It would be so easy: - Store series I‘ve watched, show me new seasons when they release. - neither does it reliably. - Don’t keep suggesting things I have watched, except in a „watch again“ category. Especially using new pictures, getting me to click on the same stuff only to realize that I have seen this already.
Given the billions invested in these UIs, how can they fail so miserably? What am I missing? This makes no economic sense … or am I just a weird edge case, and this kind of UI works for the majority?
The recommendation system is the thing that shows you stuff without you needing to browse for 20 mins.
I get the sense that they're A/B testing the wrong metric: time spent in the app. I'll often spend more time looking than a couple episodes of a show.
They haven't recommended me lockwood and co on Netflix, we stumbled on it because it was popular (and we binged watched it one night when both were asleep).
So I do think it sucks. Recommendation seems to consider similarity, but not "quality" : they give equal treatment to their products, and the consequence seems to be that they show often garbage mixed in with good stuff...
I watch high quality shows only - anyway I don't watch much.
And I have the exact same impression, it doesn't suggest me quality shows.
Often I find stuff on Reddit or other forums or through my own research then look for it on Amazon or Netflix and often it is there, but was never recommended to me.
This process for finding right movie takes effort and many aspects, while the streaming service only has my watching/browsing history and rating system which I don’t bother participating in.
I think it might get better if they become more intrusive, though.
It was much easier to choose a film to watch in the cinema (about 5 options) than to choose a film from the video store (500 options).
I've tried all sorts of "people who liked X also enjoyed Y" book and movie lists and it never seems any better than a generic list of decent books and movies.
One of my favorite movies is The Arrival. To me, it's one of the best love stories ever told. Yet when I meet other people who really liked the movie, that wasn't the main draw for them. Perhaps it was the intrigue of the time travel or watching interesting characters navigate a complex conflict or perhaps they liked the provocative questions that it explores.
Perhaps two people liking The Arrival says little about what they have in common at all, thus there's actually no data to go off beyond recommending both parties more critically acclaimed movies. I suspect that this might be the cold reality of recommendations.
When I meet people with seemingly the same taste, usually we exchange our trophies, eg my latest
This is going to hurt (series) - 2022 - UK
En man som heter Ove - 2015 - Sweden
All That Breathes - 2022 - India
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles - 1975 - BelgiumThe idea of a recommendation engine in these comments is generally a holy grail that can predict shows you will like personally that aren't necessarily well-rated by other people. Shows that don't simply show up in the platform's "critically acclaimed" section.
Though your post is a good example of why word of mouth recommendations are important. Netflix could have the best recommendation system in the world yet it cannot recommend any of the great shows it doesn't have to show you.
On youtube I put those in my Watch Later list.
For example, The Great Pretender is at 100% from critics but doesn't show up at all here.
I don't have time to shift out the good from the bad with Netflix.
In many cases, probably, either directly or indirectly. Payola is huge in the music industry and it’s why, despite never having heard of Harry Styles before, Apple Music started pushing him into every corner of their app for a few weeks after his last album release. I can understand surfacing artists who are likely to be popular with the general population. But this was clearly more than that. I’m sure it’s the same with video services. They’re paid to promote specific shows. It probably also costs them less to show you their own shows, so those are probably surfaced more frequently than shows from other companies, etc.
They suggest the same thing over and over under "different" categories. I they go try to force "popular" content on you.
One of the reasons I made this joke/rant project
The big events gets featured on the home page, for anything you are probably better of searching for directors or reading reviews, and then finding where you can see it.
They know they don’t have enough premium content to keep you as a subscriber if that’s all you watch. That kind of content usually costs a ton to create. So they need to have you watch filler content as well. And just like social media companies have taken advantage of the slot machine effect to increase addictiveness, so too do streamers. If everything you watch is good, you’ll end up watching less and be more likely to cancel.
