I’m a member of a platelet donor group on Facebook. Because he process takes several hours the Red Cross has Netflix and Hulu available to entertain donors during the process. Members on the group have observed that one of the benefits of using the Red Cross app is that:
I use the ARC Netflix to watch stuff that I don’t want affecting the algorithm/suggestions on my personal account.
Several people endorsed this statement, and I’ve got to ask, why? I’m pretty casual with my Netflix queue. I use it, my wife uses it, my children and grandchildren use it when they visit and I don’t see any problems with that, but I’m wondering if keeping it to myself would somehow result in some marvelous Netflix experience curated by the wondrous algorithm wizard.
Does anyone with their own Netflix queue get can’t-miss suggestions?
There seems to be some evidence that suggestions for new things to watch are impacted by what you watch. Different viewing experiences can lead to vastly different shows/movies on the home screen. So that may be a good reason to make sure your profile isn’t altered too much.
Before I had a device that supports separate profiles, I got a lot of suggestions for kid shows and movies, and for reality shows and other things I dislike, because other family members watched those things through my profile. Now I really do get better suggestions. But I think the idea of keeping things secret from the Netflix algorithm that you do want to watch is bizarre.
My wife and I have two different profiles and get different suggestions. I believe that is how it is supposed to be. You can have several profiles for each user, you can have one for the intellectual stuff where you will get highbrow suggestions and one for the corny shows where you will get that kind of stuff suggested and you could log in with one or the other depending on your mood.
I could understand wanting to keep porn out of your history and from the algorithm but Netflix does not have any decent porn anyway, does it? (Just asking for a friend… )
I would rather like to know how I can delete shows that I don’t want to finish watching from the list “Continue watching for Pardel-Lux”. Some have been there for ages but they were just not interesting for me, and yet there they stay.
You can remove shows from Continue Watching by going to your account on the website from your computer. The app can’t do it and I’m not sure if you can do it from your phone. But on the desktop website, you can see watch history and remove shows that you don’t want to be listed in Continue Watching. I suppose this might also be an issue if there’s a shared account. Someone might not want certain shows to be in that list when the family sits down to watch something on the living room TV.
It’s not so much that it increases good suggestions, as it reduces the bad ones. My housemate really likes those true-crime type psuedodocumentaries, which I can’t stand. If she uses my profile, I get crap like that recommended for weeks afterwards.
Thanks! I didn’t realize there was a website and that it was different from the app (I thought of it as a program because it’s on a windows computer and it is independent from the browser, but I guess that is what you mean). I’ll give it a try. Considering how impractical this app is in so many ways I guess the website has other positive features, so thanks again for the advise.
One possibility: to keep softcore porn type movies/shows away from the general account where the spouse can see what you are being suggested and put two and two together.
Really, with all the identity theft and all the personal info you NEED to protect, what movies you’ve watched is 1000x less dangerous.
I was about to type “Why would you care?”, but in ISiddiqui’s house, it could be a problem… I know you can choose to have any movies you don’t want seen on your ‘Watched’ list deleted. Not sure if that affects the algorithm, though.
Me, I decided to man up and told my wife “If you see weird stuff on our streaming home page, I just browse a lot of random stuff when I’m zoning out and don’t really want to think.” Sure 'nuff, she checked right away and laughed at all the anime and romcoms and cooking disasters and mindless action flicks… And, of course, Rescue Rangers.
Not only do I welcome suggestions that match my previously viewed shows, I even like targeted advertising (as long as it works, which it currently doesn’t because it just shows me the same things I already bought). I am a big fan of algorithm and AI based promoting as a concept.
LOL, AI advertising only exists in sales brochures of “meta”.
You will always see whatever ads still have budget.
If you buy an ad targeting one legged, red haired, republican, gay, black, rugby fans in Alaska your money will be spent just as fast as if you were targeting blond girls in Sweden.
You will always see ads for whatever item you just bought, for car rentals in locations you just left, hotels in places you just visited.
Have you looked at the “recommended for you” section of Amazon lately?
I don’t know if Netflix does this, but I find that YouTube very readily trains itself to the last 2-3 things I watched. So my suggestions can be very well trained to little-known early 70s funk, and then I forget how to install a wax ring for a toilet, and then it’s all DIY bathroom projects for the next 8 years.
Occasionally I wonder what Netflix would show me if it weren’t going off my previous decisions.
