I just assumed the Netflix top 10 were movies/shows they were trying to push, not based on actual veiwership.
That’s a bingo. Any “trending” algorithm is designed to get you to click on it. It’s not a source of accurate information.
It’s the same with search results. You’re searching for X? Here’s something X-adjacent we’ve been paid to show you that you might click on while looking for X. We’re going to call it “what others buy” and hope you do, too.
It really bothers me because I want to buy actual good quality stuff but I have no idea how to find it because I don’t trust any reviews or anything on search engines at all really.
This is one of the big things that killed Amazon for me. They used to have a great search and filter function that was designed to make it as easy as possible to find what you were looking for. Now it’s designed to find things that are related to your search and ignore your filters when sellers pay them to promote their product. Combined with the fake reviews and the ocean of low quality trash that fills 95% of their inventory, it’s now actually easier to drive to a store and search shelves manually than it is to sit and click.
And don’t get me started on AI generated “reviews” that are just reworded marketing material with affiliate links. It used to be that google could get you some relatively reliable sources, but most of those have long since replaced real reviews with this bullshit. At this point, I just assume every review is a lie unless I see a video of a human testing the product while taking about it.
I honestly think that anyone who is making money by misleading consumers with product reviews that aren’t actually based on some interaction with the product should be in prison for fraud.
Even if they’re not making money they should be.
Nothing is real.
Lemmy All Top 6??!
Top 7 “All” of all time on Lemmy, as seen by my instance:
None younger than 10 months old, on a platform largely only about 12 months old in total. So once again, not really representative of the lifetime of the site, or what the site is like today.
5 posts about lemmy itself and 1 about musk? That sounds pretty accurate.
No posts about open source. Nothing queer. No tankies or even leftist. I wouldn’t say that the best representation of today’s Lemmy.
Maybe it’s missing some technology stuff. I don’t think leftist posts get that upvoted, even if there’s a lot of them.
Thanks - oops shoulda said “Lemmy All Top 6 Hours”
Yeah, to be clear that’s “of all time”. Like, if we listed the greatest human achievements of all time - fire, gunpowder, antibiotics, computers, vaccines, the internet, etc. - that list would not be expected to change daily or even once a century.:-)
Also, every single one is either 10 or 11 months old - with only one exception being 9 months. That is obviously some kind of spike related to the Rexodus:-P.
The Fediverse is much older than 12 months btw - your list contains posts from outside of Aussie.zone so it’s not looking at Local but rather All, so it includes those, which you can get to by sorting by Old.
TLDR: “top of all time” is not intended to be anyone’s default search - Top or Active or New would be much better choices.
You just say Bingo.
I don’t get why the streaming services would care what media people watch. Are they pushing stuff that is cheaper to license?
They want to get recommendations just good enough to keep you hooked. If they show you just the objectively best, you would instantly know after seeing the best ones, that the rest of the catalogue is worse and worse.
This is how Netflix was in the beginning. I actually unsubscribed for a while for yhis reason. Now I’m as hooked as ever, there might still be a few good ones out there - I just need to keep scrolling for a few hours. /s
Stuff that is actually there, the vast emptiness of the Netflix catalog is the real horror.
80% (being generous) of Netflix is low quality Netflix produced trash they try and get you to watch so they don’t have to pay royalties or commissions to anyone.
I gave it up years ago.
I believe that they have said the top 10 is based on views, but haven’t given the windoww for that count or whether the thimbs up/down ratings factor into it. That seems plausible as it is promoted as a popularity indicator and tends to have recent additons and already popular stuff listed.
Now the trending category is most likely the stuff they are trying to promote.
I’d agree with you, but I’ve seen Morbius up there.
This is what The Algorithms have been doing from the start.
It is only just now coming to light just how manipulative YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram are configured.
It isn’t about increasing Ad views or Viewer engagement; it is all about controlling viewer opinions and belief systems.
Browsing YouTube while logged out is 1,000 times worse.
the absolute blessing of never seeing Mr. Beast’s face whenever I am signed in.
And the sheer amount of weird pseudo-reality-show-shovelware! Good grief, people! If you want made up content that’s supposed to look like the real thing, watch porn!
I didn’t even know who he was until recently. I don’t even understand why he’s popular.
His early videos that got him popular were insane and novel. I watched them from curiosity. As for why he’s still… I have no idea. I don’t know anyone who watches him. It can’t just be kids.
You underestimate kids and their amount free time.
but someone’s buying all the merch
That’s the kids parents for their kids.
I didn’t mean to imply it’s all kids. Just that they can be the majority. Regardless, parents buy stuff for their kids all the time. You think adults are buying tons of hot wheels and barbies for themselves?
