5 ms·

Netflix engineer on solving their "Black Mirror S1.E1 Pig f–-er" problem [video]

sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
Yeah I'm going to watch a 14 minute video about some person I don't know talk about some TV show I don't know, without knowing what this is about.
- larperdoodle 3y ago
  Black Mirror is a scifi anthology show and season 1 episode 1 is an extremely off putting and non representative episode where a politician is blackmailed into live streaming themselves fucking a pig. The show was later acquired by Netflix and it is in their best interest to make sure that isn't the first episode of the show people see.
- remh 3y ago
  I made the mistake of watching it. Don’t. The first half is about him commenting to his followers a Meme video of a product manager to a software engineer. The second part is about how they implemented the fact that for black mirror they wanted the first season to be displayed to be season 4 instead of season 1. Might be just personal taste but I found the streamer insufferable.
  - rhaps0dy 3y ago
    Thank you for describing this so the rest of us don't have to watch it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jonathanlydall 3y ago
    Something that is interesting (even if you don't like the streamer's style), is that Netflix had a seemingly simple requirement: For a particular show, instead of recommending to viewers to start at S01E01 (which might put people off the show due to that particular episode being distastefully vulgar to some), by default start at S04E01 (which was actually the first episode produced by Netflix after they acquired the show). It turned out that this seemingly simple requirement went against a very deeply ingrained (almost fundamental) assumption in many places in their systems, that shows always start at the earliest available episode. In the end, implementing this seemingly simple requirement landed up being (according to the streamer) a 4 month project.
    - silexia 3y ago
      Only a very poorly run org like Netflix would need four months to have a show start in season 4 instead of season 1. Season 1 episode 1 was one of the best of the show... Netflix dumbed the show down later.
  - sidcool 3y ago
    But he's a Netflix engineer, so he's gotta be smart!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- irobeth 3y ago
  main content starts around 6:30
- jumpman_miya 3y ago
  Thank you for your contribution, which consisted of feces.
larperdoodle 3y ago
Black Mirror is a scifi anthology show and season 1 episode 1 is an extremely off putting and non representative episode where a politician is blackmailed into live streaming themselves fucking a pig. The show was later acquired by Netflix and it is in their best interest to make sure that isn't the first episode of the show people see.
- bmoxb 3y ago
  I would argue that it could be off-putting (it's probably one of the harder episodes to watch) but I don't see how it's not representative of the rest of the show.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    Art isn't all pretty landscapes and pictures of boats (though those are nice too); sometimes it's challenging and though provoking and that episode is certainly one I remember. I've often said "Children of Men" is the best movie I'll never watch again, and while I wouldn't go so far as that on Black Mirror episode 1, I won't be watching it again either.
    - HocusLocus 3y ago
      You stated the concept well. Brazil [1985] is the best movie I'll never watch again. It has just become too close to reality within my lifetime and is not so funny anymore. It used to be hilarious.
      - hotpotamus 3y ago
        I'd say I'm a big fan of Gilliam's look/style and "Brazil" definitely epitomizes that. I didn't see it until sometime in the last decade, so it's hard to imagine that it was ever a comedy really, though Bob Hoskin's performance was certainly amusing and memorable. Upon reflection, "12 Monkeys" is another movie that was thought-provoking but will probably not get another play-through from me (well done Gilliam?). Perhaps as you suggest, reality has just become a bit too much and I'll just put "The Sound of Music" on on repeat from here on out, or whatever the cinematic equivalent of paintings of boats and pretty landscapes may be.
tycho-newman 3y ago
Episode 1 of Black Mirror is the best one. It is not a problem that needs solving. It later uncannily mirrored a later story about David Cameron, former UK prime minister, sticking his phallus inside a pig's mouth when he was in university. The pig was dead, and decapitated, which makes it okay I guess?
- nh23423fefe 3y ago
  It's ok to bury dead pigs, and not live pigs. So the morality of an act is dependent on vitality.
- stg22 3y ago
  Cameron denied that and the two people who made the claim admit their only source was a single anonymous member of parliament. But, because it's so funny and they knew Cameron wouldn't sue, it didn't matter to them whether or not it was true.
  - razakel 3y ago
    It doesn't matter if it actually happened or not. Like in the episode, it did happen in everyone's heads.
    - bigDinosaur 3y ago
      I don't know about you but my head likes to know what actually happened, and while imagining things can be fun it is also frequently pointlessly indulgent.
