Re:Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs...
by s_m_mcguire on Friday March 17, 2017 @12:25PM
(#13895254)
Accounting for your average person, who do you estimate is more likely to cancel: The person watching hundreds of hours of meaningless action movies and TV, or the person subscribing but rarely/never watching anything? By average I mean not prone to suddenly realizing they want/feel sufficiently motivated to spend those hundreds of hours on something else, or posting on hacker news.
Speaking anecdotally, the one (temporary) time I canceled was when I found myself in the paying-but-not-using category.
Re:Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs...
by sweezyjeezy on Friday March 17, 2017 @12:08PM
(#13895084)
How do you know what metric Netflix are optimising?
Re:Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs...
by scruple on Friday March 17, 2017 @02:09PM
(#13896401)
They tell you so in TFA.
> Users would rate documentaries with 5 stars, and silly movies with just 3 stars, but still watch silly movies more often than those high-rated documentaries.
Re:Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs...
by oculusthrift on Friday March 17, 2017 @12:46PM
(#13895486)
it's interesting because the more someone uses netflix, the less money netflix makes.
They should be optimizing "number of people who pay for Netflix". Instead they are optimizing "number of hours spent watching Netflix".
Those two metrics are correlated, but definitely not fully.
If I spend hundreds of hours a month watching meaningless action movies and TV on Netflix, I can cancel my subscription and save myself hundreds of hours and $10. I've got lots of other ways of filling my time with endless pablum.
If I spend 2 hours watching a thought-provoking documentary, I say to myself "yup, that justified spending $10 on Netflix this month."