
  Tragedy of the commons where the commons is human attention. Notifications are one of the ways to train people like pavlov’s dogs to check your app. If you don’t use it others will.
  - josteink 8y ago
    Indeed. And as a response I’ve stopped granting notification permissions to anything except email and messaging. Notifications used sparingly, with restraint, is really, really useful. This spam-fest we’re seeing now though? Fuck that shit. I can see FB and “friends” adapting though. They’re now sending me email-notifications when I don’t grant them in-app spam permissions. Really. All the big players are working together real hard to ruin everything.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  True and not true. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter make their money from advertisements. Netflix gets paid directly by the consumer. It's not obvious to me that it's in Netflix best interest to optimize the same metric as companies that rely on advertising revenue. If Twitter was paid, I'd already unsubscribed several times because I occasionally will try to "get off Twitter". It's a wasteful, unproductive time sink that makes unhappy in top of it. That's why I uninstalled the Twitter app. Now Twitter on occasion pulls me back in because I can just go to their website. Netflix to me is a totally different beast. I feel many interactions I have with the platform are feeling more like a time sink. The interface feels increasingly optimize for wasting my time. It gets harder to distinguish shows I've already looked at from ones I haven't. They suggestions are more unreliable than ever. It's downright impossible now to decide at what point the obviously is nothing left on the platform I want to watch. In addition to the UI more and more of their content feels like generic, insightful material to keep you got to the screen. Not sure when that changed. I think it happened in tandem with Netflix being less about movies and more about tv shows. Not to mention the DVD to streaming move. The more Netflix wastes my time like Twitter or YouTube the more likely I am to clean it from my life. Those services do not spark joy they just waste my limited time. No real reason Netflix cannot do better than them and treat me with dignity and respect, like a real customer and not like the product because in fact I'm not their product.
directRelations 8y ago
The interesting thing about these sorts of goals is that there’s no accounting for saturation of customer engagement and diminshing returns. When your only goal is to make a graph go up and to the right, what does a plateau mean? And then after the plateau? I’ve had a number of managers over the years, and some of them could only think in those terms, and refused to think in other ways. Decades later and those jobs are long gone, and whether there was any respect between us is long since irrelevant, but by now, those kinds of goals often come across as strong signal to me of a built in concept of disposability. Proof arrives with the fact that I’m no longer at those places. If the graph is only allowed to go up and to the right, your days there are assuredly numbered.
- spondyl 8y ago
  Infinite growth is unnatural after all. On a side note, it's fascinating hearing investors worry about Apple's growth slowing (possibly declining even) while throwing around figures in the tens, if not hundreds of billions
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    You’ll get to a point where the Netflix staff would have to down tools and watch Netflix all day to get get the last bit of growth! I guess that’s after they’ve convinced all mothers to stick their newborns in front of Netflix.
  - make3 8y ago
    investors have paid the price multiple they paid for the stock with the expectation that it would continue to grow it's dividends.
blobster 8y ago
I always wondered how some companies can rely exclusively on data like A/B testing to make decisions. Isn't that incredibly slow? In my experience there are thousands of decisions to make every year in a high growth company and there is just not enough time to test everything. This is why the best software companies that we are all familiar with revolve around an individual with incredible intuition/vision. If it was possible/practical to just rely on a bunch of A/B tests, every company would be successful.
- kbyatnal 8y ago
  Not really. With the amount of users these companies have, you can get statistically valid results very fast (and you can run hundreds of tests in parallel).
  - blobster 8y ago
    Maybe, but I'm talking about getting to that level in the first place.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      Startups that are still searching for product/market fit don't really do much A/B testing - the user populations are too small for anything statistically relevant. They rely more on intuition, or as some would call it, blind luck. In some ways, what an entrepreneur does is very coarse-grained A/B testing anyways. If you launch 50 different startup ideas and they all get zero traffic, and then you launch the 51st and it has 100 users sign up over a weekend, then there's a good indication that you should go with the 51st idea.
