7 ms·

My problem with Netflix isn't the slate of shows and movies it has in its catalog. It's definitely not as nice as it used to be, but there are a jillion and a h

My problem with Netflix isn't the slate of shows and movies it has in its catalog. It's definitely not as nice as it used to be, but there are a jillion and a half shows and movies out there. My problem is that Netflix has taken note that we watch anime a few times a week, which doubtless means we want every single band/carousel/whatever to be about anime. New Anime, Critically Acclaimed Anime, Popular Anime, Watch it Again Anime, Anime Where Characters Wear Hats, Anime Where Characters Float in Hats, and Anime About Hat Making. For the love of all let me get some other options in the fucking list before I lose my mind. I like comedies, action movies, sci-fi, documentaries, and historical dramatizations or historical fictions too, you know. Not everything has to have a talking cat in it.

randrews 7y ago
I have this problem with ML and recommendation systems in general. I hope this fad goes away soon and people go back to making simple, understandable, show-me-the-newest-stuff feeds.
- isbjorn16 7y ago
  Right - I just feel like it takes things entirely too far. Not every signal deserves a boost that takes a certain genre of suggestions up to 11. These recommendation systems need to be a bit less zealous; I like black pepper, too, but that doesn't mean I want a huge bowl of black peppercorns in cream sauce for dinner.
  - SanchoPanda 7y ago
    They may be doing the math on extremes in categories where relative quality is good given their current catalogue.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    People tend to look up movies not by theme, but by actor or director. Could Netflix be okay with categories that don’t fill up entire screens?
    - isbjorn16 7y ago
      That blows my mind; I never would have considered people would focus on the actors or the director. Until you said it I don't once thing I ever even considered the possibility! I'm kinda floored right now.
      - ryacko 7y ago
        Actors or directors are a decent indicator of quality. Recently I’ve found that old actors in mid-budget productions have the best overall quality.
- SpaceManNabs 7y ago
  Netflix didn't always have this problem. They seem to have changed their cold start model within the last 2 years.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  I think the issue lies with there being a single recommendation tab that gets filled in without enough variety.
- foobarian 7y ago
  One reason I appreciate broadcast TV is the curation aspect of their limited playlists. The streaming recommendation systems are very lonely - I know they are algorithmic and personalized, and that nobody else will see the same outcome. With broadcast, a human does that work and it is shared among viewers; e.g. some show always airs on Thursdays at 8. Then there is the seasonal cadence, i.e. summer shows, fall/spring shows. With algorithmic systems it sometimes feels like reading books written by a Markov chain toy.
markkanof 7y ago
Better than Hulu that now shows us every commercial in Spanish. No one in my household speaks Spanish. The only thing I can guess is that I know ONE TIME my daughter accidentally selected the Spanish translation of one of her cartoons.
- twiceaday 7y ago
  This is a guess but perhaps your subtitles are in Spanish, and you never use them so they are hidden?
  - isbjorn16 7y ago
    Or perhaps some global preferences setting hidden in the shadows to the left somewhere
- reaperducer 7y ago
  The New York Times app shows me ads in Spanish. Don't speak Spanish. No one in my house does.
  - 4rgento 7y ago
    Well, time to pick up duolingo's Spanish course... When life gives you lemons…
- foobarian 7y ago
  You should petition MaxMind to fix their mapping of your IP address to city/country.
adrianmonk 7y ago
Once upon a time, Netflix gave away $1 million to contest winners in an attempt to get the best recommendation algorithm they could ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize ). Now the recommendations are just not that great. It's like they're not trying too hard because they are comfy in their market position. I have never watched any anime at all (really not my thing), but Netflix keeps recommending it to me despite the fact that I haven't taken the bait once. Also it recommends shows to me that it should know through history I've already watched every episode of. Maybe that's on purpose since people watch things again, but I still don't find it useful. Also it leaves stuff in "Continue Watching" for like a month after I give it a thumbs down rating and remove it from "My List". That should be a strong enough signal to act on. And it seems to recommend stuff based on stuff that I only "watched" because it auto-played. That should not be a strong enough signal to act on. The overall point is they seem to have several obvious opportunities to be smarter with content discovery, but they're not taking them.
- isbjorn16 7y ago
  Wait where's the thumbs down rating?
  - forgotmysn 7y ago
    im pretty sure they removed it edit: i could be mistaken though
  - saurik 7y ago
    Next to the thumbs up rating (they only have two possible ratings). It might be confusing as you sometimes (at least on iOS) have to click a thumbs up icon to be shown the actual options with the thumbs down?
    - isbjorn16 7y ago
      I suspect they don't have it at all on their Roku channel :( I'll look again tonight, but if I can start downvoting these things, I can at least feel like I'm screaming "no" into the void, which is better than screaming "no" internally. Nobody wants to live through an "I have no mouth and I must scream" nightmare, after all.
perl4ever 7y ago
