A pile of mid tier content that i'd flick through before exiting out after an episode
Automatic previews
Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on
Horrible comedians that were akin to ted talks/lectures or made for people who don't actually enjoy stand up comedy.
Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting
Signing and hiring ex politicians
Searching is a chore and recommendations are nearly never useful. (Just to have some toggles around metadata like language/genre/public rating and a text box to fuzzy search through titles and descriptions?)
I cancelled my subscription a few years ago and I get more mileage and enjoyable content out of free apps like tubi, pluto, vhscast and peacock than I had in a long time with netflix.
> Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting
I can not stand how every "documentary" on netflix is actually an extremely opinionated political piece or true crime. And I usually agree with the political opinion, it's just incredibly annoying and divisive, and really it mostly feels dishonest.
Just suffered through their Three Mile Island "documentary" yesterday while working on something else. Apparently Bechtel operates a hit squad in Pennsylvania and everyone in a 5 mile radius got severe cancer. Out of four hours you get about 10 minutes of meaningful detail about the incident; the rest is headline rehash you can get on the first page of a Google search, emotional personal stories and a lot of self promotion.
All the true crime stuff is retired officers cashing in. So much for books.
> Out of four hours you get about 10 minutes of meaningful detail about the incident
Most documentaries have always been very low on information density. Even universally loved ones like something from David Attenborough are mostly a collection of disconnected (yet amazing) film snippets with a bit of commentary over the top. It's only gotten worse as narrative has become more of the focus.
There are exceptions, but when it comes to conveying meaningful information and detailed analysis youtube is far superior than mainstream documentaries.
Nature documentaries are a different beast from other documentaries. They are primarily about showing great nature footage. If you happen to learn something from it, that’s just a happy side effect.
>> Most documentaries have always been very low on information density.
Except everything done by the BBC. I am so sick of slow-paced american docs that inevitably swing into conspiracy rants and crying interviews. If there is a BBC doc availible on a subject, that is the one i will risk my hour of free time watching.
I too watched the 3 Mile Island netflix thing. The only fact i trust is the coincidence of The China Syndrome hitting theaters the week prior the accident, and only after i verified through imdb.
I want more historical documentaries like BBC's amazing The Death of Yugoslavia [1], a minute-by-minute breakdown of the collapse of Yugoslavia and subsequent civil war. It tackles a complex subject in a refreshingly dispassionate and informative way.
To be fair, they did interview a cartoon villain for balance.
There was no real attempt to compare the enormous toll of deaths and environmental damage of fossil fuels compared to nuclear. I kept thinking "did Shell commission this?".
I feel this is just true for every non-Ken Burns documentary I've ever seen and I find it kind of annoying. They always seem to have some axe to grind and just do anything they can to support that biased thesis with no room for caveats or shades of gray.
while I think most documentarists have a specific point of view which comes through, some of what netflix has been peddling is way over the top.
To name one, Seaspiracy[0] is not like your friend who's from the opposite side of he political spectrum, it's more the crazy guy with "moon nazis are coming" sign.
I think this is more a feature of people flocking to more shallow documentaries, which pushes them up the recommendation funnel.
Icarus was fantastic, for instance, but of potentially limited appeal (which is a shame, as it touches on a lot of topics of broad interest from doping in sport to political intrigue).
Icarus was absolutely amazing. I expected a subversive feel-good investigation of doping in cycling, but got something even more fascinating and disturbing.
There are myriad fascinating documentaries that aren’t about hammering home a point of view about recent political or social issues. For a very accessible list of recommendations, check out this CineFix video:
https://youtu.be/0nisJRrsNmc
This is quite literally not true. Source: I have a film degree, took classes on documentary film.
I posted this elsewhere but here’s a nice video with a ton of documentary recommendations.
https://youtu.be/0nisJRrsNmc
Both the “look at cool shit” and the “here’s how this simple looking thing actually is really complex and how it works” type of documentaries seem to mainly be on YouTube now.
YouTube is perfect for 10 minutes of content without having to try to stretch it to an hour.
> YouTube is perfect for 10 minutes of content without having to try to stretch it to an hour.
10 minutes has no relation to the complexity of the subject matter; 10 minutes is derived from the attention span of youtube viewers (and it varies a bit, but sub-15 seems to be the most common). An hour of content may be pruned until only 10 minutes are left, or two minutes of content may be stretched to 10.
Example chosen from the videos they're recommending to me now: Two documentaries from the same channel. One is about the Bob Semple tank, a wacky prototype from New Zealand designed by an amateur and never mass produced and never used. The other is about the 1960 U-2 spyplane shootdown over the Soviet Union, a serious diplomatic incident. One is 9:08 long, the other is 9:20 seconds long. What are the odds that both subjects just happen to have almost exactly the same amount of content to say about them?
Zero chance of that. Compare the articles on wikipedia, the U-2 shootdown article is 5x longer than the article for the tank. The two documentaries are the same length because this guy always makes his documentaries roughly this length because this is what the system rewards.
I likewise would like to watch a nature documentary once in a while which didn’t feel obligated to mention impending doom at least once every five minutes. If anybody had anything to say about said doom above a fifth grade level, I might watch that too.
I was surprised how hard it was to find nature documentaries that mostly showed nature and animals and not talking heads very concerned about the planet. I'm all aboard but it wasn't what I wanted to show my 1.5 year-old. I wanted her to see cool animals.
This was across a few platforms, had to really dig.
What would be the agenda of, say, talking about birds while not mentioning climate doomerism constantly? Is there some bird lobby we should be aware of?
Destruction of natural habitat is a problem, pretty much everywhere on earth. If you're watching a show about birds, it probably covers where they live. If you like seeing birds, you probably care about them being around in the next 50 years.
There is more to environmentalism than just climate change. I am obligated to point out that climate change will also change habitats, which will negatively impact many bird populations.
It's true but it just doesn't need to be interjected into every conversation, every film, every time something even moderately related comes up.
You can come up with negativity about how X is being ruined or is awful in some way or another for every X.
The almond milk in your coffee uses scarce California water supplies, cows are mistreated and use water and produce methane, coffee farmers are threatened by global warming and have these other environmental concerns, Starbucks employees are mistreated and have these union issues, you drove a car to get coffee and emitted this much carbon, coffee is addictive and has these awful side effects, strip malls and big corporations ruin local economies... and on and on and on. Pick a topic and you can ramble on about awful things as though being "woke" about it and mentioning it at every opportunity makes anything better.
It's cheap proselytizing for a certain morality and doubtful actual impact of mentioning it over and over in shallow ways that don't actually explain much to people who mostly already know. It's pointless and should be avoided. If you want to make a documentary about destruction of habitat, go do that, people will watch. But maybe stop trying to shoehorn it in at every possible opportunity.
To each their own. I think the whole context is relevant on a subject and would prefer understanding habitat and human impact when I’m trying to learn about something. To me, the habitat destruction is a crucial part of the story, and if you left it out it would be like teaching about life in America during ww2 without mentioning Japanese internments. Or discussing the 1960s without mentioning civil rights.
These things are critical topics necessary in order to understand a topic. It honestly feels a bit like you would prefer a space where the downsides or costs are not mentioned - I prefer to not elide the uncomfortable.
Edit - maybe it’s like a dinosaur documentary not mentioning their extinction? I could understand that, if it were a matter of prioritizing based on available time. Still, it does seem like the meteor event is pretty important when talking about dinosaurs. I guess we just see things differently.
If we want that nature to still exist in 50 years, then yeah, it's probably good to remind folks that they should care about fixing that doom. You could argue it were unethical to pretend the environment isn't in danger, or should we just be happy we got some video footage while it lasted?
I'll never be able to find it, but I remember watching an interesting clip from a nature documentary about cuckoo's breaking eggs or something. The narrator was talking through the scene, then abruptly "How could an all-loving God possibly..." It was narrated by Richard Dawkins.
While my Siri remote thing makes it a little nicer, the thing that drives me bonkers is searching for an exact title that I know is in their library and getting other results instead of it as the first few results items. Ridiculous.
I guess this is the classic attention economy dark pattern: we know that you already know about this title you are looking for, therefore we want you to take a look at these other things first, just to make you stick to the platform for one more title.
> Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on
:(
I know this is a tangent but it’s always sad to see representation treated as inherently political. Like this is the first time in my life I’ve ever seen mainstream shows portray wlw relationships. Or shows portray the reality of how common and casual sexual assault is. Or characters that that struggle with depression as more than just an emo/goth archetype.
I get that in some ways people tune into media to escape from all that but they become a comfort when they show your struggles and it turns out okay in the end.
It becomes a problem though when shows are catering to what 1% (or less) of the population looks like or is diagnosed with. This is what people are getting upset with. Representation is fine. But when every new show you turn on has half of the cast as a trans person, a non-binary person, and a whatever else it gets old. It gets old when historical shows and films have distorted facts or figures to, again, fill some quota. Having people in key roles where they would have never been introduced to those parts of the world at that time. Or, shoehorning some form of sexuality into a historical figure for no reason other than to check a quota box.
Gen-z identifies as 20% queer. Each new generation is more willing/able to live their truth. Wouldn't surprise me if we land somewhere around 25-30%.
In large part thanks to representation in shows and movies.
The us is rapidly diversifying too in terms of race, yet still even more under represented in media.
Glaad says only ~10% queer characters on broadcast, and was a decline from previous study.
Specifically comparing streaming netflix had 155 queer characters and HBO max 71. You do the math on the massive amount of original content on netflix compared to hbomax.
Is it truth or is it being force fed down children’s throats? How can the Western world go from a ~2% homosexuality rate to 20% in two generations? It appears we both have a different perspective on how we got here.
The parent is probably referring to the Gallup poll in February which found a significant uptick in Americans who identify as LGBT+.
Gallup doesn't make any bones about it, the bulk of the uptick was in Gen Z women identifying as bisexual. They also didn't hesitate to observe that the bulk of bisexual-identifying people eventually settle into a heterosexual relationship.
So in point of fact we haven't had a 10x increase in homosexuality, we have had a surge in young women who are statistically likely to settle into hetero relationships declaring themselves as bi.
In my opinion it helps nobody to muddle or politicize the statistics. For me it's hard to not draw the conclusion that heterosexual young people want to be allies and are declaring themselves as bisexual and perhaps experimenting a bit as a show of support. Seems more likely than the idea that a full fifth of the human population that has been sexually oppressed since the dawn of history, but it's open to interpretation I suppose.
> For me it's hard to not draw the conclusion that heterosexual young people want to be allies and are declaring themselves as bisexual and perhaps experimenting a bit as a show of support.
This makes sense until you understand the realities of the dating scene for bisexual women.
1. If you're young and have the highest rates of wlw your dating pool it's only 20% of women but 95% of men. So supposing bisexual women are choosing randomly among their dating pool it's not at all shocking they end up with way more men on average.
But it's not random and made even worse by
2. Women aren't taught how to approach other women and initiate a romantic relationship -- this is where the memes of "we've been best friends for years who are obviously pining over one another" and "useless lesbians" come from.
3. Women, having basically all experienced the discomfort (to put it lightly) of unwanted sexual attention from men, don't want to inflict that on others and so are more apprehensive hitting on other women.
4. And even if a woman does have the confidence she has to face the reality that 4/5 women she hits on will be straight and in general wlw are super apprehensive about hitting on people they don't already know are wlw. The rejection of confessing to your crush who turns out to be straight it mortifying and getting as is getting an "ew no" at a bar. It's fine, I'm fine.
5. Bisexuals in general tend to not hang around queer spaces as much.
6. Bisexuals tend to not have as much of a "gay aesthetic" as lesbians and so are harder to identify in social settings.
7. There are lesbians that wont date bisexual women because they have the same biphobia the rest of the world does, that they're straight women experimenting and will end up with a man.
This is a great comment, thanks. I can't find any fault with the logic of point #1 especially. Since there are a lot more heterosexual men out there than there are bi or lesbian women, bi women will be more likely to settle down with a man due to sheer numbers (and probably men are more aggressive at pursuing partnerships as well). Makes sense.