      - quanticle 8y ago
        It's also what venture capitalists do at the level of companies. Fund a hundred companies, and then watch them. Pour more money into the ones who appear to be succeeding.
  - deleted 8y ago
cpeterso 8y ago
Wouldn't the ideal Netflix customer watch 0 hours (thus consuming none of the company's resources) while still paying their monthly subscription? :) OTOH active viewers probably refer more friends and family to become new Netflix customers.
- keebEz 8y ago
  Ideal maybe, but if they want to maximize revenue they need to optimize around the marginal customer. Marginal customers most likely exhibit strong correlation between hours watched and retention.
- rv-de 8y ago
  interesting point. the problem is that no interaction means no data. and along the motto "if you can't measure what's important, you make important what you can measure" a more concrete metric needs to be used. even if - ironically - the optimization is opposed.
  - mkagenius 8y ago
    Ofcourse not completely 0. Just enough to keep renewing.
    - rv-de 8y ago
      sure but if you optimize you have to optimize towards a number. Now that number is either 0 in this case or x which is close to zero. Now which x would you choose? And if you choose an x (let's say 47 minutes and 23 seconds) you'll lose data moving towards it.
  - howard941 8y ago
    I was going to use that motto for a completely different email with my faraway manager but I found that the more popular version was "Measure what's important, don't make important what you can measure." It's attributed to Robert McNamara https://www.azquotes.com/quote/613247 https://www.azquotes.com/quote/613247
- 8y ago
ams6110 8y ago
About hours watched, did you somehow account for viewers like me who start a show, promptly fall asleep, and the episodes play all night.
- vageli 8y ago
  > and the episodes play all night. Do you not awake to a prompt asking you to confirm that you are still actively watching?
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Hmm not that I remember. Maybe if it hit the end of the season? Though it's actually been a while, at some point last year I felt like I'd run through all the interesting content on Netflix. Now I do the same thing on YouTube.
    - vidarh 8y ago
      They ask every few episodes.
    - dwighttk 8y ago
      Yeah but have you seen the interesting content while awake? ;)
  - blobster 8y ago
    Wow, is that a thing? Reminds me of an episode from Black Mirror.
    - thisone 8y ago
      It's more like a screen saver. You haven't interacted with the app in X amount of time, it suspends loading the next episode until you confirm you're still there. No more nefarious or creepy than a screen saver.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
the_cat_kittles 8y ago
did you ever resolve your moral dilemma? having done a very similar thing for another company, i felt the same way. ultimately i decided it was probably a net neutral, or possibly a slight minus, which definitely weighed on me. but the real reason i quit was because i decided it was incredibly lame. its so easy to find something thats an unambiguous plus, why even bother with questionable jobs? curious where youve landed, thinking wise
- jedberg 8y ago
  I always felt that it was a positive. I'm giving people hours of joy, allowing them to escape from whatever it is they are escaping from. I never even considered it a problem. I was glad that I didn't work somewhere where the consumer was the product, and that we didn't really have to exploit anyone to deliver our product. Of all of the FAANG companies to work for, Netflix seems to be the one with the least things to complain about.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >its so easy to find something thats an unambiguous plus// I think if you can walk in to a job in any area/industry you wish you're very fortunate. How?
  - the_cat_kittles 8y ago
    stop trying to make alot of money. its really that simple
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Could you give examples, I don't consider auxiliary workers to be really part of an industry (like non-specialist janitors aren't part of the satellite sector, say). Other than those roles I don't see how you can flit between industries chasing an ethical posting. Let's say I'd like to work in environmental science .. what role can I walk into?
      - 8y ago
yani 8y ago
Watching Netflix can be beneficial. There is really good educational content there. It is awesome for humanity and can help people in different situations. I am really surprised to hear that one can ask themselves if it is bad for humanity
- stabbles 8y ago
  Let's watch educational content and chill!
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  You sound like a 10yo telling their parents they want more computer time for... learning :).
  - parasubvert 8y ago
