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But what if I want a faster horse?

(rakhim.exotext.com)
1525 points saeedesmaili | 5 comments | 11 Apr 25 11:39 UTC | HN request time: 1.318s | source
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arkh ◴[11 Apr 25 12:11 UTC] No.43652926[source]▶
All the result of A/B tests. Everything will converge to give you an engaging experience for most people. The only not too bad student is reddit which lets you keep using their older UI if you want to. But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement.
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1. ballenf ◴[11 Apr 25 12:21 UTC] No.43652988[source]▶
My hunch is these algos are also optimized for hiding the long tail of content that's more expensive to serve as it's not edge-cached. And it was the long tail that drew many of us to these services in the first place. At least that's my feeling using Youtube and Netflix these days.
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2. IshKebab ◴[11 Apr 25 14:00 UTC] No.43653877[source]▶
I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding the fact that their catalogue is actually really small. They can't let you narrow your search at all because then they wouldn't have any content to give you.

Think how many times you've searched for a specific film and it says "Content related to <thing that you actually wanted>".

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3. mcpar-land ◴[11 Apr 25 14:21 UTC] No.43654113[source]▶
This is absolutely true. Spotify employs "ghost artists" that create the most inoffensive, royalty-free background music possible, and then they prioritize them in their auto-generated playlists.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

4. Apocryphon ◴[11 Apr 25 16:02 UTC] No.43655360[source]▶
Meanwhile, a lot of this content is on places like Tubi.
5. Wowfunhappy ◴[11 Apr 25 20:04 UTC] No.43657948[source]▶
> I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding the fact that their catalogue is actually really small.

I agree with you for Netflix.

However, Youtube's catalog is almost certainly larger today than it was a decade ago. Even if you could somehow weight by quality, I think it would be hard to argue that Youtube's content catalog has gotten worse. Maybe average quality per video has gone down, but there is so much content on Youtube nowadays, assuming you're able to find it.

I'm not sure about Spotify.