I still feel like there's something weird going on with the recent surge specifically in bisexuals. Most other LGBT identities are in the low single digits as a percent of US population and have ticked up slowly over time (L and G roughly doubled going from Gen X to Gen Z). But with bisexuals you have a 9x increase in the same time period. If it was just a matter of people in previous generations keeping their mouths shut because of discriminatory attitudes in society, you would think that bisexual identification would tick up at about the same rate as the other identities. Something else must be going on.
I went from being a straight guy with kids in a monogamous relationship to a woman, to an openly bisexual one with a family (that woman and our two kids) and a boyfriend. In large part I didn’t explore that other part of my life because I grew up in an era where things like my (very closeted, self-hating) dad talking about how faggots all deserved what they got and what happened to Matthew Shepard were basically unremarkable.
It’s amazing how far that kind of emotional and physical violence will go toward suppressing honest self-reporting of sexuality.
By having homosexuality violently oppressed, ostracized and ridiculed in the past, and slowly reversing that attitude towards it? People were literally criminals for loving people of the same sex...
A lot can happen in 20-40 years, and has happened in 20-40 years throughout history. Industrial Revolution, being a prime example.
We've also become far more interconnected in the last 20 years, which plays a large part - whereas before people may have kept quiet because they thought they were the odd one out they now know they aren't.
I do not agree that the industrial revolution is equivalent to changing sexuality within a society.
I could agree that modern technology and the industrial revolution are very similar. But even with that it has taken 60+yrs for our society to have a computer in the majority of homes after the Manchester Baby was created (and I think this change happened extremely quickly). And, analog and electromechanical computers go back even further. So, again, I think even these things have been a very gradual change happening over many decades once the leading technology was invented.
To further expand on my thoughts, to imply everyone was using ‘industrial revolution’ technology overnight would be heresy. I’m sure it took factories many decades to build and retrofit equipment including a technology run up to the revolution itself. With this said, you peaked my interest in this area and I have some researching to do this weekend.
The sexuality is not "changing" significantly, what changed is that it's getting less dangerous to 1. realize that you are not straight 2. not be straight 3. tell people (including polls) that you are not straight...
And if you go way back in history, homosexuality was totally accepted in places like ancient Greece. It's good that TV series show homosexuality as something normal, because it is. And if it helps to encourage more people to openly come out as either homo- or bi-sexual all the better.
> With this sentiment why is Saudi Arabia not more accepting of homosexuality then?
Because Saudi Arabia is a religiously fundamentalist theocracy and literally punishes people engaging in any activities perceived to suggest homosexuality with physical violence or death.
> Or, did their media push it down their citizens throats until accepted as is being done today.
You're using a metaphor that implies violent coersion. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "pushing it down their throats"? If you're referring to "overrepresentation"[0], can you elaborate who is doing it, why you think they're doing it (i.e. to what ultimate cause beyond "normalizing minorities") and why that is bad or objectionable?
It reads like you're trying to say a lot of things you don't want to spell out but I'm not sure what they are. Just to be sure: I'm a white European heterosexual man, you don't have to worry about offending me.
[0]: If you strictly mean demographic proportions, I guess is fair when applied to shows and films individually, though I'd like to see some numbers if you want to claim that this applies to Netflix's entire offering as a whole.
I think people wouldn't have so many issues with this if it didn't feel so patronizing. Sometimes castings feel more like HR checking all the boxes than representing a demographic, and on top of that the marketing will still typically put the white character's head front and center with the token characters on the sides. Los Angeles County where most stuff is filmed and produced is majority latino now. Let's see some movies where the cast is entirely that demographic vs. just one character in the swiss army knife of a cast demography for a change.
I think people object to the bad faith with which these actions are done:
- sharply criticizing the US on race, but hiding black characters in Chinese movie posters (eg, Star Wars)
- sharply criticizing the US on sexuality, but removing gay scenes from Chinese and ME versions (eg, Harry Potter)
To me, it’s like men who beat their wife because they’re angry someone at the bar was rude — but are too cowardly to confront him, so they take out that aggression at home.
Similarly, movie companies aren’t standing up to real bigotry in China or the ME — they’re coming home to abuse us domestically, over things we don’t even do.
I think that abuser mentality is abundant among the “Wokerati”.
Gen Z isn’t the world. US lgbt pop is 7% according to Wikipedia and that sounds high to me, maybe college kids experimenting with their identity in response to woke culture. I’d guess it’s more like 3-4%
Being gay or trans or non binary or whatever is not contagious. There is no reason for differing %, except the trend is very clear: The older the generation the fewer % are out.
It's because people are more supported and more able to come out.
More people aren't gay. More people are able to live their truth publicly.
* and based on your comment I will leap that you aren't a part of this community. The ugly truth is it is still very hard to come out for way too many. And dangerous. Look at the attacks on trans kids and talking about gender in schools.
How do you have any idea what's socially determined (a more neutral phrasing than "contagious") and what's not? It's not as if anyone's doing randomised controlled trials of RuPauls Drag Race exposure and gender self-identification.
I don't care why people do anything and I'm generally happy to let them do it, but come on. We have no idea what causes any given person's sexuality or identity to develop in the way it does. The most you can do is point to some correlations. Definitive statements like that are overconfident.
ROGD is a invention by an adjunct who asked parents on transphobic websites. It was never intended to represent the reality of transgender people. Please don't spread lies and misinformation -- you just have to perform a cursory glance online to find that out.
> Lisa Littman, as an adjunct assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, created the term based on an online survey of parents on three anti-transgender websites who believed that their teenage children had suddenly manifested symptoms of gender dysphoria and begun identifying as transgender simultaneously with other children in their peer group. [1]
She was captured by the ideology as a teenager and took testosterone for a year and a half before realising what had happened to her. And there are many others just like her.
I urge you to be more open-minded about this issue, and not baselessly accuse others of lies and misinformation, just for disagreeing with your opinion and having concerns about how children are being so negatively affected by this trend.
From context, I don't think they mean the phrase literally, it's really just a shibboleth of the progressive political movement in the US, with connotations of a person going public about a facet of themselves they had previously kept private due to fear of judgement from others or similar negative repercussions.
No, I did not. I am saying using language improperly invites the wrong kind of conclusions. Please respond to the strongest possible interpretation of my comment.
I have trans friends. We get along. I do not hate people for choosing an identity. That is silly.
I could get into the futility of binding ourselves to an identity (any identity) and how it perpetuates suffering but this is not the time or place.
I think it's important to also point out that comments like yours, drive-by tweet-sized derision, directly feed the outrage culture humanity faces today.
Oh come on, are you really going to look up data about populations expecting it to be low, and then because it doesn’t conform to your world view make up some reason why it must be wrong?
And the point about Gen Z is that this is where we’re heading. Millennials are 10% lgbt and growing, Gen Z is around lgbt 20% and growing. My all time favorite concert was Girl in Red who sold out a 5000 person venue in less than 30 minutes packed with young queer women in a red state. This is way way bigger than casual experimenting in college.
This shit is exhausting, no it isn't. It feels like it is because it's being talked about more.
1. You cannot just decide you want GRS. Not only is the process itself expensive and long, even starting the process requires two separate psych evals and a doctor sign off and you have be fully socially transitioned for at least a year.
2. The people who make it through the process commit suicide less.
> Those who wanted, and subsequently received, hormone therapy and/or surgical care had a substantially lower prevalence of past-year suicide thoughts and attempts than those who wanted hormone therapy and surgical care and did not receive them.
> Those who had “de-transitioned” at some point, meaning having gone back to living according to their sex assigned at birth, were significantly more likely to report suicide thoughts and attempts, both past-year and lifetime, than those who had never “de-transitioned.” Nearly 12 percent of those who “de-transitioned” attempted suicide in the past year compared to 6.7 percent of those who have not “de-transitioned.”
We have differing standards of backwards, wrong , and dangerous. Are either of us right? I think we are right in our own heads because we are individually seeing different perspectives. But the important part is to not silence one’s ability to discuss such ideas.
Look, I like music and just used it as an example of something that simply couldn’t happen two generations ago. The idea that artists like her can sell out shows in every city to a fanbase of queer women used to be unheard of.
If you want a less niche example my hometown’s pride used to be less than 1000 people in the 80’s and now is half a million.
In that case, hell yeah! She’s really funny and down to earth live. The whole crowd going nuts screaming “they’re so pretty it hurts” gave me so much life.
Sorry this thread is swinging so hard between folks who clearly have an axe to grind with the lgbt community and people who are shocked it’s still this bad in 2022 that I’m just defensive by default.
Yeah I just went to read comments (of course more crazy replies) after posting in the ACLU thread.
I was shocked again at the crap people on this forum are writing in that thread too.
Maybe you're right I shouldn't be shocked anymore. I've always known, but ben lucky enough not to have to experience very much, of the hate.
But it just feels so much worse. Not just on queer ness but on anything not white-male christian.
Or at least it's more vocal. Like why do these people feel the need to write this stream of crap on hacker news....
I can't decide which or both of these:
- Emboldened by leaders & media to allow them to speak out already held beliefs (the silent majority except that's a euphemism).
- This craziness has actually shifted, been created, and or amplified. Not just on LGBTQ issues. look at the ACLU thread (re lots of white males talking about overt discrimination because of diversity inclusion training and even more crazy q stuff like fbi false flagged jan 6 wth).
I think it's both.
On this topic for instance I very much doubt people knew let alone cared about trans girls playing on their high school sports team before we made progress to the point there were out trans high school girls and then it became a political punching bag. And now as a result some states and politicians are emboldened to pass dangerous laws that will cost even more lives.
As well as still being used as an offensive slur against gay people and thus not really an appropriate term to use in these sorts of discussions, 'queer' is so ill-defined that it could include pretty much anyone if they feel like it, regardless of actual sexual orientation.
For example, 'demisexual' people are included in this categorization, even though all it means is that a person prefers to form an emotional bond with their partner before engaging in sexual activity. Not only is there nothing particularly unusual about that, this includes people who are heterosexual. Who are not a marginalized sexuality by any means.
Are they really though? People are generally considered heterosexual by default if not stated otherwise, and most TV shows don't reveal this aspect for most of their characters or performers.
Gen X might be large Netflix consumers, however, they are not yet a large percentage of Netflix subscription payers. One problem for Netflix seems to be that their algorithms are favouring Gen-z content, however, Gen-z are not yet having much influence if the subscription gets cancelled or not
Why are you focusing on LGBTQ+ which, as some other posters have noted, appear over-represented in media (relative to their occurrence in the population), and not transracial people who receive effectively zero representation in media? Do you think it's acceptable to punch down like this?
The culture is more accepting of LGBTQ these days, so people are more likely to admit it. It's that simple - there's no need to try and psychoanalyze millions of people based on your political ideology.
But you've just done that. The answer is that it's obviously not that simple.
What we know is that there has been a large percentage increase in the number of people identifying as queer.
One hypothesis is that this is because there was previously a certain percentage of the population who was queer, but the societal cost for identifying as such was sufficiently high so as to prevent them from doing so. It is therefore the lowering of the societal cost for identifying as such that has allowed this percentage of the population that was always queer to freely identify as such. Your explanation is that that is the only factor and it is as simple as that.
The hypothesis that you're dismissing is that not only has the societal cost for identifying as queer diminished, but that it has actually transitioned well into a net benefit in many communities (i.e. woke Gen Z, and others). Therefore, many of the people identifying as queer are doing so not because they are inherently queer and now free to identify as such, but rather that they are not actually queer, but see social advantages from identifying as such. The claim here is purportedly substantiated by the fact that the largest increase has been in those low stakes identities such as bisexual or demisexual, wherein the person can basically continue to operate normally as a heterosexual while claiming the social advantages of being queer.
Now, as I said, the answer is that this is definitely both. I don't, however, expect you to discuss something like this in good faith, because you seem quite keen on reducing it to your pet conclusion. I'm especially not interested in what I'm anticipating, which are a myriad of claims as to how being queer is still a marked disadvantage. I'm sorry, but within the circles for which we've seen explosive growth in identification, it very much is not.
Over representation and privilege, eg, easier admissions to college or hiring. We haven’t ended bigotry, but under the guidance of Democrats and Leftists, created a new system of bigotry — using euphemisms like “equity”.
Which is the same reason White students lie about their race.