      - razakel 3y ago
        The truth doesn't matter. You imagined it. You laughed about it. The magic worked exactly how it was intended to.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  It would have been much easier for them to just rename the episode (like they renamed the series "scrotal recall" to "lovesick", which was a much better name IMO) The fact that they likely spent millions of dollars in dev time to do this really shows you how big tech companies lose sight of priorities as they mutate into behemoths
danw1979 3y ago
I suppose if you think your audience is a bunch of gentle souls who couldn’t possibly cope with the shock of this first episode, yet they’d be fine by the time it came to S04E05 “Metalhead”, then yes, this is perhaps an interesting problem that needs solving.
- rafram 3y ago
  I doubt that Black Mirror’s actual audience was the concern here. The issue was that they wanted to promote the show to all their users on the front page, and by default that would have led to everyone’s Netflix homepage displaying BLACK MIRROR: PIG FUCKER in big letters. People who wanted to watch Black Mirror would’ve been fine with it, but parents, families, prudes, etc., would’ve sent more than a few angry emails.
krosaen 3y ago
This is interesting not only because there was a product decision to sort the seasons of Black Mirror so that S4e1 would show up instead of S1e1 to avoid showing the pig f--er episode in people's home page, but also because the lengths to which the tangled mess of microservices had to be wrangled to make this happen - 4 months of work!
- yen223 3y ago
  Having worked at a place that went heavy into microservices, this story was incredibly relatable. The hard part isn't implementing the change - although having to implement it in n different places doesn't help - the hard part is having to coordinate the change with n different teams to get the change out.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > (...) the hard part is having to coordinate the change with n different teams to get the change out. I feel this is the reason why microservices end up being attacked by clueless developers, because ultimately they are the scapegoat for organizational issues. The primary selling point of microservices is that they are a management tool, as an org can use them to build teams with a very specific and clear-cut set of responsibilities. Microservices end up being a realization of Conway's law. Consequently, microservices end up being leveraged in intra-organizational conflicts. It's not that microservices cause these issues, but that the organizations that run microservices cause these issues. If you have the same team managing multiple microservices, these problems don't happen because they don't have the coordination problems that separate teams endure, specially when managers clash.
    - acdha 3y ago
      I think that’s too strong an overreaction. Conway’s law is powerful but it’s not the only reason why microservices are harder: there are also valid technical concerns inherent to needing to coordinate changes across multiple services which are still a concern even if the same people are running everything. That doesn’t mean they’re not worth using but greater frictional costs needs to be a consciously-accepted trade off.
bassrattle 3y ago
I love scifi and hated this ep. My take: when the population gathered to watch, they collectively lost a bit of their soul. I felt like I had also gathered to see it, and I was as disgusted by myself as anyone in the episode should have been. I have been hesitant to watch more.
- tinus_hn 3y ago
  The series is like the old quaint quirky Twilight Zone series. Except it takes itself so serious it’s just not quaint and quirky.
lacoolj 3y ago
wow thank you so much for posting this it just made my morning
mannyv 3y ago
The problem isn't implementing it, the problem is making sure the implementation doesn't fuck up everything else. In general, this implies that video metadata is immutable from the source...because the easiest way to do this would be to change the metadata. This is strange because Amazon renumbers episodes and seasons for some foreign shows (the Goes Wrong Show comes to mind). Anyway, it seems the easiest way would have been to change the preview component to play a specified episode, then add a field and UI to set that specified episode on the series metadata (defaulting to S01E01). Then the question is, "who sets that and how?" That leads into a rabbit hole of who would actually do that, which is probably going to be different for different shows. And any human intervention in the media process will be ugly and awkward. But - since this is a human override, there should obviously be a workflow exception. So there needs to be a permission on the users and a field on the shows. That's a couple of changes to a few different systems. How do you add a field to series metadata? How do you add a UI option to the metadata management? How do you add a permission on a user/group? Digging in might take a week or two. Implementing the changes depends on the change control and testing requirements of the various systems. A quarter to deploy from dev to production might be accurate. In a smaller shop it would be a week or two, but Netflix needs to worry about breaking their stuff.