As a childless millennial, yes.
You underestimate kids’ ability to manipulate their parents to buy things
but someone keeps taking a dump on his lawn every morning.
I’m a grown ass man and love his videos because they’re light-hearted and generally wholesome. Like where he rescued 100 dogs from kill shelters and helped get them adopted. But some of the more recent ones are just wasteful or dumb.
Roblox has completed its long-awaited direct listing on the NYSE, with shares closing at $69.47 for a fully diluted value of $45.3 billion—a gargantuan valuation for a video game company that rose to prominence and saw massive growth during the pandemic
Why exactly can’t it just be kids?
I think Roblox has more adult players than Mr. Beast has adult viewers
Fast paced editing and the novel experiences possible by being rich
Children
I don’t watch him or any top YouTubers, but many other clickbait thumbnails are far worse and more annoying with their shocked “YouTube face”…
I like how they actually removed suggestions on the home page on the first time you visit logged out. I never click on anything on the home page suggestions and most of the stuff there is garbage, so it’s actually refreshing just to see a blank home page.
This is how I use. At least any rabbit hole is started by me.
It’s still garbage, but you’re 100% correct about it being 1000x worse logged out, at least it’s like that for me.
I started getting a shitload of recommended videos based off an app I played for 5 minutes and deleted.
I never looked it up on youtube or google, and I didn’t even search for it in the play store, I just saw it listed as similar to a different game that I did look up.
And after a week of constantly telling them to stop recommending me these videos because I don’t like them, I’m still seeing them.
Again, played the app for a few minutes and deleted, have now spent more time telling youtube to stop showing it to me than I spent playing.
This is where I feel like an absolute alien
They don’t show any recommendations when you’re logged out
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Google does a fair amount of data gathering even if you don’t log in. I think it does it through cookies, fingerprinting or browser inspection
If I use a session long enough it will start to change to my actual taste
Could you send a screenshot of what you see? I’m curious to see if it’s different
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If your tastes are anything except the average population’s, you will have little to no interest in the homepage suggestions.
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There must be separate cookies for when you’re logged out or something, because as someone who is always logged in, logging out completely changes the suggestions.
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Remember when Netflix had a million dollar competition to improve their recommendation system by something like 10%? Remember when they had user ratings and reviews? Remember when they threw it all in the fucking trash?
The original recommendation engine was amazing. Showed me stuff I loved that I would have never found myself. My favorite example is the French claymation acid trip called “A Town Named Panic”
Now all I get recommended are shows that are cancelled and that I’ve already watched.
The goal isn’t to give you stuff you want to watch, the goal is to do just enough that is just good enough to keep the highest amount of users subscribed. We like to think those are the same thing and they are usually aligned, but don’t have to be. It’s better for Netflix if you find those slower and just keep coming back to look around, kind of like some frustrating streaming gatcha game.
Maximize subscriptions, minimize actual watch time.
It wasn’t long after they “improved” the recommendation engine that I set up my Plex server so I guess it was successful?
That was a great film, very charming and bizarre
I watched it because it was the top pick in children’s movies and ended up enjoying it more than my kids. I rewatch it every few years because it’s just so weird and good.
Another one is the TV show Oscar’s Oasis. It has no dialog, but a very Coyote-and-Roadrunner feel. My kids loved it and it was actually pretty funny.
But when we were at Disney World we ended up sitting next to a family from Brazil who knew very little English and their kids were watching Oscar’s Oasis and my kids immediately joined them.
Think Panique au village was Belgian. Great watch yes.
Pepperidge farm remembers
That was such a glorious time. I recall they even held a competition at one point to develop a recommendation algorithm that could predict whether or not someone would enjoy Napoleon Dynamite
Nothing makes me feel more disconnected from humanity than the YouTube trending tab
I feel that way when I see YouTube shorts. Some of them are big titted girls doing shit which I can understand why those get clicked on but a lot of it I can’t even figure out what is supposed to be happening.
can’t even figure out what is supposed to happening
big titted girls
Well there’s your answer
But there’s no big titted girls in the ones I can’t figure out. It’s just people doing weird shit.
Hm interesting
Maybe it’s just one of those things where it’s so absurd it’s funny, like the meme man ones such as “as yes the cheese stick hath returned” or a farside
Hm, the Shorts algorithm should be generally based on your normal recommendations until you start watching them.
You know, potentially controversial opinion, but I kinda like shorts, since by now the algo has figured out that I like longer documentary-style videos on normal videos, but still get vtuber clips and cute animal videos as shorts.
Maybe I’m just getting the general ones then. I never log into the browser I use for Youtube and I have it wiping all the browsing data when I close it.