    With my 10 year old, he’ll need to watch some minimum amount of educational content online to balance out the other stuff. Generally he does this (or plays math/word/science games). And if he doesn’t, strangely our internet connection gets slow on his devices. Shucks, I guess it’s time to read a book.
- pbasista 8y ago
  > Watching Netflix can be beneficial. No one disputes that. The reason why people consider it harmful is that frequent watching, which is the platform's #1 priority, creates addiction.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    It's not really addiction that worries me, it's habituation. TV is absorbing, as a child with 3/4 channels there was often a time when the was nothing of interest and that helps one week interest elsewhere (aka boredom). If there's no point at which there's nothing interesting to watch it's easy to sit and absorb stimuli out of habit. Maybe addiction can develop, does develop? If you do an action habitually you're still doing the same physically as perhaps you would as an addict.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I just cancelled Netflix for this exact reason. I find the entire platform to be anti-consumer. Auto playing videos with sound, automatically playing the next episode to encourage binging, changing cover art to give you the illusion of fresh content always arriving, television series that are 10+ episodes long for no reason other than to extend hours viewed. Don’t get me wrong, Netflix does have some good content, but I finally realized that the way the platform is designed is gross.
- lukehack 8y ago
  What's seriously making me consider cancelling my subscription is the fact that they autoplay trailers on the kids channel. I don't want my daughter getting addicted through the ML algorithms on the site, period.
  - najra 8y ago
    I've also had the situation where the trailer would be for a tv show for older kids and it scared the crap out of my daughter (likely we don't let her watch on her own so we could shut it off). We are trying to limit her exposure screen in general, but commercials in particular, which is why we thought netflix was a good option...
  - koboll 8y ago
    What's seriously making me consider canceling my subscription is that it's slowly but surely becoming a worse service over time. It's clear that rising licensing fees are eating it alive, and its response, to create more original content, is mostly failing. Original Netflix series and movies are, by and large, fairly awful. The exceptions are notable but rare. Next year, when the mass exodus of Disney content occurs, there will be a noticeable drop in the number of good movies on Netflix -- I'm predicting that I'll likely be one of many canceling Netflix in favor of Disney's streaming service, and that will be an inflection point in the beginning of Netflix's end. Netflix original content is not enough to sustain it, and soon it won't have much else.
    - derekp7 8y ago
Mikeb85 8y ago
Netflix user here. Honestly, people are going to watch TV no matter what. No amount of wishful thinking will make people do something more productive. Better Netflix than competitors, no?
- andrepd 8y ago
  >people are going to watch TV no matter what Well, not really. Obviously people already watch TV, but netflix is much more addictive, by design, and that's not a good thing. People are going to gamble no matter what, yet modern slots are many times more addictive, else the companies wouldn't research and develop them. >Better Netflix than competitors, no? Why?
  - Mikeb85 8y ago
    > Why? Because the parent had worked for Netflix. > netflix is much more addictive, by design Is it? I remember people being glued to TVs for ungodly amounts of time before Netflix.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      I’d argue that, for at least some people, streaming/TiVo/etc. can lead to more deliberate TV watching rather than plopping yourself down and begging out. I guess the counterpoint is there’s all this TV just sitting there for the watching but I’m honestly not sure which predominates. Many People historically watched a lot of TV, of whatever type happened to be on.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  One issue I have is autoplay -- when a program stops you get a pause and time to think if you want to do something else. Which is why they don't let it stop ... Continuous play is difficult with kids; you have to poll the TV viewing, rather than getting an interrupt. It's literally the only bit of Netflix I'm personally not happy with.
- Grue3 8y ago
  There was a time when people didn't watch TV. They used to listen to radio. And before radio they used to read books. It's entirely possible that a new form of media will come along, hopefully less focused on passive consumption of content.
miguelrochefort 8y ago
The only reason I haven't cancelled my 4-screen Netflix subscription is because I share the account with 3 family members who still use it. Recently, the price went up, but I still continue to pay. I looked into downgrading my subscription from 4-screen to 3-screen, but only the 2-screen option exists. Well played Netflix.
