Comment by loudmax

I find it baffling how bad Netflix's recommendation engine is. I can understand YouTube's priorities being skewed toward slop because their business model is delivering ads. It's not surprising that you have to fight the algorithm to find worthwhile content among the garbage on YouTube.

Netflix's revenue is subscription based long form videos. That should be a viable business model. Instead, they seem to be willfully heading in the direction of serving slop to an audience that's not fully engaged. This road leads them into direct competition with YouTube and TikTok.

When my son moved out of the house recently, he went on the additional household plan. What struck me was that the user interface steered heavily toward the option that includes ads. We had to search for the small print to let him pay Netflix a few dollars more for the non-ads version.

In the late 90's and early 2000's there was a sense that ads were a reasonable tradeoff for free services on the internet. If the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the perverse incentives are a catastrophe.