It seems like there is some pitfall in making a recommendation algorithm that more and more people are falling in to. I don't watch TV or have Netflix, but I listen to streaming music, and I noticed something weird. I used to listen to Pandora, and it recommended a lot of different artists that I liked on hearing them for the first time. It single-handedly gave me a taste for 21st century music. But there wasn't enough music in their catalog, so I switched to Spotify. Now Spotify will play more of the songs by people I already like, but very nearly everything it plays that I didn't find on Pandora I hate and it keep playing the same things over and over no matter how quickly and frequently I skip past them. It's hard for me to believe that they could be this bad and unresponsive unwittingly, but I wonder if perhaps there is some kind of naive algorithm that is failing. ...you may say, why don't I explicitly mark songs "like" or "dislike", but I mostly listen in my car where I can't do that. One alternative hypothesis is that different people use Pandora vs. Spotify and the ones on Pandora have better taste, but I can't believe that's all of it.
- jdsully 7y ago
  Its less risky to give you things you already like than to try and guess if something new will be appreciated. Its the same reason hollywood keeps doing remakes. If you only go by statistics and don’t think through the “what if everyone did this” question then giving you the same old content on repeat will have better metrics.
  - zxcmx 7y ago
    Right, it feels like things are optimising purely for “next click”, i.e, what will keep you mindlessly in flow, forgetting the time and consuming more content. So if I’m watching a video about TIG welding say, to optimise “next click” I suppose I should be recommended mostly more welding videos, with a smattering of engineering and finally a bit of clickbait mixed in case I’m starting to get distracted. If services are optimising for “keep going right now”, they might be modelling as something like a markov chain of “clicked on next” and that’s how we get stuck in this kind of short-sighted local optimum.
- codingslave 7y ago
noelsusman 7y ago
To be fair to them, everyone is failing at this. Recommendation algorithms, once held up as a crowning achievement of machine learning, have turned out to be terrible at their jobs. Amazon, Youtube, Netflix. None of them have it figured out.
- ojhughes 7y ago
  YouTube seems to be a lot better than the rest. I consistently get good music videos queued up, it is great for discovering new music
  - goalieca 7y ago
    YouTube seems to give me clickbait crap with high view counts. Yes it may somewhat be related to my interests but not really.
- TimJRobinson 7y ago
  Spotifys algorithm is amazing, I'm constantly finding new indie bands that I love on it. YouTube is also really good. Netflix is terrible for me, I don't think it's ever recommended a show I've loved.
  - crikli 7y ago
    Huh. My experience is the opposite. Somehow my Discover Weekly was mostly mariachi bands for a month. Finally told it I didn’t like enough of them that it got the hint. Now it’s overloaded with Scandinavian adult contemporary or something. It’s like all the other algorithms from one I’ve seen: listen to something accidentally that’s in a niche and it just loads up on recommendations from that niche.
_rtld_global_ro 7y ago
It become more or less just a catalog, often times spent close to an hour just trying to find something might be interesting (not totally shitty), and that's pretty much it: couldn't find anything, just browsing their catalog, with time wasted.
ccleve 7y ago
This is the classic article on that problem: My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1038261936872356908 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1038261936872356908
- elliekelly 7y ago
  That article was a wild ride back to 2002. From the phrase "techno-profiling" to Amazon recommending "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity" to Bezos during a public demonstration to WSJ writing "Netflix.com (netflix.com)" so the url was clear to anyone whose browser didn't convert case before making a request. In some ways technology has made a lot of progress and in some ways it really hasn't changed a bit.
pault 7y ago
Yes! That has driven me away from YouTube and Netflix recently. I know there is an ocean of content out there but when I sign in all I see is the same dozen shitty recommendations that I have no interest in! I watched one comedy special a year ago and my feed is half stand-up comedy now.
- belltaco 7y ago
  On PC you can click on a icon near the video on the home page and say that you're not interested.
- joegahona 7y ago
  This happened to my friend too. I shared a link with him of a Youtube guy who analyzes classic rock songs, and my friend's entire recommended feed was overtaken by this guy for weeks. My feed isn't nearly that sensitive. I think you and him are in the same experimentation bucket or something.
- jrnichols 7y ago
  or your kid accidentally starts playing one of the "mock buster" movies. like the absolute garbage take off of Pacific Rim called "Atlantic Rim." Now my feed is full of those. I wish Netflix would stop buying those movies.
Rapzid 7y ago
For me it's comedy specials. I don't even like them that much, but they have been plastered all over my home screen for nearly a year. Since they took away ratings and reviews I have to use other sites to try to find good stuff to watch. I've been watching a lot more Youtube recently oddly enough. Youtube does a better job of giving me a mix of videos for my interests, and there are a number of great vloggers out there across a lot of my interests posting weekly+ content.
Osiris 7y ago
Year ago, Netflix has a "Not Interested" option. If Netflix was recommending something that you didn't care about, you could use "Not Interested" to make it not show up in your list anymore. Now, it just keeps recommending these same content over and over again. There's no way to say "I don't want to watch that". There's also no variety to the suggestions. I agree that "decision fatigue" is a big deal for me.
- kovvy 7y ago
  Recommendations used to seem to be affected by your ratings. That may still be the case to some extent, but Netflix's preferences seem to be way, way more important now. That aside, I don't live in the USA so it would be nice if Netflix stopped claiming that USA content was local, and non-USA foreign. It's not just their recommendation system that is poor, their general categorisation also is.