mmjaa 8y ago
Ex-video game developer here. The games industry uses those exact metrics to measure their success. I decided to leave the games industry after it was revealed that our latest release had a 14 year old kid who was playing, non-stop in 48-hour bursts .. and the game company execs loved it. Like, they were ecstatic that they had this 14-year olds' attention like that. That was enough for me to realise that the video game industry is destructive, and has evil intent for our society...
- mcv 8y ago
  Maybe computer games should show a pop up after a couple of hours of play, suggesting it may be a good time to take a break. Preferably at a nice save point.
  - kn0where 8y ago
    Some Nintendo games like Super Mario 3D Land have that
kolbe 8y ago
This seems like a particularly dangerous linear extrapolation in a nonlinear world. Shouldn’t you all have just had a minimum engagement time that you wanted customers to hit? Like ten hours a month should make you feel comfortable enough that the customer will not be canceling anytime soon. But 200 hours a month might mean you’re causing problems to their lives that they will address by canceling. Even the auto play feature just seem like a standard hack that Goodhart’s Law would predict. User hours may be a good metric to indicate user retention when it’s measuring people’s voluntary use of the product, but could become inaccurate when it measures their psychologically manipulated use.
Novashi 8y ago
>I always had a bit of a moral dilemma working at Netflix because my goal was to get people to spend more time watching Netflix, which I didn't really think was good for humanity. Ah, come on. We need entertainment. Netflix is far and above what cable companies have been doing for a long time in terms of effort and not being scummy. Bringing joy to people is good for humanity. Don't let it weight on you.
mitko 8y ago
I had the same gripe about working at Twitter- the two main metrics were daily active users and user active minutes. User research was way understaffed so a lot of the side effects of optimizing metrics remained unchecked Edit: I wrote “The vanity metric paradox” a while ago to express it more clearly http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2018/03/23/the-vanity-metric-paradox http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2018/03/23/the-vanity-metric-para...
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Nearly every place a person can work the product is designed to get people to buy more of it. Netflix is chips, designed so that you can’t just eat one. Every product from packaging to taste to price to whatever is designed to manipulate us. We should definitely keep businesses in check but ultimately it is our responsibility whether we eat two chips or the whole bag.
cptskippy 8y ago
So that why the auto play video feature just won't die despite everyone loathing it... Most of our forays into Netflix these days are precision strikes. We know what we want to watch and we race to get to it without triggering those stupid autoplay videos. We no longer browse. For a while I had my TV setup with variable framerate to match the content being played and of course the Netflix UI and Video operated at different framerates so every time a video would kick in the screen would blank for a few seconds and when you navigated it would blank back.
- stinky613 8y ago
  I really love how Hulu's current web interface makes it really easy to toggle Autoplay on/off. I hate how Netflix makes me search through account menus. Hulu's current interface definitely isn't perfect, but I love the convenient toggle for Autoplay; and I love being able to search for episodes by name. As a fan of Seinfeld and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I can remember an episode's name waaayyy more easily than I can remember its season/episode number Maybe it's just in my head, but I feel like Netflix doesn't care what I want or think anymore. I feel like they've taken the position that their metrics and projections know better than I do.
- dwild 8y ago
  > So that why the auto play video feature just won't die despite everyone loathing it... Everyone loathing it? Is this really a thing? I never actually seen anyone complaining about it on Netflix. I've seen people complains about the "Are you still there?", my SO also often complains that it's "too long" between episodes and ask me to press continue with the remote. I do hate the autoplay from Youtube personally, particularly since I've on Youtube premium (my phone just keep playing videos in the background, that's quite annoying and I'm really lucky it only has happened while I was on wifi). Still I haven't seen any people complains from it and I do know it can be easily deactivated on the website at least. > We know what we want to watch and we race to get to it without triggering those stupid autoplay videos. Are you on a special version of Netflix? Are you actually talking about the trailers that play on the background while you browse? You don't like that feature?