You’re assuming that the goal of a recommendation algorithm is to recommend the thing you’d most want to watch at that specific moment. It’s not. The goal is to maximize their retention. It’s amazing how many of life’s annoyances become instantly explainable when you realize that your interests are not aligned with those of the companies you’re dealing with. Your happiness will always be a secondary concern to their profits.
My major problem with almost all recommendation engines and add-ons is that most of the time I want a recommendation that is orthogonal to the last thing I watched.
If I just watched a Japanese yakuza crime thriller I don't want you to recommend another Japanese yakuza crime thriller. Give me something as good as what I just watched but different. But that's me. Many people just want to watch Hallmark Christmas romances until their heads explode.
That's probably why I still use Criticker. Because it gives you one choice across multiple genres.
But part of the problem the algorithm has is that content is of very uneven quality. I look at very recent things that, a few years ago, I would have wanted to see, and scroll on by. The first Avengers movie? Kind of rushed but acceptable. Thor Love and Thunder? Garbage. (Not Netflix examples, just examples)
We want to see new content but have learned from recent experience that it's not worth the trouble. The algorithm simply can't understand that.
This lets it recommend across different services and removes incentives to promote their own content (I'm assuming someone at Amazon and Netflix is trying to goose their own stats by boosting the content they self create, or that they pay the least for)
A link (and a free recommendation for an interesting show):
https://trakt.tv/shows/giri-haji
It lets you do nerdier searches like by director, writer, actor and similar to openlibrary.org it has some weird old stuff too.
You can disable autoplay previews for all devices on Netflix' website in your profile.
Why do Apple and Amazon have search “ads”? They’re specifically trying to push content your way based on the how much the content creator/producer pays extra.
Even grocery stores do this - aisle placement is often something the food distributor pays for.
It says almost the exact opposite; they cache shows based on the algorithm, not that they recommend shows based on what's cached.
...come to think of it so does YouTube.
I'd love to be able to search for a particular genre and exclude everything that comes up.
1. It doesn't matter who likes what. Everyone's had enough of something.
FWIW, Spotify has similar issues in that they can't seem to figure out that new music from artists I'm "following" should be a slam dunk for the "new music for you" list.
Me, I haven't found a second The Wire yet, no matter how often a recommender claimed I have.
Baltimore and the same Wire producers and actors.
The only con is it is only one season.
I continually see the same bunch of shows when browsing that I will never, ever watch. They take up space and add to cognitive load and ultimately just annoy me each time I see them in the list.
I'm sure this weighting would also be very useful from an algorithmic recommendations view as well.
IMO, they don't use anything like that now for streaming. It's as others have said: this is what we want you to watch, not what you necessarily will like.
Amazon doesn't know who I bought something for so making sense of why I have bought 4 padlocks (my father in law), a set of sauce pans (wife), a light novel (myself) and rechargeable batteries (myself)
Its a bit the same as dating algorithms. If the algorithm was to good there would be no paying users of the service.
Now as an adult there's too much out there and too little time.
I suspect that this is a big part of why people feel there's nothing good to watch.
I sure have a much smaller collection than any streaming service, but it's actually all content I like, and I actually watch stuff instead of just browsing for 20min.
Edit: are you seeing alone or whit other
Doing this well seems to be surprisingly difficult for everyone. Facebook has shown me local news in Florida even though I'm British, live in Berlin, and have not even visited that state. Twitter thought I was interested in baseball, when I don't care for any spectator sports. YouTube is mostly OK for the long form content, but the shorts are 98% useless, and the adverts are… well, the current ad for me in the app is "Click this video = $1000" ad by "Beast Promo" with a cartoon that looks like MrBeast, which absolutely screams "scam", and last week it was something that looked like an anti-LGBT conspiracy theorist but my German isn't good enough to be totally sure.
Netflix, Disney, and all the rest? IMO Netflix is the best of them, but still not really all that amazing — the bar it passes that the rest fail is excessive focus on their own content.