> How do we convince you that a title is worth watching?<p>That question seems revealing to me. Convincing me that a title is worth watching is good for business, I'm sure, but I want to decide what (and whether) to watch, not be convinced. Most titles are not worth watching.<p>I don't enjoy how relative and personal the recommendation system is right now, and I don't want more of it. The current recommendation system is showing me hundreds of titles that all say something like "97% match", plus or minus one percent, even though the majority of them are objectively crappy. It seems like the personalized ratings are all super inflated.<p>I want to know what other people thought and make my own decision, not be subject to a data collection and personalization system that filters everything through the eyes of a neural network that only knows what I've rated in the past.<p>It also feels like it's getting harder to branch out to genres I don't usually watch. The recommendations are giving me a metric ton of stuff that is similar (same genres, same actors) to whatever I rated highly, but not much that is dissimilar. It feels like I have to work harder now to find good stuff that is new or unusual.
Years ago when there still was a public API I wrote a super simple script that just listed movies in order by how much Netflix thought I'd like them. This was the best Netflix interface I've used so far. While the predictions weren't super accurate they were accurate enough to quickly scan over it and find interesting stuff. They also we accurate enough to easily notice at what point in the list the was no reason to look further down. If I had spend some more time to substraction what I've already watched and maybe also make it also sortable by IMDb ratings it would have been perfect. Also no fing photos. Just give me the title and ratings, maybe just maybe the release year. At least on the overview.<p>I believe Netflix moved to the current model because they don't care about you spending your time well and in addition need to fudge their catalog. It's ultimately wasting user's time. Before they had the new match percentage it regularly would suggest movies that they themselves predicted I'd hate. WTF?!<p>At this point my favorite movie platform is mubi. Just 30 well selected movies. I can quickly tell what's new to their catalog and also if I should just close the app and do something else.
All due respect for the authors and engineers that worked on this, but this solves a problem that does not exist. In fact, it has produced confusion as my wife and I can't find a title if the artwork has changed or is different on mobile vs web vs FireTV, etc and the sands are shifting on each depending on whose account we are on.<p>You're gonna get higher click through in the short term but lower satisfaction in the longer term. This "up-and-to-the-right" disease will erode your credibility by not treating artwork as canon in subtle ways and alienate your audience who are disappointed Good Will Hunting, in this example is more drama/romance than comedy, and that Robin Williams, (usually) a comedian, is the most serious character (he graduated from Juliard).<p>tl;dr Long time personalization product manager here, don't do this: it will hurt you
I think this highlights an inherent tension between marketing and art.<p>When I create such and such a piece as an artist I want to present it a certain way, even down to the marketing material--I want it all to express the correct vision--i.e. there is one 'correct' promotional image for it.<p>Marketers, contrarily strictly have the utilitarian principle of conversion in mind--they want to manipulate my vision to make it a better fit for as <i>wide an audience as possible</i> and in so doing diminish and cheapen the art to target certain subsets or groups who may not actually fit the intended audience when you consider the work as a whole. Art is reduced to a profit making instrument.<p>That's precisely what this method attempts--cast a wider net by deceiving the fish and ignoring the wishes of the fisherman, who, only wanting trout, now gets the whole biosphere of the sea in his boat.<p>Its not very honest, and will probably make people upset unless the content based recommendation algorithm aligns perfectly with the image focused one (i.e. the image is only manipulated to fit your taste after it's ascertained the content as a whole and on its own fits your taste, and not only a subset of that content, i.e. one or two brief romantic scenes in a movie that has as its actual subject matter something entirely unromantic).
All this and they still haven't done anything about the basic problem with the front page: I don't want to see things that I've already watched or that I'm explicitly not interested in.
> This is yet another way Netflix differs from traditional media offerings: we don’t have one product but over a 100 million different products with one for each of our members with personalized recommendations and personalized visuals.<p>What? If I go over to a friend's house, I don't think of myself as using a different product. I don't <i>want</i> to use a different product. This advice seems to go against everything I've heard about brands and recognition.
One practical point anyone implementing bandits should be aware of is time correlation. Bandits are awesome if your data behaves the same going forward as it did before. But when you change your A/B split on Friday based on what you learned over the week, then suddenly whether someone saw A or B is correlated with being the kind of user that visits on weekends. That leads to selection bias, which is a pain in the ass and screws things up. It can be time of day, day of week, and even season (I bet all of our jobs will be a bit unusual going in to this coming week, for example). The problem's present on many time scales.<p>You can deal it, but everyone should be aware of this before doing the naive thing of just throwing bandits at things. Sometimes some regret is worth the plain validity of an RCT, and sometimes not.
