But what if I want a faster horse?

The TikTok-ification of advertising supported platforms is terrible, but makes sense to me. LinkedIn pivoted from making money on subscriptions and fees for job postings to ads, which mean the leading drivers are 'engagement' e.g. time you spend doom scrolling on their platform. This will end in disaster for the platform as a place to find jobs or employees.

Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscriptions. If you perceive having a fantastic experience on the site by just going there, finding something you enjoy watching, and leaving... they win. Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain, other than imagining some dark pattern like they have to pay per view and want you to watch C grade movies? More time spent looking for something to watch means less time streaming?

I don't get it.

This is strongly in tin-foil hat territory but: streaming video costs a lot more money than streaming some JSON to populate a UI. Every minute you spent browsing the catalogue over playing a video is probably a significant costs saving for Netflix.

> More time spent looking for something to watch means less time viewing?

or, if you're presented with more random 'clips' or movie snippets, this turns on your gambling reward center. It's like a slot machine - where you "win" by finding a good series to watch after searching. And because this is random, you end up getting addicted to looking thru the list/snippet, trying to encounter a perfect series to watch.

Netflix is winning, see net income trends:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...

Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon. And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it is always easier to pontificate than execute.

I don’t buy Netflix solely because they don’t integrate with the search in the iOS/macOS TV app.

Unfortunately, based on media trends before streaming and Netflix was a thing, lots of people like C grade productions. If you recall, “reality” TV shows were taking over in the 2000s. People like the Tiktok-ificiation (or otherwise lowering of quality).

> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain

Because regardless of whether or not the business model depends upon it, investors have been trained that “engagement” is inherently good quality for their investments to have. Increase engagement, stonk price go up.

The most valuable businesses have desirable net income trends, not “engagement”.

I guess my thing with LinkedIn is that there's just no reason to use the feed. It's still a place to connect with people I've worked with and keep up with what they've been doing. It's incredibly useful for that. I really don't find the feed to be either a boon or a hindrance in that use case. I know it's there, I know it annoys some people, but it's just irrelevant to me.

But they play those previews automatically... and that's still bandwidth used.

Netflix was changing a lot to drain more money out of users recently, which is why income rose recently. What I'd like to see is active / recurring users instead.

It's important to look at the competition as well for this. I think we can all agree that streaming is here to stay. But how are the others faring here? In a more and more fragmented landscape, Netflix still has the fattest offering. Also the quality of the service (aka, search, languages offered, subtitles, trailers, stream quality, own productions...) is way better than say Prime or Disney+. So why shouldn't they be leading the stats? Even if you think they suck, compared to the rest of the pack they suck the least.

You've got it backwards, Netflix doesn't want people to just doom-scroll, the users want to doom-scroll.

Attention destroying apps reduce the long term focus and reward centers such that doom-scrolling through the catalog probably feels better than just watching something. Most of the folks I know who start a movie or show immediately pull out their phones anyway to scroll elsewhere.

As is always the case, they are high on their own supply. Netflix, and a ton of other companies, are terminally ill gambling addicts.

For some reason I kept opening it up and the feed would irritate me. This has fixed it:

    www.linkedin.com##main[aria-label="Main Feed"] .scaffold-finite-scroll__content

Mostly it's to cover up that the catalogue isn't as great anymore, isn't it? Since almost every big label took back the rights and started their own streaming service, Netflix simply doesn't have as much content (that anyone would want to see) anymore.

I quit all those platforms recently and I'm not missing the frustration of having to 'switch channels' through their incomprehensible categories and views anymore.

In the ad-tention economy, engagement means more eyes on your ads. Advertisers desire engagement which is therefore a proxy for future net income.

Then investors transposed that proxy to non ad-tention businesses, driving up engagement-rich stocks in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I assume it's about papering over the gaps in their content library.

You can't provide a seamless UX for turning on the TV and watching The Office if you don't own the rights to The Office. They want to habituate you to scrolling through content Netflix actually owns and picking something, because it's apocalyptic for them if you ever treat the services as fungible content libraries that you hop between month-to-month.

And tragically most users prefer the auto playing previews. Theprimeagean has a YouTube video about how he tried to a/b test it before release thinking "no way that's what users would prefer" and was unfortunately wrong.

Also, engagement is a measure of how rich the oil field is for enshittifying the platform to extract ad dollars.

A short, compressed, small video that's edge-cached beats always out a 4K stream, so it even works as a tactic to keep you in that overview longer.

Yep. If they can’t get you to watch unknown, b/c grade content - you will quickly exhaust everything on the top shelf and log off.

And even if that isn't the case right at this moment, they have to be prepared for rights-holders to fuck with them and they have to be prepared to cut production costs (or for a rival to spend big on production in a way they don't think they can match).

So regardless of the state of their content library it's necessary future-proofing.

At this stage the cost is probably more in licensing fees and production costs than data streaming though.

I think you're right!

A short while ago, I noticed I only used Netflix to watch 2 classic comfort shows, and I started to doubt if it was worth a 2-classic-comfort-shows-as-a-service subscription. I tried looking through the catalog to see what else I was paying for and ended up cancelling my subscription.

Netflix does an amazing job in giving the impression that they have an endless library of top quality content, but in reality, it seems like it's only a handful good shows and some filler, but presented in a way that makes it look like there's way more than it actually is.

But this doesn't explain what the incentive for Netflix is if you pay for subscription regardless.

> the users want to doom-scroll.

That's depends on your definition of "want". They might not want to on, but their monkey brain does.

I can't agree.

Because my netflix subscription is cancelled specifically because the "Finding something I want to watch drains my energy" phenomenon. Gradually over the course of like a year I got more and more frustrated with being suggested things, and not having a good way to find things.