The underlying principle of equity is a decent one though. The problem is in how it's implemented: using a person's self-declared identity as an indicator of disadvantage, rather than their actual material conditions.
For example if universities would take factors like poverty and access to educational resources into account, rather than using racial identity as a inaccurate proxy for this, they'd likely achieve more equitable outcomes, in helping talented but disadvantaged individuals gain access to higher education.
> The underlying principle of equity is a decent one though.
> For example if universities would take factors like poverty and access to educational resources into account, rather than using racial identity as a inaccurate proxy for this
That’s equality — as in “equal opportunity” and we had that before “equity” was introduced.
By contrast, equity is a fundamentally racist idea which emerged from a collectivist authoritarian view of the world which tries to fix past wrongs between purported “racial groups” by introducing present discrimination to “correct” past discrimination.
This has been studied for decades. The number of people who have had some kind of sexual experience with the opposite sex is far higher than many expect. I recommend doing some more reading on this subject before coming to the (ridiculous) conclusion that people are claiming to be bisexual because they somehow enjoy feeling oppressed.
https://kinseyinstitute.org/research/publications/historical...
Actually, if you go to /r/teenagers many teens complain that LGBTQ+ has become a mark of status such that teens who proclaim loudest their bonafides as trans/bi/whatever are those who reap status.
Teenagers have always pushed against the prevailing narrative, it's how we get new ideas into the world. It becomes problematic when viral vectors of trends are disseminated at the speed of thought globally. Humans aren't hardwired for this. See also the recent HN post that more teens are depressed than ever. It has nothing to do with actual geopolitics: remember that the Cold War was extremely bleak for Americans and go back just a little earlier and you have World War II and the Great Depression.
The commons was once scoped, even in the early days of the internet because the world wasn't turned on. Now the world is the commons. So you have a million impressions and they trend toward the apocalyptic, even though the life of an American today (I will scope my observations to Americans because it's the US and Denmark I know natively) is vastly improved from, say, an American GI drafted into Vietnam or the kind of character portrayed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.
Teens are feeding on this firehose and thinking the world is ending and it's not just geopolitics. Now their memetic competition is global. The whole world's customs must be cast off and wholly rejected. Sex and identity too turn apocalyptic.
I think it's interesting that in a time where most of our deliberation is being mediated through disembodied media we are becoming disembodied, quite literally. We no longer identify as Male/Female/Human because the activities we take part in are physically formless. Our Internet identities are fungible, easily swapped unlike those in the embodied world. From this vantage, it's easy to sympathize with the desire to recontextualize identity in sex and gender to match the inner experience.
But from a Buddhist perspective, taking refuge inside another identity holds the same promise of suffering as the identity previous. And that's primarily what I'm seeing: self-immolation all across the Net. All of us burning privately and publicly to become the empresses and emperors of our own identity mountains. It's a race to the bottom and it's divisive. We are abandoning strata that are more inclusive ("we are all workers") for strata which are more exclusive ("we are black but you aren't black enough", "we are queer but you aren't queer enough”, "we are women", "no we are women", etc.)
I have more to say on a grand unified theory scale but I wouldn't be answering your question any more if I continued so I will stop here.
I think you're looking at it somewhat backwards. Teens are welcome to experiment with identity - that's what teens do and have always done - but I know a shocking number of adults who didn't truly understand their own gender identity until well into their 30s, 40s, even 50s. Part of the reason for that is that without the internet, there was no place to find discussion about it beyond the typical binaries.
I remember many peers going HARD into goth or punk territory as teens, and most went on to become a much more whole and complex version of themselves as adults with that goth or punk side informing but not dominating their identity. They cherish it though, for what it gives them emotionally, psychologically, and aesthetically.
With a richer available expression of gender and sexuality now available, I suspect it's reasonable to expect that many teens will lean into it to the same degree, but in this case understanding that gender and sexuality are both spectrums will help them feel like more complete versions of themselves later in life.
I wish my peers (and older generations) had access to this when they were younger, because it would have saved them decades of confusion and suffering.
The conclusion I tried to shine a light on is that the hunt for an identity is ultimately fruitless, unsatisfactory, without end. I "was a punk" insofar as one can be what was a dynamic process in the 80s.
The richest expression of identity, one that doesn't fit into the cookie cutters of music genre enthusiast or political firebrand (and the path of least resistance) is ultimately where one drops labels and responds naturally to the world as it is, moment by moment.
If we're all going to be turned on to the world and co-exist peacefully, equitably, well that's a world that stops drawing party lines and starts opening to an experience that isn't a scorecard of labels under your Twitter bio.
If that's going at it backwards, bring on the retrograde.
I think you're suggesting that the hunt for identity never ends so why bother? That's ridiculous. Just because we can always be trying to find ourselves doesn't mean we can't do things that get us closer to the ideal version. The point of gravitating towards extremes during our youth gives us experience and context for what those things can offer us for identities later in life.
> Any idea why so many would be bisexual vs fully homosexual?
Note that the 20% gen-z study also said "Gen Z women are roughly 3 times more likely than men to identify as LGBTQ", so a 5% : 15% split. And, you know, bisexual woman age 20-25 being LGBT is technically correct, the best kind of correct.
Someone is bi because of 'woke' politics? And because they desperately want to be victims?!?!?!
What, did the math textbook on CRT in 2nd grade turn them gay!?!
How can this shit exist on a forum like this. Insane.
I have zero confidence in the future of this country. how are we going to fight climate change or a number of other things when 40% of the country and a couple southern GOP Governors are spending all their efforts digging deeper into this drivel and actively legislating these viewpoints.
just insane to me that this kind of absolute crap has such widespread support. especially on a forum of hackers, highly educated, "smart" people
> Any idea why so many would be bisexual vs fully homosexual? This number is really what makes me believe it is more of the ‘woke’ politics being pushed. I view this as (potentially) individuals who have no group and who are desperate to cling to something that makes them a victim in this world.
Biphobia is a thing and it is a thing in gay/lesbian communities just as it is among straight people and your statement demonstrates why that is: straight people just see bisexuals as gay or lesbian and gay or lesbian people see them as traitors or cowards, especially if they live in a stable "straight passing" relationship.
Bisexuals aren't just "homosexuals who aren't committed enough". Research dating all the way back to Kinsey demonstrates that most people aren't fully hetero- or homosexual in whom they find sexually attractive regardless of what they identify as. If anything, "fully" homosexual or heterosexual people would be expected to be the exception if there were no hangups around these labels and identities.
> desperate to cling to something that makes them a victim in this world
There's a grain of truth in this perception but sadly it's tainted by American culture war bullshit. Teens and young adults have always experimented with identity and social roles so it's unsurprising they'll "try on" identities relating to themselves and that some of them will be whatever gets hotly debated today.
But this is very much a "now that we have stopped physically punishing children for using their left hand all of a sudden everybody is left-handed" dynamic to this, too. Social acceptance of left handed people led to a sharp increase in the number of left handed people followed by a period of stabilization leading to a steady proportional demographic because there were already left handed people living "in the closet" (knowingly or not) and they were finally able to "come out" once being left handed became socially acceptable. There were probably also some people unsure if they may have been left handed all along and giving it a try to see what felt more natural and then settling one way or the other, but left-handedness wasn't a "trend" or a "social contagion" or an "epidemic", just a way of being human that was previously suppressed and now normalizing.
And even today left-handed people encounter some discrimination or bias (intentional or not) in their daily lives. Utensils may still be needlessly tailored to right-handed people or left-handed alternatives may be unavailable simply because nobody considered the need for them or left-handed people are just expected to make do because they're a minority and shouldn't cause a fuss (and they can just try to use their right hand anway, right?).
But it would probably sound ridiculous to you if I said "I think kids these days are just claiming they're left-handed because they want to be victims" -- and I don't think it would have sounded as ridiculous when left-handedness was only just gaining acceptance and there was a sudden massive spike in the number of people claiming to be left-handed.
So here's a thought: why are identities like being bisexual (which if we can trust Kinsey mostly just means not making any assumptions about who you might find attractive by gender alone) considered "victim" roles? If it's because they're being treated badly, why don't we just stop treating them that way? So what if it means some kids who were "only doing it to be the victim" end up being caught in the crossfire and end up being victimized less?
I agree with your train of thought on most of your post. Though disagree with the below segment.
>And even today left-handed people encounter some discrimination or bias (intentional or not) in their daily lives. Utensils may still be needlessly tailored to right-handed people or left-handed alternatives may be unavailable simply because nobody considered the need for them or left-handed people are just expected to make do because they're a minority and shouldn't cause a fuss (and they can just try to use their right hand anway, right?).
Right handed people are roughly 90% of the world population. So, as a business owner, why would you cater half your production to something that only 10% of the population finds appealing? Which brings me back to my original point. Why over represent people so drastically?
> Right handed people are roughly 90% of the world population. So, as a business owner, why would you cater half your production to something that only 10% of the population finds appealing?
Wheelchair users only make up an estimated 1% of the US population. Would you argue businesses shouldn't try to make their storefronts wheelchair user accessible, e.g. installing ramps or wider pathways were applicable?
The point isn't just that left-handed people hardly find any products that actively cater to them, it's that many products explicitly exclude them by design. And alternatives are often hard to find and/or more expensive.
I'm not accusing any business of making a deliberate decision to be inaccessible. Inaccessibility is the default because the group is in the minority. But through statistical bias alone left-handedness effectively acts as a disability.
The question is ultimately one of equality of opportunity. Do you think that society should be shaped in such a way that statistical bias is compensated or do you think that society should reflect the statistical bias of its makeup (or option C: that society should be shaped by the biases of those with the political power and capital to shape it). If you think statistical biases should be compensated, you will necessarily end up with "dramatic overrepresentation" because the status quo is the consequence of many lifetimes of statistical bias shaping our society.
Note that there is no objectively "right or wrong answer" as this is a question about your values. And this is also what makes the question so polarizing as there's simply no way to pave over values that are the polar opposite of each other.
BTW this is ultimately the value difference that underpins the distinction between the political left and right, progressivism and conservatism, anarchism and statism: one proposes that hierarchies (i.e. power imbalances) are undesirable and should be avoided, the other believes in a (in Christian conservatism literally divinely ordained) "natural order" that is self-justified and desirable, and that any deviation from it or correction for it is a step towards societal decay (or literal "evil"). Most people tend to not use such an explicit language as they've never analyzed their own opinions (or "vibes" as the kids call it these days) in such detail but if pushed on it they usually steer one way or the other, though often with reservations that tend to be more pragmatic than ideological.
That's part of why we watched almost exclusively Korean and Japanese series and movies for the last two years. Got bored of the representation as a substitute for interesting content bs. They are fighting against different issues such as school and workplace bulying, arranged marriages or the cover up culture. The actors are also very good. On the minus side, they almost never use older actors in lead roles. Or actors who represent what most regular middle aged Korean men or women actually look like (hint: Park Jae-sang or Psy of Gangnam Style fame). I've even seen a show with a trans person and a black guy who spoke fluent Korean. Yet it all made sense, it was not just there to satisfy a representaion requirement.
Like when in decades past they'd make pre-historic films but characters had American accents or even just spoke English. Or a sword and sandals epic with very white actors, etc? Productions cater to an audience because they're ultimately commercial ventures. Streaming is more global than ever so it seems shrewd to incorporate a diverse range of actors to me.
So if representation is fine what do you want it to look like?
Because by your rules black people aren’t allowed to have fun fantasizing about being a pirate sailing the high seas in colonial England, a trans man can’t be in a WWII fiction fighting nazis, a woman can’t be in a medical drama about stopping the cholera outbreak.
So if they can’t be key roles (i.e. important at all to the plot) minorities should be relegated to background characters even in historical fiction?
Also what show has half the cast being trans or non-binary or whatever? I could use something interesting to watch.
I agree with the other poster. It’s not relatable. No offence to the minorities. It feels like forced messaging to the rest of us. Why represent only minorities in race, ethnicity and sexuality? Why not represent people such as war widows, people with skin diseases, mental disabilities, people with above average heights, obese people, etc.? For those of us not living in the USA, it feels like cultural imperialism. “We think this is the most important thing, so everyone should also think this is the most important thing.”