randrews 7y ago

I have this problem with ML and recommendation systems in general. I hope this fad goes away soon and people go back to making simple, understandable, show-me-the-newest-stuff feeds.

isbjorn16 7y ago
Right - I just feel like it takes things entirely too far. Not every signal deserves a boost that takes a certain genre of suggestions up to 11. These recommendation systems need to be a bit less zealous; I like black pepper, too, but that doesn't mean I want a huge bowl of black peppercorns in cream sauce for dinner.
- SanchoPanda 7y ago
  They may be doing the math on extremes in categories where relative quality is good given their current catalogue.
- ryacko 7y ago
  People tend to look up movies not by theme, but by actor or director. Could Netflix be okay with categories that don’t fill up entire screens?
  - isbjorn16 7y ago
    That blows my mind; I never would have considered people would focus on the actors or the director. Until you said it I don't once thing I ever even considered the possibility! I'm kinda floored right now.
    - ryacko 7y ago
      Actors or directors are a decent indicator of quality. Recently I’ve found that old actors in mid-budget productions have the best overall quality.
SpaceManNabs 7y ago
Netflix didn't always have this problem. They seem to have changed their cold start model within the last 2 years.
Mirioron 7y ago
I think the issue lies with there being a single recommendation tab that gets filled in without enough variety.
foobarian 7y ago
One reason I appreciate broadcast TV is the curation aspect of their limited playlists. The streaming recommendation systems are very lonely - I know they are algorithmic and personalized, and that nobody else will see the same outcome. With broadcast, a human does that work and it is shared among viewers; e.g. some show always airs on Thursdays at 8. Then there is the seasonal cadence, i.e. summer shows, fall/spring shows. With algorithmic systems it sometimes feels like reading books written by a Markov chain toy.

