gathersnow

Can you even vote now? I think they do a lot of it by inferring from what you watch.

Netflix became so user-hostile and it is truly baffling to me. They act as if they are paid by amount of time you spend watching movies and have all of these dark patterns shoving the user all over the place and disorienting them. I remember when they had tools to see what your friends were watching and to discover hidden gems which was always such a fun experience.

Does Netflix have such content nowadays? I really wouldn't know. They optimize the experience for binge-watching and nothing else. I wish so badly that they'd do a letterboxd thing and allow for curation of their catalog but it all goes back to the ephemeral nature of their content and how they have to hide that fact.

They care so little about that approach now it's no wonder they never used this algorithm.

I signed up for Netflix around the time I got my first DVD player in the late 90s. I watched a lot of cool movies I would never have otherwise had access to. It was fun to discover indie and foreign cinema that were not available in my local video rental stores.

When they released streaming it was truly awesome. Not only was the seleciton great, they also had things like the concept of "friends" and you could let your friends see what you watched. The joy of discovering new movies could have gone the way of something like letterboxd except where you can actually see the movies. The Netflix challenge was cool too because it really seemed like they wanted to get you to find the perfect movie for _you_.

But when the studios started to wise up and pull their content they chose the most user-hostile and pessimistic ways of dealing with it. Netflix used to be more than just a content pipe, they added value the form of the recommendation engine and were starting to add value in a social network of sorts. But instead they chose deception to hide the fact that their library was getting hollowed out. They killed off the budding social-media aspect.

I guess content is the foundation upon which you build all of these things and when their content got yanked they had to focus on maximizing viewer experience within those limitations. But a part of me does wonder if I could find something I really like within the huge library of unknown garbage they have. The problem is that they don't seem to care about that kind of experience anymore. So that's why I am no longer a subscriber.

Also, what happens if both parties agree to a salary outside of the bound during the interview. Is the employer bound by that number? I am guessing there is no mechanism that would enforce it.

I was a member of Netflix from 90s to about 2021. The beginning of the streaming era was great. But since then Netflix has a long history of being user-hostile that I said goodbye to them many years ago. I got sick of their stupid auto-play feature that couldn't be disabled.

They used to seemingly care helping you find new movies you like based on a star rating. Remember the Netflix challenge? Now I suppose there's a thumbs up, but really they probably just gauge based on if you watch or not.

Instead of adding tools to help people find a life-altering hidden gem of a movie they took them away. When their catalogue got exposed for being mostly garbage they just made it harder to stray from the most popular movies on the service. They had a social component I liked but they got rid of it a decade ago. Imagine if it were like letterboxd and you could have people you follow whose taste you liked and could trust to recommend movies? A company the size of Netflix would find this trivial to implement and yet they haven't because they want to make their service as stupid as possible. What about something like a faux-cable experience for people that don't want to pick from a list of 30k things? They refused to do that so now Pluto exists.

There are tons of ways that I think you could add community value-add but Netflix never did because they take their users for granted. I am sure this is literally a play to boost subscriber numbers based on how it went down in other countries. We'll see how it works but I for one have zero loyalty based on the contempt they show for the people that consume their product.

This is what I have been thinking recently. In my recent interactions with the IRS site I was impressed. In particular was the weird photo-identity app that I had to use to generate a PIN.

The IRS will be incentivized to collect as many tax dollars as possible. That could inform decisions that would end up making it harder for taxpayers to save money. The US does transfer payments via the tax code so doing your taxes is in many ways similar to applying for benefits in other countries.

But that's fine. That would mean that TurboTax would have to provide value by way of minimizing what you owe to the IRS instead of being the easiest way to navigate a complicated process with legal consequences if you make a mistake.

I don't think that CDMX is considered a hotbed of cartel activity?

What is really interesting is to ask it how to do things that you know is impossible. I was trying to figure out how to do something in the Django ORM that I knew how to write in SQL. It starts inventing features that to solve the problem. In another instance I went through about 5 fake modules before it suggested a real one. It seems very eager to please and in doing so seems to err on the side of making stuff up.