Netflix Inc. has seen a decline in user engagement, with customers opening the app less frequently than before. Although total watch time increased due to new subscribers, individual viewing has decreased significantly during this period. The company is facing challenges such as increased competition and fewer hit productions impacting viewer attraction. In response to these issues, Netflix has made leadership changes to strengthen its content strategy and overall business model.
After 20 years of achieving virtually no forward progress, they just gave up on trying to optimize for individual users’ preferences.
Netflix: here’s a giant heap
It actually was pretty good at steering users towards their preferences in its earlier days.
I don’t know, I never found it very good myself?
Netflix had a million-dollar engineering challenge to improve their recommendation algorithm, awarded the prize, then did not implement it. Literally because it was hard.
They were going to run another challenge, then it got scuppered due to privacy concerns. Without violating privacy, it was hard. There was no effort to resurrect the engineering challenge in a way that would accommodate this issue.
Netflix doesn’t do a good job, and that’s mostly because they don’t value the outcome of improved recommendations, given that it is a monumental and non-trivial engineering challenge. And they don’t want to.
All of their actions show this.
Back in the day when you could choose a number of stars to review how much you enjoyed something, it worked. That was a long time ago now.
Oh yes, I must agree and I think I overlooked that aspect of your point, it was better before. Agreed