Shows produced outside of the US are generally better on the diversity of appearance front. UK content particular is much more watchable for me, as actors are closer to regular people you'd see on the street vs the very thin, athletic, impossibly white toothed American casting ideal.
I approve of the use of talented non-white actors in British period dramas, such as David Copperfield. It is obvious that the person's skin colour is ahistorical for the role. But it doesn't matter. We the audience are tacitly invited to look past this detail. It seems a little incongruous for about ten seconds, then just disappears into their fine performance.
See also Chernobyl being full of actors with British accents ... jarring for about 30 seconds, and then you don't even realise for the rest of the show, because it's just that good.
I've seen a making of commentary of Chernobyl, and the reasoning behind having non-accent actors was that a) it was Western production with Western casting and b) they wanted to avoid the old habit of portraying Russians as speaking bad English. I get both points, and it helped the immersion, because I speak English without a Russian accent.
And yes, Chernobyl is among the best shows ever produced. Only exception is the last episode, they could have focused more on the international reaction to it, and the fact that everybody wanted the total cost and impact of the disaster to be low. It was a choice, so, to focus on the Soviet perspective. Taking the Soviet trial for the last episode made perfect sense.
UK produced shows are going the same way though. Inter-racial families, asian/black detectives and police chiefs, people living in million pound homes despite having average income jobs, etc.
Maybe it's me but this doesn't represent regular people I see on the street?
I should clarify, I meant diversity of appearance in all aspects, not just race/orientation.
Casting in non-US tv shows, to my eyes, seems to give a better mix of ordinary looking people (fat, ugly, disabled, scarred, plain, old, teens-actually-cast-as-teens etc). This is just as important for representation, not everyone can be insta-perfect.
I think you've over reached here. 'regular people I see on the street' is a general term and shouldn't be taken too literally.
Inter-ethnic relationships in England and Wales rose by two percentage points between 2001 and 2011 (7% in 2001 to 9% in 2011).
Ten years later, I expect the figure to be much higher but nowhere near as portrayed on TV. Let's be generous and say the increase has been 50% - and is still a minority.
They increasingly do. As one very convenient fictional example ticking off most of those, Game of Thrones had a tall warrior woman, a dwarf, an overweight bookish sort, wheelchair-bound kid, dude missing an arm, a bastard or two, skin issues, etc. ;)
Funny enough there were black people on pirate ships and black people were around in Victorian England. Black people did serve in WWII as well. White people have a long history of white washing roles for Asian people e.g. in Kung Fu, Dr. Strange, Last Air Bender, etc. And inserting themselves in a ahistorical movies e.g. Last Samurai. Mocking black people in vaudeville minstrel roles (e.g. Mickey Mouse). I am not moved by these sudden appeals for accuracy in fiction.
tldr; I shed crocodile tears when I hear that white people are offended by race switching in modern period films.
The implication being that anything outside of the anodyne mainstream of cable TV must be a concerted effort to brainwash the public.
Netflix has many problems, the big ones being that they lost old shows like The Office and Friends, which hurts retention. And they also kill off promising new shows after 2 seasons to save money on renegotiating cast contracts.
If you read comment sections however, you'll get a very different idea. The problem is that Netflix is "too woke" and consumers are revolting. Never mind the fact that Netflix is a global network with millions of customers around the world, and thousands of shows from multiple countries.
There may be some truth in the "too woke for normie crowd" allegation.
Earlier this year, much before the bad news went global for Netflix, Reed Hastings said this about experience in India during an earnings call:
"The great news is in every single other major market, we've got the flywheel spinning. The thing that frustrates us is why we haven't been as successful in India. But we're definitely leaning in there,"
The general opinion in India is that unlike Prime Video India and Disney Hotstar (Disney Plus' Indian avatar) which created a lot of good local content which served the interest of masses and hence achieved success, a lot of Netflix' local content mostly served the tastes of a sub-segment of the well earning, well traveled elite crowd (read "woke") from the bigger cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Apparently this was because the local producers came from the same group and were not tuned to the tastes of the country at large (or even the affluent segment at large). Many of them have since been fired and Netflix India has also gone ahead and reduced monthly subscription for the standard plan to only INR 199 and a new mobile only plan for only INR 149 (~ USD 2). Has not made much of a difference in the past few months though.
There's only so many times you can rewatch The Office and Friends. It can't be a major ongoing revenue source.
> brainwash
This has been going on forever. Check out "The Brady Bunch". Every episode revolves around a heavy-handed moral lesson. Go back even further and you've got the Hayes Code. Hollywood has always seen itself as morally superior to the rest of us, and hence entitled to preach to us.
Though with all the scandals emanating from Hollywood, one wonders how they hold on to that moral superiority.
The whole idea of representation was that minorities were unable to enjoy media because it didn't contain characters that looked like them or that had life experiences that they could relate to.
So Hollywood bent over backwards to shoehorn in representation everywhere they could and now they find that the majority of people don't like these shows and movies that are all about people who don't look like them and have experiences they can't relate to. This is surprising somehow?
Personally, I never had a problem enjoying a good story regardless of how different the characters are from me, but it seems a lot of people only want to watch things about themselves. The studios also seem to put a lot more emphasis on checking the correct boxes rather than telling a good story.
> So Hollywood bent over backwards to shoehorn in representation everywhere they could
> The studios also seem to put a lot more emphasis on checking the correct boxes rather than telling a good story.
What you’re describing is the paternalistic racism that Democrats have never confronted, in Northern and Coastal cities.
A charitable interpretation is that people don’t like racism:
- anime is popular; Korean TV and films are popular; Chinese movies are popular; Bollywood movies are popular; etc
- treating race as a defining characteristic is not, as in Hollywood
People want a good story where the culture and people are faithfully represented in a reasonable way. They detest products which treat the race of the person as defining or which “paint by numbers” with race.
That is, people on average are rejecting Hollywood because it is more bigoted than they are.
I’m willing to bet, however, that most people that have ever been on tv look just like you, though. Even in the last 5 years, most people on tv look just like you.
> Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on
People said the same thing in the 60s when Star Trek had the nerve to have a representative crew aboard the Enterprise and when they showed an interracial kiss.
It's different these days though. Much more emphasis on whatever fresh sexual and gender identities happen to be in vogue right now, apparently for no purpose other than to preach about them to the viewer.
Whereas in Star Trek, it made sense that a future spacefaring crew would be made up of people with origins from all different parts of the world. This was entirely consistent with the overall storyline.
Complain about terrible storylines all you want but now isn't must different from what it was in the past. People considered interracial relationships and being gay in the past the same way you consider "fresh sexual and gender identities happen to be in vogue right now".
> Much more emphasis on whatever fresh sexual and gender identities happen to be in vogue right now, apparently for no purpose other than to preach about them to the viewer.
People were been just as dismissive about interracial kiss in the 60s. About gay relationships in the 70s and 80s.
I think it's more that Netflix just has poor execution on a lot of shows.
When telling a story on TV, you often want to cut the story to the bone such that it can be understood quickly and entertain without confusing the viewer with side tangents that aren't central to the story.
If a non-story-essential element is too prominent then the viewer might feel it's boring
Sad, really; Whitaker nailed the role as the Doctor. At least the most recent season made up for it. The previous season's attempt at giving everything a woke angle simply turned out to be really, really boring sci-fi.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Like, when exactly did that happen? Most people who enjoyed the new show and dropped out did so with the Thirteenth Doctor (Whittaker). There were some episodes that made me roll my eyes (e.g. the Rosa Parks one) but personally I mostly I lost interest because of the pacing and the IMO blandness of the characters and the lack of chemistry between them (again, this is just me).
But the show was pretty much about identity for most of its first ten series, not to mention that you could say that there is an inherent aspect of transness to the character of the Doctor (especially their experience with other characters familiar with past incarnations of the Doctor). The show plays a lot with gender, especially around the timelords.
Heck, even on a purely literal textual level the show is extremely LGBTQ from the start. Captain Jack Harkness is openly bisexual (or pansexual) and flirts with the (male presenting) Doctor who is clearly intrigued. The "love triangle" subplots largely play out more as depictions of polyromantic relationships rather than sources for drama. Even without featuring any clearly trans characters, the show is fundamentally queer if you even barely scratch the surface of it.
I guess if you want to consider the show overly "woke", that started as early as when Martha Jones became a companion because her race became relevant to the plot. The only thing that changed with the newer series is that the writing IMO got sloppier.
I don’t remember Harkness, love triangles, or sexuality pre-reboot Doctor Who. I don’t recall any Doctor having relationships with companions pre-reboot, yet the opportunity to showcase that was always possible. It was a sci-fi kids show that didn’t include love, but still had great stories.
So you dislike the entire new show starting with the Ninth Doctor, not just the more recent series. That's important context. FWIW I'd argue that the Eight Doctor also had a heavy romance subplot, so I guess your cut-off is 1989.
That's all percectly reasonable but I don't see how this has anything to do with the discussion related to the article, given that the new Doctor Who show started in 2010, Netflix only started doing its own productions in 2013 and most complaints about "too much politics" tend to be about media produced in the mid-2010s onwards (the Ghostbusters reboot was released in 2016).
People are saying that right now about the new Star Treks. And I don't think most disagree with the politics/social commentary, it's just so in your face/contrived that it ruins the show for many.
Good grief, no need to take the comments of others in bad faith. What folks mean by "in your face", is the fact that these shows will throw in a bunch of woke characters as a substitute for actually writing a good show. Instead, they'll say something like "Look, we have a disabled multiracial transsexual lesbian as a character, isn't our show great?".
The reason all the Star Trek comparisons in this comments section are so wildly off base is that Star Trek was actually a well-written show with interesting plot lines and interesting characters, that happened to have a diverse cast. Most of what's on Netflix now is just junk that that thinks if it pushes the cultural envelope far enough, no one will notice that most of the shows are little more than clumsy preaching.
They have one gay character and a non binary character. The one character has (had) a trill symbiont. The trill host has always been shown as not being heterosexual in TNG in the 80s and Deep Space Nine in the 80s.
Again even back in the 60s with the original Trek “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, they showed two races fighting because one was black on the left side and white on the right side and the other race was just to opposite - to show just how dumb racism was.
You’re comparing a reaction to something that was common but only recently televised to something that’s extremely uncommon and over-represented in their programming 20x compared with reality.
I think you underestimate how much things have changed to make that claim: it wasn't until 1996 that the majority of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Below 20% of Americans approved of it when the Star Trek kiss aired.
A larger percentage of Republicans support transgender rights today than Americans supported interracial marriage when in 1969. More Americans support transgender rights today than supported it 20 years after the Trek kiss aired.
Interracial relationships weren’t that realistic in the 60s and there were laws in the south against interracial marriage. It wasn’t until the 80s that laws against “sodomy” - ie homosexual relationships - were overturned. It was always those “liberal Hollywood types” pushing an agenda…
But netflix is making historically white characters black for no good reason.
If some ruler in middle age europe was white then why do they have to change that just to showe more black people into the show or whatever. They should make original shows and stories where they can do whatever they want
Only good (original) thing coming out of NF is the first season of House of Cards and Bojack Horseman. Definitely never been worth a monthly subscription.
Narcos and Narcos: Mexico were both good. Dark, Katla, Frontera Verde. I guess those are all non-English speaking, or in Narcos' case, mixed language. As long as you don't hate subtitles, there's been good stuff. Russian Doll, Big Mouth, and Arcane were all pretty terrific among English speaking. Brand New Cherry Flavor wasn't mind-blowing, but more than worth watching. Same with Stranger Things. That's just content from the last couple years.
Netflix honestly has plenty of good content. You just have to not use the in-app recommendation system at all and find content through traditional sources, i.e. word of mouth, professional critics, and industry publications, then search directly. As long as they allow you to find a title by name when you already know the name, they're fine.
* Russian Doll S01
* Stranger Things S01
* Squid Game S01
* Glow S01-02
* American Vandal S01
* I Think You Should Leave S01
* Mindhunter S01-02
There's also a lot of content aimed at different audiences that is considered good, but not for me (Gilmore Girls reunion show, Shadow and Bone, many romantic-oriented shows, etc.).