selestify 8y ago

That's more of a systemic problem, it's debatable how beneficial getting people addicted to Facebook, YouTube's next video, or any of a number of engagement platforms is to humanity. But everyone does it, and the ones that dont, don't make it so big.

whatshisface 8y ago
An excerpt from the moral philosophy of Goatee Spock Evil Dimension: Littering, theft and pollution are also systemic problems that many separate actors contribute independently to - and no individual litterer, thief or chemical plant could solve the problem entirely by cleaning up only their own actions. That's why, for thousands of years, societies have agreed that litterers, thieves, and polluters are not culpable for their actions, and why no serious effort has ever been made to bring them to justice or discourage them. After all, you might complain when you see a mob boss using underhanded methods to get ahead, but cooler heads know that touchy-feely mob bosses don't get as far in their careers; they can't be blamed. In my opinion, anti-litterers tend to be over-idealistc academics with no grasp on the real world. If I were to stop throwing cigarette butts out my car window, I would have more cigarette buts inside my car. They must not realize this, I guess, because idealists don't go on road trips. Besides, if I don't cover a square inch of grass with a chip bag, someone driving behind me will. >everyone does it, and the ones that dont, don't make it so big. Socrates was famous for posing this argument at Greek garden parties. Eventually it took root, and that's why the Athenians (and all societies inheriting their legal tradition) took every law off the books. --An excerpt from the moral philosophy of Goatee Spock Evil Dimension
- kodisha 8y ago
  Can't google this Goatee Spock Evil Dimension, link please?
  - lozenge 8y ago
    https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeardOfEvil https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeardOfEvil https://io9.gizmodo.com/scientists-prove-that-a-goatee-makes-you-look-evil-5914836 https://io9.gizmodo.com/scientists-prove-that-a-goatee-makes...
    - provenScience 8y ago
      “Scientists prove...”
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The... It's a reference to a Star Trek episode.
- ensiferum 8y ago
  If I were to stop throwing cigarette butts out my car window, I would have more cigarette buts inside my car." Unfortunately it seems most smokers are obnoxious asshole litterers. Disgusting ppl.
  - stevenicr 8y ago
    I think some of them are ignorant about the effects. Many smokers I have spoken with over the years believe that the butt / filter is just cotton and tobacco and paper and will decompose very quickly. I'd like to see more education about this, and the amount that end up in the oceans. Someone developed a backpack that can keep strong odors inside, there should be ashtray inserts and portable small proof boxes that smokers can use, so that their car does not get the old smoke-butt smell which is way worse than the smoked in the car smell - which I gather is one of the main reasons to get the butts out of the car as fast as possible. I'd also like to see a change in how cigarettes are made, requiring the butts to be faster to break down / decompose. Surely these things are possible, and less litter in the future as well.
EGreg 8y ago
Tragedy of the commons where the commons is human attention. Notifications are one of the ways to train people like pavlov’s dogs to check your app. If you don’t use it others will.
- josteink 8y ago
  Indeed. And as a response I’ve stopped granting notification permissions to anything except email and messaging. Notifications used sparingly, with restraint, is really, really useful. This spam-fest we’re seeing now though? Fuck that shit. I can see FB and “friends” adapting though. They’re now sending me email-notifications when I don’t grant them in-app spam permissions. Really. All the big players are working together real hard to ruin everything.
ajmurmann 8y ago
True and not true. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter make their money from advertisements. Netflix gets paid directly by the consumer. It's not obvious to me that it's in Netflix best interest to optimize the same metric as companies that rely on advertising revenue. If Twitter was paid, I'd already unsubscribed several times because I occasionally will try to "get off Twitter". It's a wasteful, unproductive time sink that makes unhappy in top of it. That's why I uninstalled the Twitter app. Now Twitter on occasion pulls me back in because I can just go to their website. Netflix to me is a totally different beast. I feel many interactions I have with the platform are feeling more like a time sink. The interface feels increasingly optimize for wasting my time. It gets harder to distinguish shows I've already looked at from ones I haven't. They suggestions are more unreliable than ever. It's downright impossible now to decide at what point the obviously is nothing left on the platform I want to watch. In addition to the UI more and more of their content feels like generic, insightful material to keep you got to the screen. Not sure when that changed. I think it happened in tandem with Netflix being less about movies and more about tv shows. Not to mention the DVD to streaming move. The more Netflix wastes my time like Twitter or YouTube the more likely I am to clean it from my life. Those services do not spark joy they just waste my limited time. No real reason Netflix cannot do better than them and treat me with dignity and respect, like a real customer and not like the product because in fact I'm not their product.

directRelations 8y ago

The interesting thing about these sorts of goals is that there’s no accounting for saturation of customer engagement and diminshing returns. When your only goal is to make a graph go up and to the right, what does a plateau mean? And then after the plateau? I’ve had a number of managers over the years, and some of them could only think in those terms, and refused to think in other ways. Decades later and those jobs are long gone, and whether there was any respect between us is long since irrelevant, but by now, those kinds of goals often come across as strong signal to me of a built in concept of disposability. Proof arrives with the fact that I’m no longer at those places. If the graph is only allowed to go up and to the right, your days there are assuredly numbered.

spondyl 8y ago
Infinite growth is unnatural after all. On a side note, it's fascinating hearing investors worry about Apple's growth slowing (possibly declining even) while throwing around figures in the tens, if not hundreds of billions
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  You’ll get to a point where the Netflix staff would have to down tools and watch Netflix all day to get get the last bit of growth! I guess that’s after they’ve convinced all mothers to stick their newborns in front of Netflix.
- make3 8y ago
  investors have paid the price multiple they paid for the stock with the expectation that it would continue to grow it's dividends.