markkanof 7y ago

Better than Hulu that now shows us every commercial in Spanish. No one in my household speaks Spanish. The only thing I can guess is that I know ONE TIME my daughter accidentally selected the Spanish translation of one of her cartoons.

twiceaday 7y ago
This is a guess but perhaps your subtitles are in Spanish, and you never use them so they are hidden?
- isbjorn16 7y ago
  Or perhaps some global preferences setting hidden in the shadows to the left somewhere
reaperducer 7y ago
The New York Times app shows me ads in Spanish. Don't speak Spanish. No one in my house does.
- 4rgento 7y ago
  Well, time to pick up duolingo's Spanish course... When life gives you lemons…
foobarian 7y ago
You should petition MaxMind to fix their mapping of your IP address to city/country.

adrianmonk 7y ago

Once upon a time, Netflix gave away $1 million to contest winners in an attempt to get the best recommendation algorithm they could ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize ). Now the recommendations are just not that great. It's like they're not trying too hard because they are comfy in their market position. I have never watched any anime at all (really not my thing), but Netflix keeps recommending it to me despite the fact that I haven't taken the bait once. Also it recommends shows to me that it should know through history I've already watched every episode of. Maybe that's on purpose since people watch things again, but I still don't find it useful. Also it leaves stuff in "Continue Watching" for like a month after I give it a thumbs down rating and remove it from "My List". That should be a strong enough signal to act on. And it seems to recommend stuff based on stuff that I only "watched" because it auto-played. That should not be a strong enough signal to act on. The overall point is they seem to have several obvious opportunities to be smarter with content discovery, but they're not taking them.

isbjorn16 7y ago
Wait where's the thumbs down rating?
- forgotmysn 7y ago
  im pretty sure they removed it edit: i could be mistaken though
- saurik 7y ago
  Next to the thumbs up rating (they only have two possible ratings). It might be confusing as you sometimes (at least on iOS) have to click a thumbs up icon to be shown the actual options with the thumbs down?
  - isbjorn16 7y ago
    I suspect they don't have it at all on their Roku channel :( I'll look again tonight, but if I can start downvoting these things, I can at least feel like I'm screaming "no" into the void, which is better than screaming "no" internally. Nobody wants to live through an "I have no mouth and I must scream" nightmare, after all.

perl4ever 7y ago

It seems like there is some pitfall in making a recommendation algorithm that more and more people are falling in to. I don't watch TV or have Netflix, but I listen to streaming music, and I noticed something weird. I used to listen to Pandora, and it recommended a lot of different artists that I liked on hearing them for the first time. It single-handedly gave me a taste for 21st century music. But there wasn't enough music in their catalog, so I switched to Spotify. Now Spotify will play more of the songs by people I already like, but very nearly everything it plays that I didn't find on Pandora I hate and it keep playing the same things over and over no matter how quickly and frequently I skip past them. It's hard for me to believe that they could be this bad and unresponsive unwittingly, but I wonder if perhaps there is some kind of naive algorithm that is failing. ...you may say, why don't I explicitly mark songs "like" or "dislike", but I mostly listen in my car where I can't do that. One alternative hypothesis is that different people use Pandora vs. Spotify and the ones on Pandora have better taste, but I can't believe that's all of it.