I'm not saying that's exclusively the good content, and I have also canceled my sub, but I think you're underselling it a little bit. Bojack is, without question, my favorite thing that's come out of Netflix.
I like it, but Chef's Table uses "that one simple trick" 5x an episode where 18th century orchestral music is overlaid in a montage using all the available camera and editing tricks, showing someone literally is just making a cookie.
Chef's Table is mostly just food porn overlaid with chefs potentially musing about freshness of ingredients. It has nothing insightful to say about running a restaurant, about making food, or anything else. Which is a shame, because I think a more naturalistic, less pretentious view into the daily workings of restaurants could make for a nice show.
So the rest of the reply chain here is...certainly something. I won't comment on most of the points, but I will just point out - you can now disable automatic previews; I believe it's in your profile settings.
As for whether Netflix is still worth it...I honestly don't know, might need to discuss with my family.
God the tone of your comment just set me off. What's the ugly sentiment and uglier mind? Just put it out there, whatever -ism you're about to accuse the parent poster of. Let's hear it without your cute little innuendo.
This is the exact kind of bullshit they're calling out. Netflix stuffs pop politics into every show they can and is relentless with it. They want to make sure their viewers are getting the "correct" politics, and not the "ugly sentiments".
Maybe, just maybe, some of us want to just watch some TV and not have whatever today's stupid social battle is shoved down our throats.
There are some good ways to have a political message in your content, and there are terrible ways, especially if it feels "shoe-horned". I'm not GP and am not precisely sure what was meant by pop, but I took it to mean "un-nuanced, insincerely-held".
There are people such as yourself who seem eager to label "ugly minded" any questions about the quality of content that promotes A Message even if the Message is simplistic. If a mob like that arises, now we have a ratcheting-up of bad content and simplistic politics.
If pop politics is something considered "insincerely-held" then how can the viewer/audience decide if something is pop politics.
I got into an argument once with a few people a while back about gay rights and they dismissed my points as pop politics but it's hard to argue that you're being sincere when they don't believe you. And there isn't much nuance that you can give to the topic.
There's always nuance, irrespective of whether some position is right. Gay rights, for instance: what are you talking about, exactly?
I don't know what happened in your conversation to make your interlocutors doubt your sincerity, but perhaps it had something to do with being unable to inhabit the point of view of someone with whom you disagree? Did you listen to them, or sputter and get angry?
For me, it's hard to overstate how much I support the right of people to be gay and have homosexual relationships (which are not the same thing, but I support them both). My perspective is that full social acceptance about homosexuality is a no-brainer. An ideal world would place no special emphasis on it, any more than a straight relationship. To my mind, having any negative opinion about it at all is reactionary and ignorant. And yet, there's nuance.
The State should have no opinion on nor legal category of marriage at all, either, IMO. "Gay marriage" should not be something that's legal or illegal, because neither should "straight marriage" be. Strictly, I don't support "gay marriage", not because of the "gay" but because of the "marriage". Imagine someone who agrees with my stance on "gay rights" but without nuance screaming at me because I don't support "gay marriage".
My support of homosexuality is part of a broader support for consent in general: just as no one ideally should have a say about whether 2 men have a homosexual relationship, no one ideally should have a say on whether sexual or romantic consent involves exchange of money. Every argument for homosexuality (or marriage) can also apply to prostitution, and it's unprincipled not to recognize that. Imagine someone without nuance screaming at me because I'm comparing homosexuality to prostitution.
Let's see how far down the rabbit hole goes.
The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is a small sect that gets a lot of publicity in the United States for holding protests against homosexuality, involving holding up signs that say "God hates <homosexual slur>". It's hard to overstate how much I disagree with them about homosexuality, or anything, really, as an atheist. But what is the deal, there? Are they just homophobes? Is there rampant, latent desires amongst the congregation? There are lots and lots of articles talking about what they believe, and their Wikipedia page labels them as a hate group. But what do they say themselves about what they believe? Let us use them as an object lesson, to see how one might come, not to agreement, but at least to understanding, one's political opposition.
They are a modern church, living in the 21st century, and they have a website. I won't link to it, because the URL has a slur, but I spent quite a lot of time on their website, inhabiting their beliefs, laying aside judgment, just to really understand what's going on. It's hard to summarize it all, but a single quote from their FAQ is instructive:
Q: I was taught that the Bible says that God loves everyone. Why do you say that God hates people?
A: The Bible teaches that God hates people. The notion that "God hates the sin but loves the sinner" is unbiblical. For example: “Thou hatest all workers of iniquity.” (Psalm 5:5). Here is a list of additional Bible examples of the hatred of God towards people....
To understand - and remember, this is not about understanding WBC per se, but about exploring this concept of nuance even about something we both agree fervently - to understand what the WBC is saying, here, it's necessary to really inhabit this idea that: a) The Bible is a guidebook on how to get into Heaven. b) God, not humanity, defines what is good and wholesome c) The consequences for misinterpreting this guidebook are literally catastrophic.
That you and I do not share these beliefs is not the point. That we might find them abhorrent misses the point. This is the world that these people inhabit: God is a real and terrifying force that will torment you for all eternity for even slight transgressions of a cryptic, contradictory set of rules. To their mind, these protests are a kindly, generous act, to literally save people from eternal torment.
These congregants live their lives under the thumb of a cruel, capricious, supernatural tyrant. I, personally, cannot bring myself to feel anger towards them. Only genuine horror and pity, that they inhabit such a world view.
Now, circling back to the beginning, a rhetorical question: Can you, yourself, describe why you support "gay rights"? If you cannot get beyond "there is no nuance, it's just right", it could be that you come off as insincere because you accept no challenges to your perspective. Are you afraid that you might hear something that would change your mind? If not, be generous to your opposition, hear them out. Inhabit their perspective. Mull it over. There's really nothing to be afraid of.
It's telling that the comments calling out people complaining about representation are all greyed out. Sorry.
HN has been surprisingly me lately in the viewpoints people are willing to say out loud on a public forum. or at least minimally a few vocal commenters.
IDK if it's just feeling empowered not to hide anymore or perhaps progress we've made is creating stronger 'protective' reactions. It's scary though.
If it scares you that people are willing to air their discontent about not liking preachy political messages in their entertainment, I'm not sure what to take from that.
Personally I think having a diverse set of views in a public forum was the whole point of having public forums.
That person said they were scared by other's views. And implication I took from that: those scary views should not be aired.
I'm not interested in having one-way discussions, especially if it's run by "the most scared wins". Clearly there's bounds to that, but the view expressed above was not something I'm interested in, and I don't think I'm alone.
The comment in question is: "Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on." It's right here, please go have a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31278073
They absolutely did not mention of black or gay people. You are straight-up wrong about that.
It's nearly impossible to take the content of your message seriously, given the way you mischaracterize their actual statement.
Kinda weird to complain about being "scared" when the subtext in your own post is that other people should be scared of voicing their opinions on a public forum.
> HN has been surprisingly me lately in the viewpoints people are willing to say out loud on a public forum. or at least minimally a few vocal commenters.
Me too, except I conclude that HN has finally managed to somewhat pull their heads out of their asses.
Sure. Comments can only go to iirc -4 before they get killed and stop taking downvotes, and flagkills don't affect karma directly at all. So it makes sense that, from your relatively few comments that remain visible to the vast majority who don't turn on showdead, you'd see a signal that's skewed artificially high. I expect that'll remain the case right up till the ban.
I'm just here to say how nice the tcp/ip tuning team is. The content may be a battle zone but their internet technology is focussed on tcp optimisations which make sense.
They have amazing instrumentation in the kernel, and they give back to FreeBSD.
I don't work for them, I have met them. Nice guys.
Netflix had great streaming tech years before anyone else did. I wonder why they decided that the right move was to compete on content. If they had just set up a platform where any content provider could sell their content (on a monthly or one-off basis) for a small cut like 15%, they might have become the default "TV store."
They had to. Consumers don't care about streaming tech; in their eyes all the services are the same levels of fine. They do care about content and once content producers started rolling their own streaming services, cutting Netflix out, and pulling their content, they had to do something to keep their shelves looking stocked.
It depends, Shopify for example is providing eCommerce technology to shop owners. And they do great. Netflix could have gone that route.
Contrary to Shopify so, streaming lives of content. Which means the only reasonable customers for Netflix tech were content owners looking at their own streaming service (not that many around pre-Netflix, Amazon developed it's own tech) or content creators (excluding big studios, this market was and is owned by YouTube). I think Netflix didn't have much of a choice, and they did very well, didn't they?
Anecdata: Most of my current streaming is happening on Netflix (original content from Spain, Scandinavia, Poland,... stuff you don't get somewhere else) or Disney+ (incredible how deep Disney's catalogue is, especially for older films like Alien). Prime Video fell behind quite a bit on the content front. Netflix has an opportunity so, IMHO, in cooperating with local studios and producers in smaller countries. Something neither Disney nor Amazon seem to be capable of doing.
This isn't true. I and many others really had a hard time with a few. HBO Go, for example, particularly at the beginning, was too shite to use. Had tons of content I wanted, and I never used it. But I agree that once you pass "good enough," there are diminishing returns.
They had to focus on content as they feared other studios would start their own streaming studios and took their content away (as mentioned by the article).
What you’re describing would not work in the movie industry, which is very contract and license heavy.
This is basically how they started, as they licensed a lot of content for the platform to begin with. The content providers looked at that juicy monthly revenue and decided they wanted a slice of the action, and now we have Netflix, hbo max, Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon prime and probably a few others I've forgotten. Lots of content, as long as you don't mind subscribing to each one individually!
That might result in legal problems (see FCC vs Turner cases) or unfavorable terms for the company (i.e no incentive for networks to keep shows on Netflix).
One thing I appreciate Netflix for is atleast they are willing to do the bare minimum and give me 720p on Linux. I am also an Amazon Prime subscriber but Amazon is literally forcing me to pirate their shows because they refuse to serve more than 480p on Linux. Was trying to watch Jack Reacher last weekend and the quality was so bad that it was probably 360p, gave up after 3 episodes and ended up torrenting the season, which is a shame because I want to support shows I watch so they get more seasons.
In 2021 streamers should be supporting atleast 1080p for Linux but if they can't I can live with 720p like Netflix does, but serving 480p is just disrespectful and looks awful on any decent size modern monitor.
Of course the irritating thing is that all of their consumer devices are internally Linux as well, including the FireTV's that happily stream Amazon Prime in 4K.
But you don't even have that choice. I'm OK with running binary blob drivers on my Linux machine (if they work).
And since I'm running a reasonably recent GPU, it could be conceivable that all decoding is done on the GPU itself and sent directly to the monitor, which supports HDCP.
I begrudgingly accepted this sad future and got a smart tv. The software is as awful as I assumed it will be. But every single platform trusts LG and just streams 4k without me even needing to keep up with updates.
Please vote with your wallet and never purchase a "smart" TV. They're cheaper because the data they harvest from your network (and the always-on microphone) is extremely profitable.
As the parent alluded, you can just not respect copyright. They can either give you a decent experience, or they can be content with only having uneducated dummies as their customers. Alternatively, you can just not watch their shitty content.
This chart [1] was making the rounds a while back. Whether you totally agree with its methodology or not, it certainly suggests that many people consider a huge swath of Netflix' content average at best.
And for someone like me who doesn't watch a huge amount of video, that's not a great look. Tastes differ of course but my tastes aren't that out of the mainstream. And I'd rather a streaming service had a modest number of high quality shows than a whole lot of meh.
I don't know about other people, but finding something to watch on Netflix is frustrating, there's so much poor quality shows. The recommendations are not good (tbf that's most streaming services) and there's no option for granular filtering. For example, I hate dubs, I would like to pick shows where the original audio is some particular language, I don't get why that isn't there?
In contrast, on HBO Max / Disney+, usually there's far less content but since the quality is better you can easily pick something to watch.
I agree, netflix might be too embarrassed by their catalogue to show people a simple A-Z listing of everything they have, but I'd absolutely watch netflix more often if they did. Scrolling through the same shows I'm not interested in over and over across their multiple random/useless categories takes up way too much time.
Every so often I'll go to search and enter random 2-3 letter combinations because I usually find a bunch of stuff I'd like to see but Netflix has been hiding from me.