There is a trending tab? Huh. I really only use youtube when I want something specific and I never use thier app or webpage so I had no idea.
PSA: The top 10 lists are 100% bought and paid for, or pushed by the streaming service in question.
You know I’ve worked on these sorts of bullshit features (under protest) as a developer (special sorting algorithms that bump up the score of monetized entries over organic (aka real) ones) and somehow I never stopped to think that everyone was likely doing the same.
Naivety, I guess
Something like this?
SELECT * FROM content ORDER BY (views + bribe) DESC;
Absolutely. Ever since shitflix removed the star ratings and reviews that were done by real people, I stopped believing any of that “top list” bullshit.
‘Top 10 highest Netflix bribes’.
oh my how scandalous
The new payola… payolix?
That’s also how I feel whenever I access youtube from a different browser and just get the default listing.
Even when I go to YouTube on my account I have that feeling sometimes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As if it’s not just their selected movies they wanna promote.
I’m so disconnected I don’t even have Netflix or any other streaming service
What’s television? Is it that thing boomers use?
TV and streaming sucks. Movies suck. I’ve seen so many of them in the past that there’s really nothing new out there that’s any good any more because it’s all just rehashing and reimagining the past. Same with gaming. Same with books. And music. We’re so buried under a ton of entertainment that we can just stop making new entertainment and watch everything done in the past and still have enough to last us our entire lifetime. So what’s the point? If we’re going to have streaming, give us everything old – EVERYTHING – for a very low cost or free with limited ads and stop making new shit for your platform, all on one service.
I hear this a lot and do understand the sentiment but oh man in the last 3-4 years there have been so many great original and lower budget not blockbuster movies that have come out it’s great. Horror has really had a renaissance in the last 3 years with fresh ideas and plenty of new actors who are very good. It’s just not the things that are ever advertised a ton and probably have to scrounge through trailer YouTube’s to find them or sign up for newsletters. Some examples from recent years are Barbarian (2022), Infinity Pool (2023), Monkey Man (2024), The Holdovers (2023) and Perfect Days (2024).
sounds like you only focus on pop culture bullshit.
try getting into shit that isn’t designed to entertain you. classics, art films, art music, etc
It is a very big monitor
At least, that is how I use it.
Godzilla Minus One was #1 yesterday. I’m glad to finally see some good taste on there.
Oh shit, I know what I’m doing after work today!
It’s good. Don’t expect Shin Godzilla good, but it’s definitely good. I actually cared about the people in this one.
I went to the cinema to see it and it was amazing. I think I cried 3-4 times during it. Just one punch to the feels after another.
Seriously. You’re like ok all the bad things happened, it cou- oh no it just got even worse.
BUT THEN THERE SHE IS, THERE SHE IS AND HE DIDNT KNOW
God that movie got me in the feels
Don’t bother. They don’t have the black and white version.
No one’s stopping you from turning the color saturation to 0 on your TV/Monitor.
Fun Fact: I thought Bubba Ho-tep was in black and white when I first watched it. Turns out the DVD player was broken. I kind of liked it better in black and white.
This is a bespoke black and white experience.
They won an Oscar for this version of the movie.
Godzilla minus one is currently dominating that and I absolutely agree with that choice!
I never trusted that list from the getgo. Why wouldn’t they use it to promote certain content? It would be wasted opportunity if they didn’t.
Because they already have paying users.
They want engagement, which for Netflix means looking at what seems popular and promoting those.
But most likely not.
Godzilla Minus One instantly hitting #1 restores my faith in humanity… a little.
Pretty damn good. However, going into it blind meant I was surprised by the subtitles. I didn’t really want to read subtitles at the time.
Buddy, it’s a Japanese movie made in Japan, by Japanese people, wtf did you expect?
What part of ‘blind’ do you not understand? I only knew the name of the movie.
Dubbing?
It has a dub, so idk why that guy didn’t just watch that
During the pandemic I just sort of forgot about movies and most TV. I hadn’t even heard of 90% of the stuff nominated last awards season.
For the most part it doesn’t come up, but every so often I end up in a conversation where I feel like an alien.
That’s pretty much the rest of the planet whenever US people talk about “world famous” people
My mom was describing some show to me saying I should watch it and I was just thinking “that sounds awful”
I know, same. Then a year later I watch it after the hype has died down, and I’m like “mum, you gotta watch this!”
I don’t know if these are based on what everyone on the service is watching, or if it’s just because they still use Nielson families as their sole metric. How can the top 10 most popular things be shit I have never even heard of? If they’re that popular, I’m pretty sure I’d hear about it somewhere.
There is both no reason to believe its truly accurate and also its true that the content they advertise the most will be watched the most. I wouldn’t take it serious.
