Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this:

1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine.

2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is and aren’t likely to publicly flog someone doing their same job based on uninformed speculation. They know their own systems are Byzantine and don’t look like what random onlookers think it would look like.

So that leaves the rest, who offer insights based on how stuff works at a small scale, or better yet, pronouncements rooted in “first principles.”

Right? A common complaint by outsiders is that Netflix uses microservices. I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details. What is the magic difference that would have ensured the live stream would have been successful?

I am one of the ones who complain about their microservices architecture quite a lot.

This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better.

It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity.

Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up control.

The same thing happened with Netflix where they wanted to push too hard to be a tech company and have their tech blogs filled with interesting things.

On the back end they went too deep on the microservices complexity. And on the front end for a long time they suffered with their whole RxJS problem.

So it's not an objective matter of what's better. It's more cultural problem at Netflix. Plus the fact that they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based.

> they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based.

You lost me. Netflix built a massive CDN, a recommendation engine, did dynamic transcoding of video, and a bunch of other things, at scale, quite some years before everyone else. They may have enshittified in the last five years, but I dont see any reason why they dont have a genuinely legitimate claim to being a founder member of the FAANG club.

I have a much harder time believing that companies with AI in their name or domain are doing any kind of AI, by contrast.

Same thing was done a little later by HBO, Disney and a plethora of others, which points to the task not really being uber-difficult.

Speaking as a consumer, Netflix’s solution is objectively better than it’s competitors. It handles network blips better, it’s more responsive to use, it has far fewer random bugs you need to work around.

You can argue whether or not that edge translates into more revenue, but the edge is objectively there.