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Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

The marginal cost to serve you more videos is real, but it’s negligible compared to the fixed costs or cost of people not re-subscribing. So I assume that people at Netflix were optimizing for usage/engagement just like the ad driven services as a proxy for subscribe rate.

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I wonder how much the workforce plays into it.

If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and skills going to shape the new company?

I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more heavily into the attention economy than they might otherwise need to.

Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.

> Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction

This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly only care about the user as a source of revenue.

The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are hardly incentivised to fix that now.

I wouldn’t say they are hardly incentivized now. They were never incentivized.

What company cares about a users well being? The only companies that might care are ones where the population growth rate of humanity is the bottleneck on their new user acquisition and those companies are slowly morphing into sovereign nations already

Indeed. It was however expedient to pay lip service to the idea of promoting user wellbeing at various times (i.e. shortly post-Cambridge analytica at Facebook)

I used to own a part of the Facebook homepage and maximizing its metrics was my job.

They told us they cared about wellbeing. I made a feature that demonstrably improved wellbeing, and we had lots of data and surveys etc to prove it.

But it decreased watch-time on shortform (what we used to call TikTok style) videos so the Director made me delete it. That started my disillusionment process that eventually made me quit.

Money is the only thing that matters to them.

Yeah, I was working at Oculus when the wellbeing narrative started to fall apart across Meta. Was a good time to get out.

While it initially makes a reasonable proxy you end up polluting the measurements gradually by engineering for maximum screen time. The Artificialy created screentime is increasingly unrelated to satisfaction and ultimately not at all.

Take how Google sorts results by popularity while it is also the main source of "popularity".

The word means something different now.

This is the correct answer.

The more you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe.

If you haven't watched a streamer in a couple of months, that's the first thing you'll cancel when you glance at your credit card statement.

Netflix could probably get enough goodwill by just automatically not charging people who didn't use their service at all as to be worth it. No hassle, we just keep rolling your subscription over until you watch something again (of course they make interest in the month you paid but didn't use services - that $0.05 should pay for the email and other infrastructure costs needed for a customer that doesn't even use the service). The real benefit of this is when someone does watch something there is no hassle - they are already subscribed and so they don't even think about should the re subscribe.

Of course with their ad supported tier they probably don't agree.

I think they already remind you after a year of inactivity, and automatically cancel your plan after 2 years of inactivity.

But they're a business, so obviously they want you to use it and pay for it.

>Netflix could probably get enough goodwill by just automatically not charging people who didn't use their service at all as to be worth it.

Is there a circumstance that could cause their stock price to drop to $0 more quickly?

This is the correct mental model. Minor COGS increase < Churn.

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