blobster 8y ago

I always wondered how some companies can rely exclusively on data like A/B testing to make decisions. Isn't that incredibly slow? In my experience there are thousands of decisions to make every year in a high growth company and there is just not enough time to test everything. This is why the best software companies that we are all familiar with revolve around an individual with incredible intuition/vision. If it was possible/practical to just rely on a bunch of A/B tests, every company would be successful.

kbyatnal 8y ago
Not really. With the amount of users these companies have, you can get statistically valid results very fast (and you can run hundreds of tests in parallel).
- blobster 8y ago
  Maybe, but I'm talking about getting to that level in the first place.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    Startups that are still searching for product/market fit don't really do much A/B testing - the user populations are too small for anything statistically relevant. They rely more on intuition, or as some would call it, blind luck. In some ways, what an entrepreneur does is very coarse-grained A/B testing anyways. If you launch 50 different startup ideas and they all get zero traffic, and then you launch the 51st and it has 100 users sign up over a weekend, then there's a good indication that you should go with the 51st idea.
    - quanticle 8y ago
      It's also what venture capitalists do at the level of companies. Fund a hundred companies, and then watch them. Pour more money into the ones who appear to be succeeding.
- deleted 8y ago

cpeterso 8y ago

Wouldn't the ideal Netflix customer watch 0 hours (thus consuming none of the company's resources) while still paying their monthly subscription? :) OTOH active viewers probably refer more friends and family to become new Netflix customers.

keebEz 8y ago
Ideal maybe, but if they want to maximize revenue they need to optimize around the marginal customer. Marginal customers most likely exhibit strong correlation between hours watched and retention.
rv-de 8y ago
interesting point. the problem is that no interaction means no data. and along the motto "if you can't measure what's important, you make important what you can measure" a more concrete metric needs to be used. even if - ironically - the optimization is opposed.
- mkagenius 8y ago
  Ofcourse not completely 0. Just enough to keep renewing.
  - rv-de 8y ago
    sure but if you optimize you have to optimize towards a number. Now that number is either 0 in this case or x which is close to zero. Now which x would you choose? And if you choose an x (let's say 47 minutes and 23 seconds) you'll lose data moving towards it.
- howard941 8y ago
  I was going to use that motto for a completely different email with my faraway manager but I found that the more popular version was "Measure what's important, don't make important what you can measure." It's attributed to Robert McNamara https://www.azquotes.com/quote/613247 https://www.azquotes.com/quote/613247
8y ago

ams6110 8y ago

About hours watched, did you somehow account for viewers like me who start a show, promptly fall asleep, and the episodes play all night.

vageli 8y ago
> and the episodes play all night. Do you not awake to a prompt asking you to confirm that you are still actively watching?
- ams6110 8y ago
  Hmm not that I remember. Maybe if it hit the end of the season? Though it's actually been a while, at some point last year I felt like I'd run through all the interesting content on Netflix. Now I do the same thing on YouTube.
  - vidarh 8y ago
    They ask every few episodes.
  - dwighttk 8y ago
    Yeah but have you seen the interesting content while awake? ;)
- blobster 8y ago
  Wow, is that a thing? Reminds me of an episode from Black Mirror.
  - thisone 8y ago
    It's more like a screen saver. You haven't interacted with the app in X amount of time, it suspends loading the next episode until you confirm you're still there. No more nefarious or creepy than a screen saver.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago

the_cat_kittles 8y ago

did you ever resolve your moral dilemma? having done a very similar thing for another company, i felt the same way. ultimately i decided it was probably a net neutral, or possibly a slight minus, which definitely weighed on me. but the real reason i quit was because i decided it was incredibly lame. its so easy to find something thats an unambiguous plus, why even bother with questionable jobs? curious where youve landed, thinking wise

jedberg 8y ago
I always felt that it was a positive. I'm giving people hours of joy, allowing them to escape from whatever it is they are escaping from. I never even considered it a problem. I was glad that I didn't work somewhere where the consumer was the product, and that we didn't really have to exploit anyone to deliver our product. Of all of the FAANG companies to work for, Netflix seems to be the one with the least things to complain about.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
>its so easy to find something thats an unambiguous plus// I think if you can walk in to a job in any area/industry you wish you're very fortunate. How?
- the_cat_kittles 8y ago
  stop trying to make alot of money. its really that simple
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Could you give examples, I don't consider auxiliary workers to be really part of an industry (like non-specialist janitors aren't part of the satellite sector, say). Other than those roles I don't see how you can flit between industries chasing an ethical posting. Let's say I'd like to work in environmental science .. what role can I walk into?
    - 8y ago