jdsully 7y ago
Its less risky to give you things you already like than to try and guess if something new will be appreciated. Its the same reason hollywood keeps doing remakes. If you only go by statistics and don’t think through the “what if everyone did this” question then giving you the same old content on repeat will have better metrics.
- zxcmx 7y ago
  Right, it feels like things are optimising purely for “next click”, i.e, what will keep you mindlessly in flow, forgetting the time and consuming more content. So if I’m watching a video about TIG welding say, to optimise “next click” I suppose I should be recommended mostly more welding videos, with a smattering of engineering and finally a bit of clickbait mixed in case I’m starting to get distracted. If services are optimising for “keep going right now”, they might be modelling as something like a markov chain of “clicked on next” and that’s how we get stuck in this kind of short-sighted local optimum.
codingslave 7y ago

noelsusman 7y ago

To be fair to them, everyone is failing at this. Recommendation algorithms, once held up as a crowning achievement of machine learning, have turned out to be terrible at their jobs. Amazon, Youtube, Netflix. None of them have it figured out.

ojhughes 7y ago
YouTube seems to be a lot better than the rest. I consistently get good music videos queued up, it is great for discovering new music
- goalieca 7y ago
  YouTube seems to give me clickbait crap with high view counts. Yes it may somewhat be related to my interests but not really.
TimJRobinson 7y ago
Spotifys algorithm is amazing, I'm constantly finding new indie bands that I love on it. YouTube is also really good. Netflix is terrible for me, I don't think it's ever recommended a show I've loved.
- crikli 7y ago
  Huh. My experience is the opposite. Somehow my Discover Weekly was mostly mariachi bands for a month. Finally told it I didn’t like enough of them that it got the hint. Now it’s overloaded with Scandinavian adult contemporary or something. It’s like all the other algorithms from one I’ve seen: listen to something accidentally that’s in a niche and it just loads up on recommendations from that niche.

_rtld_global_ro 7y ago

It become more or less just a catalog, often times spent close to an hour just trying to find something might be interesting (not totally shitty), and that's pretty much it: couldn't find anything, just browsing their catalog, with time wasted.

ccleve 7y ago

This is the classic article on that problem: My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1038261936872356908 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1038261936872356908

elliekelly 7y ago
That article was a wild ride back to 2002. From the phrase "techno-profiling" to Amazon recommending "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity" to Bezos during a public demonstration to WSJ writing "Netflix.com (netflix.com)" so the url was clear to anyone whose browser didn't convert case before making a request. In some ways technology has made a lot of progress and in some ways it really hasn't changed a bit.

pault 7y ago

Yes! That has driven me away from YouTube and Netflix recently. I know there is an ocean of content out there but when I sign in all I see is the same dozen shitty recommendations that I have no interest in! I watched one comedy special a year ago and my feed is half stand-up comedy now.

belltaco 7y ago
On PC you can click on a icon near the video on the home page and say that you're not interested.
joegahona 7y ago
This happened to my friend too. I shared a link with him of a Youtube guy who analyzes classic rock songs, and my friend's entire recommended feed was overtaken by this guy for weeks. My feed isn't nearly that sensitive. I think you and him are in the same experimentation bucket or something.
jrnichols 7y ago
or your kid accidentally starts playing one of the "mock buster" movies. like the absolute garbage take off of Pacific Rim called "Atlantic Rim." Now my feed is full of those. I wish Netflix would stop buying those movies.

Rapzid 7y ago

For me it's comedy specials. I don't even like them that much, but they have been plastered all over my home screen for nearly a year. Since they took away ratings and reviews I have to use other sites to try to find good stuff to watch. I've been watching a lot more Youtube recently oddly enough. Youtube does a better job of giving me a mix of videos for my interests, and there are a number of great vloggers out there across a lot of my interests posting weekly+ content.

Osiris 7y ago

Year ago, Netflix has a "Not Interested" option. If Netflix was recommending something that you didn't care about, you could use "Not Interested" to make it not show up in your list anymore. Now, it just keeps recommending these same content over and over again. There's no way to say "I don't want to watch that". There's also no variety to the suggestions. I agree that "decision fatigue" is a big deal for me.

kovvy 7y ago
Recommendations used to seem to be affected by your ratings. That may still be the case to some extent, but Netflix's preferences seem to be way, way more important now. That aside, I don't live in the USA so it would be nice if Netflix stopped claiming that USA content was local, and non-USA foreign. It's not just their recommendation system that is poor, their general categorisation also is.