The Netflix algorithm is very, very good at what it does, but of course letting multiple people use your account muddies the dataset and makes it less accurate. That could be a good thing, though, if you want to get a wide variety of recommendations.
It can be interesting to look at other peoples’ Netflix accounts because you’ll often see recommendations for shows that you didn’t even know existed. You may not actually want to watch any of them, but it’s neat to see the service through an entirely different lens. It can sometimes seem like an entirely different platform if their tastes and yours diverge enough.
Yeah, the profiles are mostly useful for keeping your profile from being overwhelmed with stuff that Netflix identified as being likely targets for others in your household.
I mean, it’s nice to have the kids on their own kid profile and not get bombarded with suggestions for cartoons and kid programs, instead of the stuff my wife and I would prefer to watch. I’ve even considered getting my wife her own profile, so I can get better recommendations based on what I want to watch, not some sort of moving average of what the two of us have watched.
The only reason I can see for using a public profile to keep stuff off of your own profile would be in case you’re watching something your partner might not approve of.
I worked at YT for 2 years as a contractor and one of the articles I had to write was on how video recommendations worked. I discovered on my own that watching a lot of Malcolm X speeches brought up more recs for very, very similar content plus a few wild cards like 1960s vintage film clips. Also the home page recs were different from what was on a watch page for a selected video.
Because you are seeing all kinds of intelligently targeted ads?
Or are you seeing ads for stuff you bought a month ago?
Google knows when I bought my fridge: I need a new one about now- instead I see ads for the washing machine I bought last June.
Ads have never shown any intelligence other than “you just about fit the profile, we can get away with showing you this and call it “targeted””.
If this is the best “big data” can do I’m not really impressed.
After we bought a Switch we saw more ads for Switch : not for games, not for extra controllers. After I bought an extra controller the genius AI thinks I need more of them.
Or was that the last item in my search history someone paid money to show ads to “interested” people?
Now I just bought a car: guess what ads I get?
I could write better a “targeting algorithm” with 2 if/then statements.
Their algorithm is not about targeting ads- it is about forfilling the order for X thousand “targetted” views ASAP.
Amazon can’t even recommend me a book I want to read (although they should have a decent insight in my complete reading history through Goodreads).
Netflix has ±20 categories. Each show fits into multiple categories: if you recently watched something in that category it will “recommend” the next show in that category: if you think there is more to it: go check the “recommendations” in a friend’s account . The overlap between all of us is friggin huge. Almost as if we all get the same recommendations based on a small number of categories. If you really like a certain actor: Netflix will never catch on: if you despise an actor: Netflix wil never catch on. New shows are “recommended” because the producers (or publishers if we are talking about Amazon) are plugging their wares: just like the “top 10” table in the airport bookshop. This has nothing to do with AI — it is old skool marketing. That is why the recommendations look like the window of a blockbuster or the “top 10” table of a bookstore - the process is exactly the same.
Or you’re just checking out something for reasons other than your own enjoyment.
What I don’t get from the OP is how the app works. Surely the Red Cross doesn’t just let people use their app to access Netflix without an account. And, if it’s using your account, I would expect all views to go to the history of one of your profiles.
Does the Red Cross app create its own profile? Does it use some old Netflix API that doesn’t use profiles, and thus doesn’t keep track of what you watch?
I could definitely see the advantage of having an app that essentially logs into an Incognito profile. It’d be the same reason people use Incognito mode on browsers for various things. Sure, you could have a separate profile for porn, and maybe even delete that profile after your session. But a separate app would be a lot more convenient.
That said, there’s soft core porn on Netflix? It seems odd to me that I’ve never seen it at all. I’ve actually gone looking for it just to see, and searches just resulted in documentaries.
At one point I think I broke the YT AI … I literally will go from watching a 5 hour Planet Caravan to um, Sic Mea Fata from the Carmina Burana to The Dead South to the whole album of Led Zep Mothership to The Hu to a hairdresser showing me how to do the Vestal Virgin hairstyle to one of those vids of 10 most haunted to The Mikado to whatever random thing catches my interest. I even had a vid on those little glass droplets that shatter when you snap off their tails on screen for a while. We regularly watch Forgotten Weapons, The Chieftain, C&Rsenal, Townsends and The Muppet Show. I will watch stuff in French or German, mrAru will pick stuff up in Spanish.
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