I have to wonder how much of this is to favor cache hits for streams over picking the bytes up out of storage. That is, if a bunch of people are streaming a show, it's easier to add a few more and reuse the edge cache. Most viewers won't go beyond the recommendations, so the back-catalog pulls are less frequent, and less pressure on the infrastructure.
> how much of this is to favor cache hits for streams over picking the bytes up out of storage.
Netflix's catalog historically has been small enough that it can fit within a single rack.
With 8Mbps [0] bitrates for 4k (okay, add 50% for transcoding to lower resolutions, so let's call it 12Mbps), we get about 5.4GB per hour of video. At 360TB for a single 2U Open Connect storage device [1], that translates to 67k hours of 4k video.
This article from 2020 [2] indicated that US Netflix's catalog was about 36k hours. Even at 50% growth since then it would still comfortably fit on a single machine.
You can find it in the web UI by clicking a TV or movie page, and then choosing Sort A-Z. The reason it's so buried is that it's pretty useless. Most people don't want to scroll through a hundred mostly bad shows starting with punctuation symbols and numbers.
Agree with you that it would be lovely if Netflix had more fine-grained controls.
The UI/UX is the crux of the problem for me, and infact, the same problem with Amazon Prime.
They both have fantastic shows and films, I know because i've seen some of them, but they NEVER seem to show up in app. Instead, I get endless scrolling of the same shows I skip over every time.
The algo doesn't seem to learn (Not to say it doesn't but the perception). The UI doesn't have enough unique elements to drive the algo. What I mean is if I tend to watch 20min comedy shows between 9-11pm. Create me some blocks of shows that meet this criteria. So a rewatch, continue and a new show.
They need to allow the customer to feed in more data. Integrate IMDB, Trakt etc and farm this data to improve recommendations, even if they are shows/films outside of their catalogue. I have a feeling that the lack of "I've seen this before outside of Netflix" button and the simple thumbs up or down doesn't provide the depth in the data.
I get why they moved to the current rating system, the thread on here discussing it at the time was actually really insightful for someone who was learning algos at the time.
We subscribe to Netflix, Disney, Binge, Prime and previously Stan. They all have annoyingly poor interfaces in one way or another. It's quite amazing that not one of them has excelled at allowing you to find something you might want to watch.
Netflix was doing fine as a dvd rental platform, hell netflix was doing great, they then made a jump to a streaming platform and did well there. The movie production studios saw how well netflix was doing and so started making their own streaming platforms preventing netflix from streaming their movies. so netflix in a desperation move said "fine" then we will make our own movies.
And so here we are, despite living in the post movie scarcity future you can never watch the movie you want to because it is on a different streaming service.
It used to be even better, they had user ratings in early versions. Hiding content or forcing users to watch things is extremely bad. they got away with all this because they had such a huge headstart on 90% of online streaming. There were no other options. Now... those things are starting to sour out.
I remember finding great b movies and content with user reviews.
> I would like to pick shows where the original audio is some particular language, I don't get why that isn't there?
I’m somewhat confused by your sentiments here, if you search “French”/”Spanish”/etc Netflix will bring up a list of movies and shows in those languages, it’s one of my main uses of Netflix these days.
This is probably a very unpopular opinion but at a certain point I blame the user (i feel like blame is the wrong word here) . At a certain point a UI can’t cater to everything and a user needs to experiment. I feel like that’s something that’s been lost this past decade. User experimentation.
“I hate autoplaying videos!” If you hate it so much why not going it he settings and turn it off. A quick Google search will help you.
“I want an A-Z list for Netflix” Again a quick Google search will show you a way.
Eyeballing the chart it looks like the percentages for each section are roughly the same for each service, Netflix just has a lot more shows so they fill in the "just average" box more than the other services.
Yeah, I was confused by GP's phrasing as well. Maybe I'm taking the word "average" too literally and this is just one of those "5 stars good, 4 stars okay, 3 or fewer stars is garbage" things, but wouldn't the expectation be that the average show is...average? Unless you think that Netflix is has some reason to be more likely to make good shows than anyone else, it seems like their shows should be on average, average.
That graph isn’t showing that. Sure, Netflix produces way more content than competitors but they also have more shows in the far right (outstanding and exceptional) than their competitors.
There is a disconnect between what I want and what providers are trying to offer me. I want quality content with powerful search. Providers seem to think I want a huge unsearchable library from which they will make recommendations. Netflix has lots and lots of great original content, but given a random show, it's far more likely to be average or less (versus, say, HBOmax).
> Providers seem to think I want a huge unsearchable library from which they will make recommendations.
Providers want to act as gatekeepers who have the power to make something popular by limiting your options to alternatives. Sometimes they also want to be able to accept money for heavily promoting specific things over others. It's not about delivering a quality product to you at all, it's about what gives them money/power at your expense.
On the other hand, a lot of people are fine with putting unremarkable content on as largely background noise. That's what a lot of broadcast TV was. So there's probably at least some market for a large catalog of OK stuff rather than more of a focus on prestige TV.
There was a while where they were talking about providers making a lot of Niche Content. I wonder if they need to do a better job of adapting to personas. I love the Victorian/Edwardian Farm series that are on Prime, and I think of shows in a niche as sort of "beyond rating". i.e. They are never going to get the money to be considered "exceptional", but will be draw just as strongly for people who appreciate that niche. (Deep not broad). So can Netflix create a curated and simpler interface that optimizes for Outstanding/Exceptional or period pieces or whatever instead of just a long list that's hard to grok.
The probably is we've coupled the gui and the service, the people making the UI have a monopoly and no reason to improve. Same goes for spotify, audible and just about every streaming provider these days.
I had HBO and tried to watch every show. There are plenty of ho-hum shows. An HBO show has a theme and style their own which makes getting into a show a lengthy affair only to realize it's not what you really want. Netflix sums up the show in a preview making it easier.
Between deliberately bad search and a bias towards pushing you to waste time rather than entertain, they bury their own content and deliver swill.
Netflix got away with it because they were the only game in town. Disney really broke the seal and delivered a good platform. Apple is delivering strong content that compensates for the horrific application.
The ratio of OK-or-worse to good-or-exceptional sure appears to be a less favorable for Netflix than the others.
Though people's rankings seem crazy to me. Apparently just producing a Star Wars thing and not totally shitting the bed in the process counts as "exceptional". Then again... yeah, that's kinda true, I guess. From a certain point of view. Still, better than nearly all shows on all those services? Yikes. I dunno about that.
While Ratio is usually the right way to evaluate things. Is that applicable in this case? Doesn't what matters is the number of good shows not the percentage? If I watch Netflix I can find three Exceptional shows and a bunch of Outstanding shows, including three at the high end of outstanding. If I watch Apple TV + There are no exceptional shows and only one at the high end of outstanding, but the ratio seems better.
It matters if they're not spending less for each show, on average, than other services. If you're dropping $20m a season, on average, and so are your competitors, but more of yours are duds, that's bad. If you're dropping $5m to your competitors' $20m, maybe it's not a problem if, say, twice as many of your seasons are bad.
But, part of the trouble with this analysis, as far as sussing out the above issue, is season-count. How many Netflix originals are as long as, say, The Sopranos? Or The Wire? How many are only one season, or maybe two? It's possible (possible! I do not know) the hours-of-original-content difference between Netflix and the other services isn't as large as this suggests. Or that it's even larger. Hard to tell.
I'd say that this chart points toward bad things for Netflix, but without some other pieces of data it's hard to tell what it's actually saying.
Hence my comment about the methodology. And HBO Max doesn't have anything that's exceptional?
For that reason, it doesn't really make sense to focus on the specifics of a handful of outliers as unreliably ranked by RT (I think). The real message is that large as Netflix' catalog is, it doesn't necessarily have a lot more highly ranked content than other sites have. (Which roughly squares with my anecdotal impressions.)
The fact that Titans is slightly higher ranked than Peacemaker on HBO is insane.
The data would be more interesting if it could be broken up by demographics. My wife (along with a lot of women) likes reality tv, and Netflix has a fair amount of that. I personally can’t stand it.
But doesn't this? Medthodology aside, taking the data as is, Netflix has like 30 programs outstanding or better. The next best is like 10. Weird about HBO Max though. Maybe because they don't consider HBO shows as 'streaming'. At least Succession should be in exceptional. If not a lot more, if you include the older work.
Right. I don't care about the shows/movies I don't want to watch on a streaming service. I only care if there are enough shows/movies on there I do want to see.
I also don't want to spend large amounts of time researching what i want to watch. If there is one good show with poor discoverability burried under a mountain of crap, that is still a product failure.
They don't really have that many more shows well out to the right; it's mostly a draw. (And at that point you're talking pretty small numbers.) But it's pretty clear from the graph that, as a percentage of their total shows, more Netflix shows are just OK than the other services. (Now if the bulk of that is very cheap drek to boost the size of the catalog, that's OK I guess. But I doubt that it is.)
>They don't really have that many more shows well out to the right; it's mostly a draw.
Netflix has significantly more in the outstanding category: for example, I count around 8 for Disney, 11 for Apple, 10 for HBO Max, 8 for Hulu, and at least 39 for Netflix. I don't know how you call that a draw.
And I don't really care about the average show, since I (and I suspect most others) are not uniformly randomly sampling movies to watch with zero input from others. I (and I suspect others) watch those that are rated as good movies, and in that case, Netflix is crushing the competition by the numbers in that chart.
Netflix, by that chart, provides a lot more shows rated good, outstanding, and exceptional.
Although most of those Netflix shows are on the far left of that category.
There are a lot of ways you can interpret the info and a lot of good questions that it doesn't really answer. But it is interesting that Netflix clearly looks different from others.
From the chart, Netflix has a lot of titles, relative to the other channels. I would think they could lean hard on recommending titles to niche audiences - getting viewer returns from titles in the long tail of popularity.
But, my experience as a viewer is frustrating - all I see are the Netflix recommendations for me - browsing, exploring and discovering are tedious. I see less than 5% of their catalog through their UI. I would like an "experience" over the Netflix catalog with faceted search.
Wow yeah, that's bad. It took me a while to realize what's wrong with it. It seems logarithmic, but actually just between the boxes is logarithmic; inside each box is linear. That's why the points have such a strange distribution, clustering toward the left of each box.
The clustering is a visualization of Benford's law:
> One of Holland’s last projects for Netflix was The Queen’s Gambit, an expensive period piece that sources say was mocked as “Holland’s Folly” by some in-house. According to sources, Bajaria and her staff were dismissive and even unpleasant to the team that worked on it.
What a hellscape to work in. I got on Netflix very briefly, just to watch that show. I can't think of any reason to get back on.
I dislike this format because it makes a 4 hour story into an 8 hour story where 4 hours of it is showing the character in some type of inebriated state. I think flight attendant did this too, and the only reason I can think of is to pad their statistics and it being cheap to film those sequences. But it just ends up boring me.
And all the content producers are doing it. I tried Severance on Apple TV+, and I had to stop after 4 episodes because nothing was happening, and this is supposed to be a critically acclaimed show.
The new Batman movie was excruciatingly long too. I miss my 100min stories from the early 2000s and before.
LOL, I just saw a category on Netflix "90 minute movies from the 2000s" and your post reminded me of that. In the moment, I was like, "this is exactly what I wanted" and ended up watching a movie from the list.
I find that I often don't want to commit to another long series nor do I want to watch some movie that is exceptionally long. I hope this sort of shorter content comes back as an alternative to the very long movies we see today.
Different strokes I guess; I thought Severance was great. I didn't even notice the sequences you're describing, but I guess in hindsight they added flavor/gave me a mental break to process recent plot developments
Severance does not have the drunk/high sequences, but it was just crazy slow for me. I might also just be an atypical watcher, but it still feels like a lot of shows/movies are a lot longer than they used to be when I was a kid, and yet the extra minutes do not give me any extra enjoyment. Or maybe I am just getting old and turning into my dad.
What is almost certainly true is that a lot of shows are more serialized than when you were a kid given that serial was mostly bad for a number of reasons in the broadcast era.
So most shows were pretty much 30-60 self-contained minutes with relatively little prior context needed. If you're going to tell a story over 8 hours or even several seasons, various aspects of the pace are going to be a lot slower.