This thing is hilarious. I’ve noticed that Netflix far prefers to display black faces to me, and women’s faces to my wife. Personally I think they should spend their time making sure I can read the title of the show, but whatever...
Netflix gets huge props for paying their engineers handsomely, especially the infrastructure guys. And they still spend more on content acquisition than they do on payroll. The fact that their lackluster catalog costs them more than a staff full of $400k/yr+ engineers and executives sheds light on the real problem: it's too goddamn expensive to get the licensing rights to show a movie or television show.<p>My wife and I own two gyms and payroll is our largest expense by <i>multiple orders of magnitude</i>. Every business I've ever looked at or been involved in, payroll has been the largest expense, often by one order of magnitude or more. The fact that <i>licensing</i> still beats out Netflix's payroll is insane.
<i>Why should you care about any particular title we recommend? What can we say about a new and unfamiliar title that will pique your interest? How do we convince you that a title is worth watching?</i><p>How about, instead of overpersonalizing everything, you say "we recommend X because you liked Y and people like you also like X."
The whole "a machine decides what I watch"-thing scares me a bit. It creates a world where people only listen to the exact thing they like. Like a reddit/HN echo chamber, but instead of being designed for communities, it is tailored to one person. An individual echo chamber.<p>Of course it is nice to listen to music we love and to see movies that fit our past viewing experience, but what about putting some plain randomness in there too. Wikipedia has a "random article" button. The online content world is not random enough.
The "My List" is terrible, fix that. On XBox360 there is no gridded "My List", so I have to scroll through pages of a single tape. If I've watched all episodes of a series, have it filter to the very bottom until there is a new episode which I HAVEN'T yet watched, and only then add a red "new episodes" tag and filter it to the top. That's just the start of it. With all the ridiculous easy-fix problems, you have the audacity to post this crap? These kinds of show-off posts make me cringe at how poorly you, Netflix, are being managed. You're showing off the wrong thing! It's like if I hire a kid to mow my lawn, and I come back 2hrs later and instead of the lawn being mowed he shows me with great pride how he planted a fucking pineapple in the fucking back corner of the yard. I just wanted my fucking lawn mowed!
I'm aware of a general screaming into the void complaining here, so I'll add two different comments.<p>About the article:<p>Very interesting idea, and the Replay is a fascinating and in hindsight obvious way of being able to quickly test out new approaches without waiting for the data collection.<p>Screaming into the void:<p>If you're able to do all this, why do you still write "NEW EPISODES" on the thumbnails of shows <i>you know I've already watched</i>? Why do I have broken images <i>constantly</i> in my android app? Why can I not turn off autoplay of trailers (meaning if I don't want to have things spoiled I need to keep flicking around)? Why do you suggest I watch things I've 1. Already seen and 2. Told you I hated?
So... as useful as Amazon's 'products we think you will like', an echo chamber of previous purchases ala Google's search bubble. This feels reminiscent of Facebook's attempts at emotional manipulation experiments.
Well, since you removed rating by stars and replaced it with nigh useless thumbs system, you don't seem to be very interested in personalising what I want to watch. And it shows.<p>Since the recommended titles are clearly very focused on Netflix production, I just ignore any recommendations altogether and just browse all new arrivals every week...
I hate shit like that. I pretty quickly memorise covers and then it's agony to find anything when I have to read every single freakin' title in their super small UI :/ Do. NOT. Do. THAT.
Amazon Prime shows me rating from IMDB (or Rotten Tomatoes), which I find more useful in making a decision on what to watch, than these tweaks. For me, these are cool, but will not move the needle much.<p>Also I am not sure if I want a different "Poster" for "My Cousin Vinny". Ever.
Can they also do some explaining on how they get to those seemingly completely irrelevant match percentage scores? I have to _avoid_ things that have too high of a match, to the point that I don't think it's just a crappy match system but rather one that actively tries to push content on me that I _hate_.
Now let's talk how Netflix "personalizes" Most Popular and Trending titles - on 3 different accounts I've seen there 3 different set of movies in each of the hit lists.