Yeah I'm going to watch a 14 minute video about some person I don't know talk about some TV show I don't know, without knowing what this is about.

larperdoodle 3y ago
Black Mirror is a scifi anthology show and season 1 episode 1 is an extremely off putting and non representative episode where a politician is blackmailed into live streaming themselves fucking a pig. The show was later acquired by Netflix and it is in their best interest to make sure that isn't the first episode of the show people see.
remh 3y ago
I made the mistake of watching it. Don’t. The first half is about him commenting to his followers a Meme video of a product manager to a software engineer. The second part is about how they implemented the fact that for black mirror they wanted the first season to be displayed to be season 4 instead of season 1. Might be just personal taste but I found the streamer insufferable.
- rhaps0dy 3y ago
  Thank you for describing this so the rest of us don't have to watch it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jonathanlydall 3y ago
  Something that is interesting (even if you don't like the streamer's style), is that Netflix had a seemingly simple requirement: For a particular show, instead of recommending to viewers to start at S01E01 (which might put people off the show due to that particular episode being distastefully vulgar to some), by default start at S04E01 (which was actually the first episode produced by Netflix after they acquired the show). It turned out that this seemingly simple requirement went against a very deeply ingrained (almost fundamental) assumption in many places in their systems, that shows always start at the earliest available episode. In the end, implementing this seemingly simple requirement landed up being (according to the streamer) a 4 month project.
  - silexia 3y ago
    Only a very poorly run org like Netflix would need four months to have a show start in season 4 instead of season 1. Season 1 episode 1 was one of the best of the show... Netflix dumbed the show down later.
- sidcool 3y ago
  But he's a Netflix engineer, so he's gotta be smart!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
irobeth 3y ago
main content starts around 6:30
jumpman_miya 3y ago
Thank you for your contribution, which consisted of feces.

larperdoodle 3y ago

Black Mirror is a scifi anthology show and season 1 episode 1 is an extremely off putting and non representative episode where a politician is blackmailed into live streaming themselves fucking a pig. The show was later acquired by Netflix and it is in their best interest to make sure that isn't the first episode of the show people see.

bmoxb 3y ago
I would argue that it could be off-putting (it's probably one of the harder episodes to watch) but I don't see how it's not representative of the rest of the show.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Art isn't all pretty landscapes and pictures of boats (though those are nice too); sometimes it's challenging and though provoking and that episode is certainly one I remember. I've often said "Children of Men" is the best movie I'll never watch again, and while I wouldn't go so far as that on Black Mirror episode 1, I won't be watching it again either.
  - HocusLocus 3y ago
    You stated the concept well. Brazil [1985] is the best movie I'll never watch again. It has just become too close to reality within my lifetime and is not so funny anymore. It used to be hilarious.
    - hotpotamus 3y ago
      I'd say I'm a big fan of Gilliam's look/style and "Brazil" definitely epitomizes that. I didn't see it until sometime in the last decade, so it's hard to imagine that it was ever a comedy really, though Bob Hoskin's performance was certainly amusing and memorable. Upon reflection, "12 Monkeys" is another movie that was thought-provoking but will probably not get another play-through from me (well done Gilliam?). Perhaps as you suggest, reality has just become a bit too much and I'll just put "The Sound of Music" on on repeat from here on out, or whatever the cinematic equivalent of paintings of boats and pretty landscapes may be.

tycho-newman 3y ago

Episode 1 of Black Mirror is the best one. It is not a problem that needs solving. It later uncannily mirrored a later story about David Cameron, former UK prime minister, sticking his phallus inside a pig's mouth when he was in university. The pig was dead, and decapitated, which makes it okay I guess?

