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> The employees are incentivized to do so and this is what they measure, so this is what they build I also work in data teams and this is directly my observati
by pdinny 5y ago
> The employees are incentivized to do so and this is what they measure, so this is what they build
I also work in data teams and this is directly my observation too.
Closely related are Conway's Law (you ship your org chart) and Goodhart's Law (commonly paraphrased as 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.')
In Netflix's case I certainly feel the shipped product is too close of a reflection of org structure and incentives and user experience suffers as a result.
This feels particularly evident in the treatment of thumbnails and title descriptions. Often I find myself clicking through on a thumbnail in order to read the description only to find that the I've already read the description and didn't want to watch that title, but the thumbnail has since changed.
I'm sure there is some team in Netflix whose sole purpose is increasing thumbnail clickthrough rates. And they are probably succeeding in that respect by changing the thumbnails. They get to win at their portion of some funnel, even if the net result is a lousy user experience.
- denton-scratch 5y ago> and title descriptions To my mind, it's the title descriptions that are the most clickbaity. I get the sense that Netflix are beding over backwards to ensure that you can't form an impression of the flic from that description. I cancelled my Netflix subscription. Less and less of the titles are well-known 3rd-party productions; more and more are Netflix productions that I have found to be rather dull. Their ability to "divine my preferences" was never much good, but it's got worse. Of course, they don't really care about my preferences; what matters for Netflix is what they would prefer me to watch, apparently. Youtube's ability to discern my preferences also seems to have nosedived over the last year. I watched one programme about a certain WWII aircraft; YT then started pushing at me an unending diet of aircraft restoration docs and amateur historian channels.