[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.