[sfn42]

Man i really hate how people absolve themselves of responsibility like this. "It's not my fault I spent all weekend watching Netflix, it's their UI!"

No, it isn't. I love when they release full seasons at a time. I can watch them at whatever pace I please. If some degenerate can't control themselves that's their problem.

"But muh children" parent them. "But irresponsible parents" Netflix is probably the best case scenario there.

[techno_tsar]

I don’t interpret this discussion as about absolving oneself of responsibility. To be fair, what people spend their weekends doing is none of my business.

But it is true that Netflix makes UI decisions that encourage binging. They are not evil for doing so, because honestly, there isn’t anything wrong with binging anyway, but it’s indicative of the logic that is going to be used when it comes to producing their own shows.

[sfn42]

You could say they encourage binging, you could say they have good UX. I don't really know what type of functionality were talking about here, I'm thinking things like automatically playing the next episode, skipping intros etc. To me that's just good design, it's exactly what I want the app to do.

And I don't really see how Netflix benefits from binging. It seems to me that Netflix is more like gyms - they want customers who pay but don't use the service. The more you watch the more you're costing Netflix. If you pay but never watch anything you're the perfect customer, they're collecting free money.

If you just watch a full show in a weekend and unsubscribe that's really not ideal for them.

[StreetChief]

What if they are spending their weekends building devices to kill you? Does it now become your business?

[rain_iwakura]

No one is saying you don't have agency as an individual. This is an aggregate statement. In any A/B test you're interested in proportion of people converted who displayed increase in desired behavior. What you can't do is to go on an extrapolate this to any individual person, because that's now how statistics work or are designed.

You're taking an rightwing/libertarian approach (no judgement) where everyone has complete free will to do anything they want and make fully informed decisions. Rational actor and all that. Reality is quite different, and if you don't believe me you can peruse a ton of work in behavioral economics that show it.

Hell, I don't even need to go far to conjure an example: gambling addicts.

[sfn42]

I don't really know what you think I don't understand. I'm not arguing from the point of view of an A/B test, I'm arguing from the point of a Netflix user.

I don't care how others ruin their lives. There's a million and one ways to do so and if you try to remove one they'll fine another. If you choose to binge Netflix all day that's on you. If you choose to overindulge in drugs or food or whatever, that's on you.

By all means, help people who need it. I'm a strong supporter of all kinds of social safety nets. Free healthcare, free rehab, free counseling, free education, bring it on. It's the best possible investment a society can make, any society that ignores these obvious improvements is shooting itself in the foot. If someone needs and wants help, help them.

All I'm saying is Netflix (and similar) is great the way it is. It's a much much much better experience than tv used to be.

So when I see people seemingly hold them responsible for the behavior of their users, it honestly makes me angry. They're doing what we want. We should celebrate them for that, not criticize them. It's not their fault people can't control themselves.

And I fail to see what you think the motivation is. You seem to think Netflix is secretly scheming to make their viewers binge more - why? That would be like a gym trying to make their support members come in to the gym. Fact is if everyone went to the gym on a weekly basis they wouldn't have space for half of their members and they would go bankrupt. I don't know the details of Netflix's server costs but I'm betting that if everyone on there were to start binging everything they would go under as well. I don't see any reason why Netflix would want people to binge more. Not one. It would increase server costs, maybe also licensing costs, bring in zero extra money, and once people were done watching everything interesting they would unsubscribe. It seems much more favorable for them if people watched one episode per week and kept paying for years while hardly using Netflix servers.

But we don't want one episode per week, we want to decide our own pace. We don't want to have to choose to play the next episode, we can pause the show whenever we want to. We don't want to watch the same intro for each episode.

That's why we pay for the service - it's what we want. That's their incentive. Not making degenerates spend more in server costs per week than they pay per month. That's not good business for Netflix.