| I remember when Netflix started automatically playing trailers (or their own version of one) whenever you rested on a title for longer than a few seconds. And I remember looking up how to disable this feature but you can't. I'm sure there will be "well actually"'s for this but when I checked, you couldn't and I don't bother every day checking to see if it's there. I noticed the Netflix app on some older smart televisions don't have this feature which I can only speculate why but it's like an upgrade watching on those old versions. I think it's clever, it gets the content they paid for playing on television sets sooner. Trailers can draw people in to watch something they might not have the same way the beginning of a book can suck you in sometimes. And for users that don't like this feature, it keeps them scrolling. Cause every time you scroll over to the next title, the trailer stops and you reliably get about 2 seconds before the next trailer starts playing. So I started scrolling faster. I think what happened next was that I realized there was nothing interesting to watch much sooner than I would if I wasn't scrolling as fast to avoid the automatically playing trailers. Their original content comes out so fast and different people in my social circles are so excited about completely different ones and recommending them to me all the time that they just all seem the "same". Something about not having months of hype and advertisements, big reveals, franchises, etc. makes the Netflix originals feel like the product of an assembly line than legitimate inspiration. Like they're doing sprints for creative work. There was a thread a while back on HN about "Bright" when it came out. I remember there was a comment suggesting that the plot/setting/actors/world seems like it was generated with neural nets or something. That's how they all feel to me. Also the recommendation algorithm gets some things right about me. Most things probably. But it's noticeably more exciting to use when scrolling through someone else's profile. Because it's all new stuff. It's completely tailored for someone else. You're likely to find titles you wouldn't bother to search for specifically (typing in the title) but you're surprised it's on their and you want to watch it immediately. I like The Incredibles but I don't want to watch the Emoji Movie. So I think they're getting eaten from a couple of angles. original programming is soylent green, other media companies are taking their balls home, the interface is designed in a way that reveals the lack of interesting stuff quicker, their price went up. |