> it still feels like a lot of shows/movies are a lot longer than they used to be when I was a kid
When I was a kid tv shows typically had 22 episodes per season. Flight Attendant wouldn’t have been made back then, but if it was it would have had much more filler. More likely it would have been about a flight attendant who is a secret CIA agent and defeats a different commie every episode.
The article seems like it might be biased and pushing a narrative. It might not be, and I am not dismissing the sources or their sincerity. But a few things seem a bit off to me.
Bajaria is brought in to bring fresh eyes and a new approval chain to the process as part of a strategic direction. It's just asserted this was the wrong thing to do, and the anti-Bajaria sources here clearly met her with hostility from the start:
"Everybody thought it was a terrible thing Ted did, allowing one team to greenlight something that another team had passed on."
and
"And Ted loved that stupid phrase, ‘There are multiple paths to yes.’"
Why? Why was it a bad thing to have different groups looking at shows with a different eye? For a corporation and workforce which allegedly pride themselves on diversity this seems strange to me. They go through a bunch of examples of shows that were dismissed by Holland which Bajaria picked up, but list hits, and credit her with other "megahits". Seems like the diversity of opinion and skill paid off in those cases at least.
They're also dismissive and making seemingly arbitrary statements to support that:
"By then, Holland was to oversee 80 shows on the service while Bajaria was responsible for 60. “Who can make 140 shows a year?” asks one creative. “That’s insane."
Why is 80 shows by one team okay but another 60 by another team insane? Maybe they're just talking absolute numbers, but the article very clearly ties it to the same paragraph where it introduces Bajaria.
Given the hostility and dismissiveness of the original group, I could completely understand a bit of return from the new group. Now what I think is equally likely to have happened is that the new group's arrival put noises out of joint because it threatened the existing power structure, and things deteriorated from there. Now that is always to be expected to some degree in a situation like this so likely the CEO should have managed it better. But maybe it was largely caused by assholes in the Holland camp. Or maybe by those in the Bajaria camp. Or maybe none of it's really a problem and Netflix hasn't got dramatically worse, they're just hitting limits of growth and facing increasing competition, and their stock crash is just a good excuse for disgruntled people to air their grievances.
All these discussions are very US-centric. Netflix made more money from outside US than US (4477M vs 3350M) and membership went up in Asia.
I agree that the US-made content on Netflix is not as good as it used to be, but the foreign content is quite good. Plus virtually every country except US is used to read subtitles, so shows have a big audience. For example a lot of great shows nowadays come from Korea, and I assume they are much cheaper to buy than the US-made shows.
We get a lot of Korean Netflix content in Australia and I’ve quite liked it. It’s something different we’d never get through our own TV networks or the mostly-US streaming networks we have access to.
This is great insider reporting! Most people have no clue how shows gets selected and blame “wokness” for troubles at Netflix. In reality, the cost-cutting high-volume risk-averse leadership took over initial leadership of opposite nature. Transition from “ gut-driven, risktaking, maverick culture” to “prudent and frequently indecisive” is exactly the story of many other areas. Well put.
This isn't "insider reporting". If you don't how the media works, when the article says "Sources close to Holland" or a "Holland loyalist"...it is Holland (usually journalists will make an effort to disguise that, but the precise events being "quoted anonymously" here make obvious that the main source for the story was one person i.e. when the "anonymous" source quotes a conversation that occurred with two people in the room...it is obvious). There is no real analysis, it is just execs sniping at each other and trying to make sure future employers think it was someone else's fault.
On the subject, the problem with Netflix was that they tried to have it both ways. They seemed to think they could significantly increase output without decreasing quality. So saying that the failure of the new strategy is prudence ignores the fact that reckless spending got them into this position...bankruptcy tends to force prudence, but that is ex-post...prudence is not the cause of bankruptcy.
I think this should indicate that problems with NFLX are slightly more fundamental. I am sure they have the capacity to produce great shows. Look at their debt, look at how much capital they have committed to production...you can produce multiple "best ever" shows, and it won't get you out that hole.
Agree with this assessment, Cindy Holland is bitter she was pushed out and reached out through "channels" to deliver her own take on events. Its not really reporting just highlighting a power struggle from an individuals viewpoint(Cindy).
If the events mentioned in the story are in fact a cause of NFLX's decline is another story. People were forced inside(globally) during the pandemic and consumed alot more media than ever before in history. The quality of shows at NFLX has gone down considerably the past 2 years. NFLX pushed a show that alienated alot of people with Cuties. Friends and other hit shows left NFLX. Inflation has hit a 40 year high and gas and food are expensive, people are cutting costs and NFLX seems like an easy cut.
Would Cindy have stopped all of the above events? Maybe the quality issue but costs(under her) seemed steep, who can say? I think no matter who is at the top NFLX would have suffered in some way. If Ted had chose Cindy instead of Bela Bajaria we would have a similar article talking about Bela's sources and how Cindy's excessive spending and smaller show lineups are killing NFLX.
> They seemed to think they could significantly increase output without decreasing quality.
An executive is quoted, on their strategy, as saying “We succeed if 1 in 10 shows is a hit.” I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t think they were pumping out pure winners.
> (It was also Holland who warned Sarandos, to no avail, that continuing to order specials from one of his comedy heroes, Dave Chappelle, would lead to internal strife and bad press.)
Given that the journalist goes out of her way to include this, it's not a mystery why "wokeness" is not mentioned in the article :)
Absolutely love behind the scenes stuff. I'm only a little way into Binge Times[0] by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski and I'm pretty sure I can recommend it here.
The thing is, their strategy is fundamentally flawed. They understood they needed to build up a library, but their metrics chased subscriber uptick that said “Only the first two seasons matter.” So, with a couple of exceptions they’re building up a large library of cancelled shows.
exactly. They lose the trust of subscribers. What happens then is that no one wants to watch a new show because it's going to get cancelled. So people wait until more seasons or the show is entirely out. Which is also increasingly common. People are getting tired of waiting a year between seasons, when there are entire complete shows they could binge watch right now. So they wait. Which means Netflix never sees the season 1 viewers they need.
Some shows just don't hit their stride until two or more seasons in. Parks and Rec had a really rough first season.
If anyone from netflix is reading, the reason I don't watch as much as I used to is because of the automatic previews. I used to just leave netflix open all day and randomly pick things when I felt like watching. I can't do that anymore. Though I do really appreciate how easy it is to suspend/cancel. I'll be back for stranger things, but who knows how long I'll stay.
The most egregious is that there's still no setting to prevent skipping the credits. It's so distracting when you finish a movie or series and instead of having some time to reflect on it, you get served an ad for some of their other show.
This seems to be awful trend in general. I often like to see the credits usually for song credits and most of the time they seem to get interrupted by this insistence on launching the next show. You see something similar now with youtube, where before the videos ends the real estate on the screen for the last 10 seconds becomes filled with suggestions for what to watch next. Often to the detriment of some important visual that's still on the screen. It's almost like there's a genuine fear that someone stopping to concentrate on the present represents a serious threat to their engagement metrics. I can say that I end up consuming less of all this stuff as a result of the frustration.
I have to agree on that - it seems like forcing a show/movie to a user even if that does not align with their mood or historic picks. I am not interested at all in shows like Inventing Anna or Tinder Swindler or Selling Sunset but I have to still cope with them showing that moving banner ad like that covering so much real estate.
What I would like to see is, semantic search where I could elaborate the shows/movies I'd like to search for: "A classic movie starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg" and Netflix shows me "War of the Worlds" in search results.
I'm just interested in something like a "not interested" button distinct from the thumbs down button. Netflix insists on suggesting the same shows I've never clicked for months or even years of them showing on my front page. I'd like to say, "Hey, stop suggesting this."
I don't feel like Netflix lacks things to watch, I just feel it does a terrible job keeping its suggestions fresh.
I'd really like to be able to say "I like this _kind_ of thing, just not this specific one." You know, just because I don't like "Valerian", I still enjoy sci-fi.
Thumbs-down on a video seems to remove the whole category.
It is very similar to how Spotify tanked their platform for my use -- at some point, I'm a paying customer, and I get annoyed when you constantly shove your original content down my through regardless of how much it matches my preferences.
You just can't start a service with recommendations as part of your sell... and then bastardize those recommendations into advertisements or original content-pushers. Paying customers eventually lose patience.
I'm Curious if there's going to be a noticeable Stranger Things dropoff. Though there will probably be a big uptick for Squid Game season 2. Apparently season 1 was worth $1 billion dollars for Netflix.
You are more profitable for them by not watching as much as you used to. The only way your apathy hurts them is if you downgrade to a lower tier of service or cancel it.
With auto play enabled Netflix would show a random clip from the movie/show. In about 5% of the cases they would play the trailer (which is really what you want).
If you turn auto play off, there's no way to play anything. You have to just start watching.
Can this really be classified as a "crash"? They're a 20+ year old company, a hugely successful business, and likely to continue to be a major player in both entertainment & tech for the next decade+. Perpetual high growth is a fantasy.
Sure they've been a publicly traded company for 20 years but most of the first 10 of that they were mailing DVDs to people. They've really only been in the original content game since 2012 so just about 10 years. And the latest incarnation of Netflix a full-fledged Hollywood studio operating in a very capital intensive, competitive and increasingly crowded environment is even younger still. The history of Hollywood is littered with companies that have gone out business. It wasn't long ago that MGM one the oldest(1924) and most storied names in Hollywood went bankrupt.
Can someone tell me what the 94% match in Netflix means?
I don't understand what in the world XX% match is all about.
My biggest complaint about Netflix is there is no simple 5-star rating. Or something like that.
I'm not going to watch a trash movie that is a XX% match to some bogus criteria. Even if that match is 100%.
Thus, unlike Prime, I explore very little with Netflix. I manually look up the rating in IMDb before I watch anything. (Which is why I prefer Prime. Since IMDb is built in.)
Roughly, people who liked movies you liked, also liked that movie.
If you like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but you haven't seen Ghostbusters, and 94% of people who have seen all three movies and liked the first two also liked Ghostbusters, then it's 94% likely that you'll also like Ghostbusters.
I'm sure it's much more complicated and nuanced, but that's the general idea.
That should be the idea, but the match score never worked out well for me personally.
Specifically at some point it seemed like Netflix started weighting all their own content much more heavily than others so the match scores on Netflix shows were much higher, even though obviously Netflix producing a show has almost no bearing on whether I'll like it or not.
I've never liked a single video on Netflix and I've had them for a number of years. I think with no direct likes the rating system starts at 99% and might also take your viewing history into account to adjust it over time based on third party likes from people who watched similar movies to you. I'll often see a bunch of new Netflix original movies come up with 95-99% matches as soon as they're released but then over time they drop to 64% and eventually never come up again.
I wish it started at 0% and worked its way up because the current implementation is really misleading. It's trying to get me to watch something because it's a Netflix original they want to push but really their plan backfired and now I don't watch any Netflix originals unless I know for sure I want to watch it beforehand.
Netflix created the bad but successful template that the other streaming services followed: own the streaming platform and the content -- and now they're suffering for it, and so are consumers.
As a consumer, I don't want to have 5 different streaming services with subs coming and going depending on what shows happen to be in season. I'd rather choose to subscribe to one of various streaming services that in turn let me source content from many providers and just let me pay per show or whatever (maybe after a free first episode or something, I dunno).
In a way I kind of feel bad for Netflix, because they were there "first" and for a long time had maybe one of the more "open" (in terms of content) services. Now the studios are in control again. It's not good for the consumer.
Sure, absolutely, I could probably rephrase to make that clear, I don't think it was their "fault" per se, but a result of the asymmetrical power relationship between content producer and streaming service.
I'm amazed that people didn't see this coming as the end game of the "cut the cord" transition... This was always where it was going to end up. Netflix proved the concept, but it ends up that having an early-mover advantage doesn't matter when you don't own your product, just the platform. But of course what people are actually paying for is the product. And it's been shown time and again that people are willing to put up with "good enough" platforms as long as it has the product they want.
It's the downside of all "content platform" plays. There's nothing stopping a new platform from taking over YouTube or Facebook or Twitter. All it takes is the actual content producers moving to a different platform and poof there it goes.