yani 8y ago

Watching Netflix can be beneficial. There is really good educational content there. It is awesome for humanity and can help people in different situations. I am really surprised to hear that one can ask themselves if it is bad for humanity

stabbles 8y ago
Let's watch educational content and chill!
TeMPOraL 8y ago
You sound like a 10yo telling their parents they want more computer time for... learning :).
- parasubvert 8y ago
  With my 10 year old, he’ll need to watch some minimum amount of educational content online to balance out the other stuff. Generally he does this (or plays math/word/science games). And if he doesn’t, strangely our internet connection gets slow on his devices. Shucks, I guess it’s time to read a book.
pbasista 8y ago
> Watching Netflix can be beneficial. No one disputes that. The reason why people consider it harmful is that frequent watching, which is the platform's #1 priority, creates addiction.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  It's not really addiction that worries me, it's habituation. TV is absorbing, as a child with 3/4 channels there was often a time when the was nothing of interest and that helps one week interest elsewhere (aka boredom). If there's no point at which there's nothing interesting to watch it's easy to sit and absorb stimuli out of habit. Maybe addiction can develop, does develop? If you do an action habitually you're still doing the same physically as perhaps you would as an addict.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

I just cancelled Netflix for this exact reason. I find the entire platform to be anti-consumer. Auto playing videos with sound, automatically playing the next episode to encourage binging, changing cover art to give you the illusion of fresh content always arriving, television series that are 10+ episodes long for no reason other than to extend hours viewed. Don’t get me wrong, Netflix does have some good content, but I finally realized that the way the platform is designed is gross.

lukehack 8y ago
What's seriously making me consider cancelling my subscription is the fact that they autoplay trailers on the kids channel. I don't want my daughter getting addicted through the ML algorithms on the site, period.
- najra 8y ago
  I've also had the situation where the trailer would be for a tv show for older kids and it scared the crap out of my daughter (likely we don't let her watch on her own so we could shut it off). We are trying to limit her exposure screen in general, but commercials in particular, which is why we thought netflix was a good option...
- koboll 8y ago
  What's seriously making me consider canceling my subscription is that it's slowly but surely becoming a worse service over time. It's clear that rising licensing fees are eating it alive, and its response, to create more original content, is mostly failing. Original Netflix series and movies are, by and large, fairly awful. The exceptions are notable but rare. Next year, when the mass exodus of Disney content occurs, there will be a noticeable drop in the number of good movies on Netflix -- I'm predicting that I'll likely be one of many canceling Netflix in favor of Disney's streaming service, and that will be an inflection point in the beginning of Netflix's end. Netflix original content is not enough to sustain it, and soon it won't have much else.
  - derekp7 8y ago

Mikeb85 8y ago

Netflix user here. Honestly, people are going to watch TV no matter what. No amount of wishful thinking will make people do something more productive. Better Netflix than competitors, no?

andrepd 8y ago
>people are going to watch TV no matter what Well, not really. Obviously people already watch TV, but netflix is much more addictive, by design, and that's not a good thing. People are going to gamble no matter what, yet modern slots are many times more addictive, else the companies wouldn't research and develop them. >Better Netflix than competitors, no? Why?
- Mikeb85 8y ago
  > Why? Because the parent had worked for Netflix. > netflix is much more addictive, by design Is it? I remember people being glued to TVs for ungodly amounts of time before Netflix.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    I’d argue that, for at least some people, streaming/TiVo/etc. can lead to more deliberate TV watching rather than plopping yourself down and begging out. I guess the counterpoint is there’s all this TV just sitting there for the watching but I’m honestly not sure which predominates. Many People historically watched a lot of TV, of whatever type happened to be on.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
One issue I have is autoplay -- when a program stops you get a pause and time to think if you want to do something else. Which is why they don't let it stop ... Continuous play is difficult with kids; you have to poll the TV viewing, rather than getting an interrupt. It's literally the only bit of Netflix I'm personally not happy with.
Grue3 8y ago
There was a time when people didn't watch TV. They used to listen to radio. And before radio they used to read books. It's entirely possible that a new form of media will come along, hopefully less focused on passive consumption of content.

