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Yes, for the last few years, every time I logged into Netflix I was stunned at poorly they seemed to understand me. Heist movies, murder mysteries, drug cartels fighting, stuff I never watch, and this was the majority of the stuff they showed. Recently I spent 20 minutes looking for something to watch, but I couldn't find anything at all that looked interesting. I thought that was so shocking, I decided it was time to cancel Netflix. So I finally gave up my account. There is an abundance of good material I can watch elsewhere.

But the main question is, why can't Netflix write a recommendation engine that actually shows me something I want to watch?



Because they can't get the rights to stream anything you'd actually want to watch, and they think they can trick you into accepting their catalogue and continuing to pay them away.


No one can write decent recommendation engines because it's a really hard problem that no one has solved.

Even in music--where everyone actually has a pretty complete catalog--recommendation is pretty bad.




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