I think Netflix faces the problem that measuring the causality between a user watching specific content and choosing to stay subscribed is super hard. Therefore, they focus on a metric that is easy to measure, namely time spent in the app. This is likely not the metric they should be optimizing for, but since they _can_ measure it, it becomes the target anyway.

#2 is youtube. #3 (BitTorrent) saw 40% 6-month growth in 2024 (the same year Netflix had 60% YoY growth):

https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-traffic-increases-40-in-...

It's about two things:

1. Cutting costs on the other side.

Studios don't want to license content to Netflix now that they are direct competitors, so Netflix has fewer and fewer movies and shows that they didn't produce themselves. And they want to spend as little as possible on producing their own content.

That way they make as much profit from the subscriptions as they can.

2. Reducing the value of competitors.

They are competing for user time. They want you to spend as many minutes as possible on Netflix because any minute not spent their is a minute you might be spending on Hulu or Apple TV. At the end of the month when you decide that you can't afford that many streaming services and decide to cut one, you'll pick based on which one you use the most. They don't want that to be the other guy.

Well, there is a setting to turn it off.

Who's that and do they work for Netflix?

Tbh I don't mind the previews as long as they don't make the UI lag*. I was just pointing out that they don't save bandwidth.

* I'm also aware that they're blatant lies and have little connection with what's in the actual movie.

> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain

Entertainment is a zero-sum market. More time spent doom scrolling means less time spent on another service, which probably reduces their churn (also, ads)

Think of it this way, the less time they spend actually WATCHING content, the longer they will pay their monthly service because they have this massive "watch list" that they never actually get through. They just keep paying month after month never getting through a backlog that they inspire to watch. I don't agree with it, but it makes sense to me. If you can never feel satisfied, you will pay over and over again chasing that satisfaction of watching "everything."

Many people will pay Netflix for years hardly watching content for months just because the convenience factor of not having to subscribe/unsubscribe when they know a new season of X will be out in the next year. It's wild to me, but people are lazy. So again, the more you keep them from actually watching the content and realizing they are "done", the longer they likely just keep their subscription active. Get them to add as much potential content they want to watch to a never ending backlog watch list.

My wife and I realized we were only really using Netflix to watch Seinfeld. I got a complete set of DVDs for less money than a month of Netflix and canceled my subscription

> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain

They want to take the bargaining power from creators (and old IP owners).

They don't want the customers to search for a specific show. They want the customers to watch whatever is shown to them. This way Netflix will have tremendous power over show creators - if our algorithm doesn't favor you, it doesn't matter how good your show is or how much money you spend on marketing outside Netflix.

Netflix's primary goal used to be to attract new subscribers. Now it's a more about maintaining subscribers and finding new ways to monetize the existing subscriber base. That's why you're seeing things like "sharing" subscriptions, and advertising, and premium plans.

I wish Netflix and other streaming services had more information about a movie or show for me to base my decision on. I would like more text. Maybe, some reviewer snippets. The full major cast members, not just the top names. The director should be prominently displayed. Let me easily see what else that director has done, even if it's not on that streaming channel.

Apple TV is the worst, because it dumps you right into the program, and you have to back out in order to get more information.

They all just want me to trust them that I'll love it. I end up having to pull up reviews on my phone.

i think people's view of netflix's business model is heavliy biased by what they want netflix to be.

i get it, i hate what they've become too. i'd like to believe there's a world where paying for content is a better model than selling ads. but the reality is that every time netflix makes a decision that the internet gets angry about, their balance sheet looks better.

Careful, or the IP owners of Seinfeld will decide it's stealing to not pay a monthly subscription to keep watching Seinfeld every month.

The LinkedIn feed would actually be very useful if it only showed my contact's milestones such as job updates, their own product/service launches and events like conferences or conventions that involve them.

Of course, such a feed would take me 2 minutes per week to read through so that wouldn't be good for the business.

My problem with turning it of is that if you _do_ want to watch the preview it's very cumbersome. Clicking on it goes to the movie/episode. So to get to the preview you have to go to the list of Episodes, scroll down (and try not to get spoiled) to trailers then play it. So I have one profile with it on and one with it off, depending on if I'm browsing or not.

The thing about the situation is, now that when Tik-tok-ification has grown big enough, it (no-choice interfaces, "enshitification", etc) becomes the only paradigm UI designers, managers and investors understand. Moreover, it's interface that essentially completely controls the user - all the choices they have are essentially fake and control always appeals to managers and control may not immediately make money but it can make money long term so it can be justified.

You can see how Sonos enshitified their interface and even with a user rebellion wouldn't back down, just as an example.

100%. Wasn’t trying to contradict your statement - just giving some additional context.

And he is a semi popular tech YouTuber that has risen to popularity in the last couple of years. I think he also streams on twitch but I’m not on that site so I can’t say. But he worked for Netflix for about 10 years.

I'm using usenet and a bunch of FOSS (*arr) and I'm never going back. This way I OWN my library, there is no chance that in November I will lose the ability to rewatch the office due to some uninteresting bullshit.

Whenever I physically can I buy DVDs or digital downloads.

I guess I just didn't understand the Netflix model - why would I want to rent something that I can just buy and have for life? Especially with the enshitification these days - it means I have to pay a massive amount of money (over 5 years say), for a shitty experience, ending up having nothing when I cancel the subscription? That's just a recurring bad deal, in my opinion.

This. The absolute worst case scenario for streaming is you open the app scroll for a minute or less then close it. If you scroll for 10 minutes instead of just 1 the streaming service has much larger mindshare and youre more likely to check again tomorrow.