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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

It is.

I must have expressed myself really badly, since people are reading the opposite of what I intended.

Netflix bet the farm on computer-generated plots, which is partly how they have such an immense quantity of content - yet the badness shines through. OTOH the handful of decent shows they have are all fully fledged concepts that they bought.

Like most people I really have to rethink the value-per-$ of this proposition, but if Netflix just erased all the crap maybe 10 up-to-snuff and 2 to 3 really good shows a year would remain. Worth paying what it is? If every new show was like "1983" or "Fauda"...

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"Computer-generated plots"? What? That's bizarre. Tell me more!

Netflix isn't outsourcing all of it's script work to computers literally, of course, but they can definitely do "People like historical drama... people like boats... let's do a historical drama on a boat!" sorts of things, which may not literally be coming straight out of a computer, but it might as well be.

When my kids were younger, my wife and I used to joke about some of the kids shows that way, too... "kids like dinosaurs... kids like trains... Dinosaur Train!" If you don't have kids or aren't in the US or something... I'm not just making up a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Train

> When my kids were younger, my wife and I used to joke about some of the kids shows that way, too... "kids like dinosaurs... kids like trains... Dinosaur Train!" If you don't have kids or aren't in the US or something... I'm not just making up a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Train

Netflix is literally doing the exact same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinotrux:

> Dinotrux is an American computer-animated web series. It features a fictional prehistoric world inhabited by hybrid characters that are part dinosaur and part mechanical construction vehicle. The larger Dinotrux are accompanied by Rotilian Reptools who are smaller reptiles combined with mechanic's tools.[3] The series debuted on August 14, 2015 on Netflix...

> they can definitely do "People like historical drama... people like boats... let's do a historical drama on a boat!" sorts of things

They can do a lot more than that. They know precisely at what points people pause episodes or give up viewing a series entirely, for example. I'm sure someone must have thought of using that to determine what plot structures and pacing captivates viewers.

>they can definitely do "People like historical drama... people like boats... let's do a historical drama on a boat!" sorts of things,

Which is the Achilles Heel of all recommendation engines. Just because I watched one historical drama doesn't mean that I want all historical dramas all the time. Take a show like Stranger Things. The campy nostalgic thing worked for it, but that doesn't mean I want my next 5 shows to be campy and nostalgic. I want my next show to be something original like Stranger Things was.

Ken Liu wrote an enjoyable short story ("Real Artists") about exactly that. Just looked it up and it was published in 2011. One of those unusual bits of SF that becomes, if anything, more credible over time.

I think that was hyperbole for "plots that are to some degree based on datamining Netflix' amazingly detailed knowledge of people's viewing habits".

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