Soliciting premature evaluations

In case you're wondering about the answer to the question posed by this screen shot of my TV, yes, I was enjoying -- and did enjoy -- Alexandra Aja's new French language film Oxygen. I highly recommend it, though will not tell you too much about it so you go in without any preconceived notions.

But the question itself should never have been asked.

I don't know if you've noticed -- I first noticed within the past couple months -- that when you pause a movie on Netflix, it asks you straight away if you are enjoying what you're watching. Like, even if you pause it one minute in. 

This is just dumb.

Netflix should not be feeding data into its algorithm about user preferences if the user has not fully consumed the content. Yeah sure, maybe most of us aren't rating movies after we finish them, and Netflix is grumpy about that, but rating it during the movie? What if it doesn't get good until the second act?

Either answer could be misleading. What if -- and this is really a more likely scenario -- the movie (or TV show, or comedy special) starts out like gangbusters, but then peters out, or worse, ends on something so patently offensive that you wouldn't recommend the movie (or TV show, or comedy special) to your worst enemy? 

You won't know that until that moment comes, but if Netflix has their way, you'll have already blindly endorsed it based on a few clever sequences and a general sense of optimism.

The truth is, probably most people are eager to say they are enjoying something -- it's a kind of confirmation bias, where you want to convince yourself you made the right selection for your Thursday night viewing.

So what are a bunch of false positives or false negatives doing for Netflix?

It's hard to say. But any meaningful algorithm changes or programming decisions based on partial information are inherently flawed. 

Imagine someone was pitching an idea to you and they wanted some venture capital for it, and you controlled that venture capital. Imagine that the product sounded so great, and answered so many of society's needs, and was so destined to be the Next Big Thing that you greenlit it before the presentation ended? Before the person doing the pitch got a chance to tell you about its horrible environmental effects and the fact that it would cost $10 billion to launch?

You get the idea.

Of course, we'll never actually know how any of this affects the way Netflix does business because Netflix keeps that information closely guarded.

But since I did finish, I can again say: See Oxygen. 

Let my complete set of data inform your personal algorithm.