miguelrochefort 8y ago

The only reason I haven't cancelled my 4-screen Netflix subscription is because I share the account with 3 family members who still use it. Recently, the price went up, but I still continue to pay. I looked into downgrading my subscription from 4-screen to 3-screen, but only the 2-screen option exists. Well played Netflix.

mmjaa 8y ago

Ex-video game developer here. The games industry uses those exact metrics to measure their success. I decided to leave the games industry after it was revealed that our latest release had a 14 year old kid who was playing, non-stop in 48-hour bursts .. and the game company execs loved it. Like, they were ecstatic that they had this 14-year olds' attention like that. That was enough for me to realise that the video game industry is destructive, and has evil intent for our society...

mcv 8y ago
Maybe computer games should show a pop up after a couple of hours of play, suggesting it may be a good time to take a break. Preferably at a nice save point.
- kn0where 8y ago
  Some Nintendo games like Super Mario 3D Land have that

kolbe 8y ago

This seems like a particularly dangerous linear extrapolation in a nonlinear world. Shouldn’t you all have just had a minimum engagement time that you wanted customers to hit? Like ten hours a month should make you feel comfortable enough that the customer will not be canceling anytime soon. But 200 hours a month might mean you’re causing problems to their lives that they will address by canceling. Even the auto play feature just seem like a standard hack that Goodhart’s Law would predict. User hours may be a good metric to indicate user retention when it’s measuring people’s voluntary use of the product, but could become inaccurate when it measures their psychologically manipulated use.

Novashi 8y ago

>I always had a bit of a moral dilemma working at Netflix because my goal was to get people to spend more time watching Netflix, which I didn't really think was good for humanity. Ah, come on. We need entertainment. Netflix is far and above what cable companies have been doing for a long time in terms of effort and not being scummy. Bringing joy to people is good for humanity. Don't let it weight on you.

mitko 8y ago

I had the same gripe about working at Twitter- the two main metrics were daily active users and user active minutes. User research was way understaffed so a lot of the side effects of optimizing metrics remained unchecked Edit: I wrote “The vanity metric paradox” a while ago to express it more clearly http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2018/03/23/the-vanity-metric-paradox http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2018/03/23/the-vanity-metric-para...

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

Nearly every place a person can work the product is designed to get people to buy more of it. Netflix is chips, designed so that you can’t just eat one. Every product from packaging to taste to price to whatever is designed to manipulate us. We should definitely keep businesses in check but ultimately it is our responsibility whether we eat two chips or the whole bag.

cptskippy 8y ago

So that why the auto play video feature just won't die despite everyone loathing it... Most of our forays into Netflix these days are precision strikes. We know what we want to watch and we race to get to it without triggering those stupid autoplay videos. We no longer browse. For a while I had my TV setup with variable framerate to match the content being played and of course the Netflix UI and Video operated at different framerates so every time a video would kick in the screen would blank for a few seconds and when you navigated it would blank back.

stinky613 8y ago
I really love how Hulu's current web interface makes it really easy to toggle Autoplay on/off. I hate how Netflix makes me search through account menus. Hulu's current interface definitely isn't perfect, but I love the convenient toggle for Autoplay; and I love being able to search for episodes by name. As a fan of Seinfeld and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I can remember an episode's name waaayyy more easily than I can remember its season/episode number Maybe it's just in my head, but I feel like Netflix doesn't care what I want or think anymore. I feel like they've taken the position that their metrics and projections know better than I do.
dwild 8y ago
> So that why the auto play video feature just won't die despite everyone loathing it... Everyone loathing it? Is this really a thing? I never actually seen anyone complaining about it on Netflix. I've seen people complains about the "Are you still there?", my SO also often complains that it's "too long" between episodes and ask me to press continue with the remote. I do hate the autoplay from Youtube personally, particularly since I've on Youtube premium (my phone just keep playing videos in the background, that's quite annoying and I'm really lucky it only has happened while I was on wifi). Still I haven't seen any people complains from it and I do know it can be easily deactivated on the website at least. > We know what we want to watch and we race to get to it without triggering those stupid autoplay videos. Are you on a special version of Netflix? Are you actually talking about the trailers that play on the background while you browse? You don't like that feature?