[saberworks]

I wish they would note which movies they've shown to me and I've chosen not to watch 1 bazillion times. Then stop showing them to me. For recommendations, isn't knowing what I chose not to watch as important as knowing what I've actually watched?

[rogerbinns]

They also bizarrely consider something that you have only watched a few seconds of (by accident) as watched and like to show recommendations by that.

Through human eyes, Netflix's recommendations are especially dumb for the reasons you and I give. Equally pointless is recommending things I have already watched in a genre instead of other items in that genre, and doing a filter bubble where they keep narrowing down to things like you have already watched.

[chimeracoder]

My favorite example of these "dumb" (to human eyes) recommendations happened to me a year ago: https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/423877639666167808. Note the reason Netflix recommended it.

I have no trouble understanding why a recommendation engine might yield this sort of result (e.g. parents sharing accounts with kids), but I'm a bit surprised that Netflix doesn't do a better job of inferring when different people are using the same account, even when the users don't keep their profiles separate explicitly.

The amusing part is that I've never even seen the show myself. My friend happened to watch a single episode of Law & Order: SVU on my computer while she was staying at my place... and now I'm probably on a government list somewhere after this recommendation!

[ZeroGravitas]

In reality though it's a good recommendation (for your friend, not you), it just seems odd if you have a particular mental model of what a recommendation should be like, which this violates.

As you say the demographic that watches SVU is likely to have kids that watch Barney and may not be aware that it's on Netflix, so this is a good recomendation for parents even if they won't watch it immediately after some late night SVU binge but rather the next day with their kids.

[dagw]

I remember Netflix recommending a whole bunch of random cartons and The Sons of Anarchy for my 4 year old daughter on her profile.

[cauterized]

Yup. Similarly, I wish they'd stop recommending entire sets of options based on a TV show I abandoned halfway through the first episode three months ago because it was so bad.

[yurymik]

Just go to https://www.netflix.com/MoviesYouveSeen and remove said show from your history. I do this every time our guests with small children watch cartoons, but fail to switch into "kids mode".

[IvyMike]

The Netflix UI is not completely consistent, so on some screens the option is not available, but in theory you can rate a movie as "Not Interested" for these cases.

[cauterized]

Haven't see a "not interested" option in the iOS app. Where does it show up?

[IvyMike]

Not sure on iOS. Here it is on the web interface:

https://imgur.com/O1DaihN

[MichaelGG]

I wonder if this is intentional? As in, if they can delay a user an average of X minutes per viewing session, they save? Or perhaps more realistically, have they determined that the terrible recommendations do work for some metric?

It's not like they can be blind to the problem, right? Or perhaps they are lacking content for people like us?

[icehawk219]

While this makes a good narrative (and as someone who is fed up with laying down to get comfortable just to have to get up 3 minutes later to confirm I'm still watching Futurama again it's easy to imagine), I suspect it's less sinister than this. If anything I'd suspect it's more likely that they're trying to boost, or give a final effort, towards certain things. I'm sure viewing numbers play into their contract negotiations so if something isn't doing well it's an indication they need to ditch it or an indication they over-paid. So I wonder if instead of it being them trying to delay you watching something it's just them really hoping you'll eventually decide to watch it.

[nilkn]

This is a classic example of focusing on fancy, clever things and forgetting about the obvious and simple wins.

[Ntrails]

They'd run out of movies pretty damned fast if they did that...

[sib]

Yes, they should - this is a well-understood use case in recommender systems.