nh23423fefe 3y ago
It's ok to bury dead pigs, and not live pigs. So the morality of an act is dependent on vitality.
stg22 3y ago
Cameron denied that and the two people who made the claim admit their only source was a single anonymous member of parliament. But, because it's so funny and they knew Cameron wouldn't sue, it didn't matter to them whether or not it was true.
- razakel 3y ago
  It doesn't matter if it actually happened or not. Like in the episode, it did happen in everyone's heads.
  - bigDinosaur 3y ago
    I don't know about you but my head likes to know what actually happened, and while imagining things can be fun it is also frequently pointlessly indulgent.
    - razakel 3y ago
      The truth doesn't matter. You imagined it. You laughed about it. The magic worked exactly how it was intended to.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
It would have been much easier for them to just rename the episode (like they renamed the series "scrotal recall" to "lovesick", which was a much better name IMO) The fact that they likely spent millions of dollars in dev time to do this really shows you how big tech companies lose sight of priorities as they mutate into behemoths

danw1979 3y ago

I suppose if you think your audience is a bunch of gentle souls who couldn’t possibly cope with the shock of this first episode, yet they’d be fine by the time it came to S04E05 “Metalhead”, then yes, this is perhaps an interesting problem that needs solving.

rafram 3y ago
I doubt that Black Mirror’s actual audience was the concern here. The issue was that they wanted to promote the show to all their users on the front page, and by default that would have led to everyone’s Netflix homepage displaying BLACK MIRROR: PIG FUCKER in big letters. People who wanted to watch Black Mirror would’ve been fine with it, but parents, families, prudes, etc., would’ve sent more than a few angry emails.

krosaen 3y ago

This is interesting not only because there was a product decision to sort the seasons of Black Mirror so that S4e1 would show up instead of S1e1 to avoid showing the pig f--er episode in people's home page, but also because the lengths to which the tangled mess of microservices had to be wrangled to make this happen - 4 months of work!

yen223 3y ago
Having worked at a place that went heavy into microservices, this story was incredibly relatable. The hard part isn't implementing the change - although having to implement it in n different places doesn't help - the hard part is having to coordinate the change with n different teams to get the change out.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > (...) the hard part is having to coordinate the change with n different teams to get the change out. I feel this is the reason why microservices end up being attacked by clueless developers, because ultimately they are the scapegoat for organizational issues. The primary selling point of microservices is that they are a management tool, as an org can use them to build teams with a very specific and clear-cut set of responsibilities. Microservices end up being a realization of Conway's law. Consequently, microservices end up being leveraged in intra-organizational conflicts. It's not that microservices cause these issues, but that the organizations that run microservices cause these issues. If you have the same team managing multiple microservices, these problems don't happen because they don't have the coordination problems that separate teams endure, specially when managers clash.
  - acdha 3y ago
    I think that’s too strong an overreaction. Conway’s law is powerful but it’s not the only reason why microservices are harder: there are also valid technical concerns inherent to needing to coordinate changes across multiple services which are still a concern even if the same people are running everything. That doesn’t mean they’re not worth using but greater frictional costs needs to be a consciously-accepted trade off.

bassrattle 3y ago

I love scifi and hated this ep. My take: when the population gathered to watch, they collectively lost a bit of their soul. I felt like I had also gathered to see it, and I was as disgusted by myself as anyone in the episode should have been. I have been hesitant to watch more.

tinus_hn 3y ago
The series is like the old quaint quirky Twilight Zone series. Except it takes itself so serious it’s just not quaint and quirky.

lacoolj 3y ago

wow thank you so much for posting this it just made my morning

mannyv 3y ago

The problem isn't implementing it, the problem is making sure the implementation doesn't fuck up everything else. In general, this implies that video metadata is immutable from the source...because the easiest way to do this would be to change the metadata. This is strange because Amazon renumbers episodes and seasons for some foreign shows (the Goes Wrong Show comes to mind). Anyway, it seems the easiest way would have been to change the preview component to play a specified episode, then add a field and UI to set that specified episode on the series metadata (defaulting to S01E01). Then the question is, "who sets that and how?" That leads into a rabbit hole of who would actually do that, which is probably going to be different for different shows. And any human intervention in the media process will be ugly and awkward. But - since this is a human override, there should obviously be a workflow exception. So there needs to be a permission on the users and a field on the shows. That's a couple of changes to a few different systems. How do you add a field to series metadata? How do you add a UI option to the metadata management? How do you add a permission on a user/group? Digging in might take a week or two. Implementing the changes depends on the change control and testing requirements of the various systems. A quarter to deploy from dev to production might be accurate. In a smaller shop it would be a week or two, but Netflix needs to worry about breaking their stuff.