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Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

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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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>".

Meanwhile, a lot of this content is on places like Tubi.

> 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.

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...

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