This seems to be the most obvious explanation. There is simply competition now where there was none before. A good learning moment here for HN, where we mistake lengthy in-depth blog posts for an unassailable tech advantage when in reality this stuff is kinda commodity.
Netflix is always recommending to me the same shows, day after day, week after week. I've passed over them many times. When will Netflix give up on them show me something further back in their catalog? This seems like a no-brainer to me. I get bored with scroll scroll scroll to look past them.
Probably you are more enjoy scrolling than watching. I realized it for myself when I bought a lot of games but never "have time or mood" to actually play them. Sometimes this also happens to content on Netflix. I don't have enough cognitive power to process another setting or just not feel entertained by a show in the middle of it. Lucky I have my wife and sometimes follow her recommendation because she is so excited about this stuff, so I want to share her emotions.
Wrote this and feels like I sound a little burned out.
> I realized it for myself when I bought a lot of games but never "have time or mood" to actually play them.
When this happens to me consistently it is nearly always depression killing my desire. Although it's never obvious in the moment that's the case, it just feels like I'm not in the mood.
Obviously I don't know anything about you or your situation, but if you're consistently not in the mood for things you used to enjoy it's worth considering if you're depressed (or burned out as you said). Depression is not always obvious when you're in the middle of it, and it's not always "woe is me I want to die".
Of course could be many other things in your situation you would know better than I, your comment just reminded me of myself and I wanted to share my experience with it.
Comcast does the same thing. They have a catalog of 4000 movies. If you're browsing, the only way is to start at the beginning and scroll 4 at a time. You'll give up long before you get to the bottom.
It would be lovely if they'd just offer a "random sort" as an option.
I agree with a lot of the criticisms of content on Netflix, but I also think that it was necessary. I don’t think it would be possible to pump out only A++++ content to fill their catalog in the time that they have been able to grow their offering. So now that they do have a ton of content, they can scale down new releases a bit and focus on providing better content rather than more content. I think they had to push out as much as they could because of all of the new competition in the area. Now they have a large collection of Netflix originals to keep some subset of subscribers entertained, and going forward they can focus on growing that subset by introducing better quality originals. If they focused solely on quality, a subscriber might only stay for a few months or a year or so before they could watch everything (edit: everything “worth watching”) and unsubscribe. Just my opinion.
Edit2: as part of the growth of competition in this arena, Netflix was having certain shows pulled (an example that comes to mind is The Office)
I find the whole premise of this article kind of funny. I don't think Netflix is in anywhere near as much trouble as they're making out. I don't think the content strategy is anywhere near as important as they're pretending either. What Netflix is running into is just normal business - they're very large, so it's possible they are at the peak of their TAM in lots of markets, their competition is strong because they're so successful other people have allocated capital to compete in the market, and the macro-economic trends have gone from incredibly favourable to less favourable. This has nothing to do with Lupin or Queens Gambit.
It's an interesting story, quite clearly heavily informed by Holland, but just because Hollywood types don't like Netflix coming in and stopping on their industry doesn't mean Netflix is actually doing the wrong thing, and I don't think the current turn around in the stock price tells us anything about that strategy.
Do they know off the cuff which will be quality? The commission-in-bulk strategy reminds me a bit of YC expanding the startups in each batch, to maximise their chances of unearthing diamonds. And might be hard to avoid when you are increasingly targeting multiple continents.
By diamonds, I am assuming you mean popular shows. Quality and popular tend to be correlated, but not always. Bad quality scripts can sometime be successful (e.g. Fast and Furious / Transformers, but these are not cheap either), but I think those are usually the exception and not the norm.
Given 1 high quality script vs 2 low quality scripts with the same total price, I would rather fund the high quality one. Although the high quality script has equals less choices for the customers, I know there is higher likelihood they might like it and would come back to watch again and again. There is almost certainly not the case with low quality scripts.
The script writing is the only variable that they can control. So why give it up just to throw a bunch of shows on the wall and see what sticks? You already know the script is not good, even if it is cheap. What are the chances your customers will like it?
TV+ is doing good on its own. CODA, Severance and Ted Lasso are already bringing attention to the platform. Netflix would just muddy Apples image as a high quality brand.
What should happen, if we're doing "shoulds", is that it shouldn't be permitted for one company to own both distribution and production, nor for such companies to create long-term exclusivity agreements with one another.
In certain ways yes, in certain ways no. The monopoly provided by copyright does really hinder effective competition. Requiring non-discriminatory licensing would radically change the competitive landscape in this space.
Interestingly, competition is worse for consumers in some respects here. It's resulting in fragmentation of the market such that people are too many services for 1-2 shows each
There’s vastly more high-quality television being produced than any other time in history. From my perspective, subscribing to one of the major services gives me a better experience than cable TV ever did, at a much lower cost. If I run out of stuff to watch I can always switch to another.
> competition is worse for consumers in some respects here
The implicit assumption here is that without competition, we'd have all (or most) of the same shows, just on a single service.
I don't think that's true. I think competition between streaming services largely on the basis of original content has produced a lot of good shows that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. It seems to me like there's a lot more variety in things to watch these days, and it's not like I have to pay for every streaming service every month...
Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example? Netflix has started and cancelled a ton of original series, but would they have even been tried at all back when cable TV was king? I don't know, maybe there are some statistics on the variety of TV shows being watched and I'm wrong, but I can't find them.
A shift in the competitive landscape might encourage distributors to integrate better with aggregators or meta-interfaces of various sorts. Or directly with one another, in some fashion.
> Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example?
I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production. However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.
More importantly than whether Disney would still be OK, I think it would make it easier for indies and startups to participate in the market.
> A shift in the competitive landscape might encourage distributors to integrate better with aggregators or meta-interfaces of various sorts. Or directly with one another, in some fashion.
That's a big "might" there, isn't it equally possible that eventually distribution will converge on a single platform? It's much easier for that kind of thing to happen with streaming than with, say, theaters.
> I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production.
But there is no monopoly right now. I don't think you can slice an industry as thinly as "Star Wars TV shows" and say Disney has a monopoly there. Disney does not have a monopoly in the streaming market, no-one does. They have a monopoly in the same way Walmart has a monopoly on Walmart brand toothpaste, I guess.
At most you can say it's an oligopoly, which I somewhat agree with and yes, it seems like it could be improved.
> However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.
If the government bans production companies from distributing their shows, mandating middle men and lower profit margins for the producers, that decreases the incentive to spend as much on production. And it's not clear that forcing a distribution middleman into the transaction is going to lower prices. After all, when Netflix raised prices, people left despite Netflix's "monopoly" on Netflix Original content.
Either of us could be right, it would be great if we could find some data, or some example from another industry to get a clearer picture.
Exactly that. I want to see more competition on price, features, and quality, and less on content availability.
It'd also make it easier to enter both parts of that market, as a production company or a distributor, which is currently something that only a company with an enormous pile of cash and/or ownership of an existing large catalog of material, can realistically do.
I really think services like YouTube are going to win out. For every hour of video I've watched on Netflix or Hulu I've probably watched 40 on Youtube. The variety of content there is absolutely incredible and so much of it is very deep educational content.
I hate YouTube for their recommendation system. I watch few things and then get million recommendations of the same thing by different author. I don’t want that, I want to see other topics and must actively search for them.
I think people are watching a lot more video in general. There are multiple generations, at this point, that mostly wouldn't pay for cable or even bother with rabbit ears even if TV & movie streaming services didn't exist, but do pay for a streaming service or three. I don't think YouTube's going to beat that entire market, unless they shift tactics pretty substantially. I think they expanded the market, though, grabbing almost all of that new territory for themselves in the process (at least until TikTok came along)
> I think people are watching a lot more video in general
My parents, their parents, and many of their peers have TVs on in the background during virtually every waking moment they spend at home, and have done so since at least the 90s.
People are watching video differently, but I'm not sure it's "a lot more".
My parents and my in-laws (all in their 70s) do this, too, and I'm astounded by it. The TV is just on and playing in the background all the time, even when we visit and are sitting down and talking. It's not enjoyable to me.
Come to think of it, my wife often does this as well (she's in her 30s). She'll put something on and then do something completely different, just the other day I came into the room to find her with netflix running on screen, a youtube video playing on another screen and her staring at her phone looking at something else.
But I find myself, if I'm going to watch something, sit down and focus on it completely, to the point that I often pause and rewind if I didn't quite catch the phrasing of something.
I guess it's just that certain people don't mind passive viewing and can have a lot more inputs without being bothered by it.
I absolutely detest YouTube and the only reason I sometimes use an Invidious instance to access it is that people basically don't put video anywhere else anymore.
Until very recently (a year or two ago?), the US didn't allow film studios to own movie theaters. Hadn't for something like 70 years. That was due to antitrust action over a situation pretty similar to what's happening with streaming services.
I think it's a good idea to mitigate the downsides of the monopoly granted by copyright, when possible. We saw similar problems with studio ownership of movie theaters, and solved that by not letting studios own movie theaters (via an antitrust suit). That's only very recently, and in what may be the twilight of the movie theater itself, changed.
In the current environment, I suspect we'll see (are already seeing, to some extent) history repeat itself, but not do anything about it this time, because we're so skittish of regulating markets now.
I don't think you should have to own an extensive catalog of content to launch a streaming service. Nor that you should effectively have to grovel for the patronage of one of a handful of integrated production+distribution mega corporations to undertake production of new media. But that's rapidly where the market's heading, and I don't see any mechanism to change that course short of anti-trust action.
There are, as usual, some benefits to the rents the current monopolistic system produces (extra cash sloshing around to throw at projects, for example—extra R&D money is a typical benefit monopolies produce, and in this case, because the monopolies are on particular content rather than on all content [so far—Disney's getting alarmingly close], there remain incentives to actually spend that money on, if you will, R&D, or the closest thing to it in media production) but at the cost reduced competition on cost & quality, and of making it much harder to enter the market, for new players.
Why would you want even more consolidation? The other content owners (Disney, WB, etc.) have already pulled all their content from 3rd parties (including Netflix) to destroy competition. Why is there so many people on HN that want less market competition and cheer when corporations consolidate?
Because people want to watch the leading shows in their area of interest and not have to pay 10+ services $10-$20 a month.
As it gets increasingly hard/expensive, not to mention the bickering between services and platforms and services and markets to watch them on, customers are resorting to piracy as a way to get the content they want.
All these streaming companies battle for long term user acquisition, thus perpetual $10/month subscription per service for X providers is definitely a no-go long term.
I think a middle ground would be shareware-like pay-per-view type model. Are you creating a new series? Make the first episode freely watchable, and then don't price excessively the entire season.
As a consumer would make sense for me to pay 5$ for a season of show X on Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max/etc. But allow me to watch the thing I payed for perpetually in the future, as long as the show is still on the platform. And when I'm looking for something new to pay for, allow me to see the first episode of existing shows for free.
Would that work for all consumers? I don't know, most people I know with streaming subscriptions, barely actively watch shows and very often those are standins for background noise.
I was hoping for something like $50 a month and pay the creators accordingly. If I spend 10% of my viewing hours watching a particular series then the creator+provide can split the $5.
I wish the internet ads worked the same way. I'd happily pay any website 2x whatever google or similar ad networks pay, to avoid ads. Seems like it would help reduce clickbait as well.
It’s inevitable, consumers aren’t gonna support all these (subscription) streaming services. Gonna be Disney and one or two other streaming services in 10 years.
We need more companies not less. This is an awful idea. Frankly I wish we'd see what happened theaters back in the day happen and not allowing creators to be their own distributors. Yes Netflix would have to stop creating content, but it would at least somewhat mitigate this current world where everyone creates their own streaming service.
Automatic previews
Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on
Horrible comedians that were akin to ted talks/lectures or made for people who don't actually enjoy stand up comedy.
Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting
Signing and hiring ex politicians
Searching is a chore and recommendations are nearly never useful. (Just to have some toggles around metadata like language/genre/public rating and a text box to fuzzy search through titles and descriptions?)
I cancelled my subscription a few years ago and I get more mileage and enjoyable content out of free apps like tubi, pluto, vhscast and peacock than I had in a long time with netflix.