DataDownload: Inside Netflix’s major Play Something update

7 min readMay 8, 2021

DataDownload: Inside Netflix’s major Play Something update A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

Back when I was a kid, going to Baskin Robbins was wonderful. 31 flavors… so much choice!

You have to admit it — when it comes to Netflix, you suffer from decision fatigue. Vulture has a great piece on the streamer’s strategy to replace that with new tools.

Speaking of decision fatigue, Facebook’s Supreme Court whiffed, and decided not to decide. So, there we go. And speaking of conundrums…why does the US have two different Highway Fonts? Vox has the answer. Finally, our long read… is the dream of a computer brain fading? Scientific American has that covered.

So — don’t miss my colleague Abran Maldonado’s panel next Thursday — Can NFTs Fund the Future for Artists? RSVP, it’s free and it’s going to be awesome.

Have a good week.

Steve

Steven Rosenbaum
Steve@NYCMedialab.org
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab Must-Read Inside Netflix’s Quest to End Scrolling

“Finding something to watch is not a lean-back experience anymore; it’s a challenge.” — Elena Neira, a professor at Barcelona’s Open University

Back when Netflix was transitioning to streaming, it tested an experimental feature with a small audience: instead of users having to select from rows of content, once you opened the Netflix app it would just start playing something, just like cable TV. Viewers didn’t like it at the time, and the idea was shelved for over a decade.

Now, the company has reintroduced the feature, called Play Something, armed with a plethora of viewer data and audiences overburdened with decision fatigue (a problem Netflix itself helped create). Todd Yellin, VP of product doesn’t think the issue is too much content (“I’m shocked when people don’t think it’s a good thing”), but not having the right tools to quickly choose what you want to watch.

“Unlike old-school TV, Netflix’s version of changing channels makes sure you start at the beginning of a title and not somewhere in the middle. It knows if you’re halfway through a binge, serving up the next episode in your queue rather than one from two seasons ago. And of course, the programs you’re shown are determined by the algorithm, rather than some anonymous network executive.”

Vulture / 21 min read Read More What Journalists Need in a Chaotic News Environment: Lessons From 2020

With the threat of false and misleading claims about elections looming last year, the American Press Institute teamed up with Craig Newmark Philanthropies to launch the Trusted Elections Network, which connects newsrooms and experts on elections and misinformation to better address attacks on the election process. The Institute lists several lessons they learned over the last year:

Journalists need a sense of what their audiences really want, and sometimes — especially in times of chaos — it’s the basics: “One thing 2020 taught us is that in times of chaos, audiences need the basics. In the case of an election, it’s where and how to register and vote, especially understanding less familiar processes like mail voting.”

Newsrooms need the leeway, through dedicated funding, to try new things: “Funding helped newsrooms hire additional reporters, produce content in new formats and across multiple platforms, and better listen to, engage, and support their audiences and communities.”

American Press Institute / 6 min read

It’s easy to forget that the clever, hilarious, and sometimes profound examples of GPT-3-generated text you see online are highly curated. If you’ve ever played around in the beta’s sandbox mode, you quickly realize that generating a decent response to a prompt is like shaking a magic 8-ball… containing a large chunk of the internet’s text — including the disturbing bits.

For Latitude, the makers of AI Dungeon, the combination of text adventure scenarios and state-of-the-art natural language generation turned out to be a winning combination in 2019. The game now attracts 20k DAUs, according to OpenAI. But even here, user-posted story logs on reddit and the AI Dungeon app are curated. The underbelly is there, it’s just not displayed that much.

But last month, OpenAI turned on its monitoring system, revealing that “some [AI Dungeon] players were typing words that caused the game to generate stories depicting sexual encounters involving children.” Latitude, in turn, turned on a new moderation system last week, triggering an intense reaction from the user base. The company is now caught between “the challenge of winning back users’ trust while meeting OpenAI’s requirements for tighter control over its text generator.”

WIRED / 8 min read Read More With Trump Ruling, Facebook’s Oversight Board Highlights Where the Power Lies

The endless ouroboros of Big Tech self-regulation saw a glimmer of hope when Facebook’s appointed “Supreme Court” threw back the decision on Trump’s account, telling the company they needed to decide for themselves and live with the consequences. The semi-independent group (they’re still paid by Facebook) gave the company six month to make a decision, and said that it “needs to be more transparent about how it handles high-profile political accounts and that it can’t justify refusing to take down violating posts merely because of their ‘newsworthiness.’”

NBC News / 3 min read Read More How We Manage New York Times Readers’ Data Privacy

When Kelsey Johnson joined the NY Times’ Data Governance department, she was part of a team of two, tasked with tackling nearly inscrutable GDPR regulations (at least, in 2017) over the span of five months. Now there are over 100 privacy laws around the globe.

To tackle this, the Times has to implement “complex sets of rules to ensure their websites and apps are in compliance no matter where users are located.” Instead of approaching regulations reactively, the Times chose to invest in privacy as part of their business strategy. The result is PURR — Privacy, Users, Rules and Regulations — the paper’s “privacy machine.” Johnson dives into how PURR works, its directives, rules, and dependencies. And yes, there are more than a few cat references.

NYT Open / 8 min read

Read More What We’re Watching Why the US Has Two Different Highway Fonts

The typefaces on highway signs, deconstructed.

Vox (YouTube) / 5 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: A Vast Web of Vengeance, Part 2

Inside the world of complaint sites and what can be done about the “the bathroom wall of the internet.”

Spotify / 24 min listen

Listen Now Virtual Events Free Event: Data Driven NYC with Databricks & Synthesia
Date: May 11, 5PM EDT
This month’s speakers include: Ali Ghodsi, Founder & CEO, Databricks and Victor Riparbelli, Founder & CEO, Synthesia. Register Here.

Free/Paid Event: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series w/ Mastry & Miami Heat
Date: May 12, 7:30PM EDT
Join a conversation with Rudy Cline-Thomas, Managing Director at Mastry, and Andre Iguodala, Guard-Forward for Miami Heat. Register Here. A Deeper Look The Fading Dream of the Computer Brain

“Taking cues from AI, computational neuroscience is gradually leaving behind biological brains in search of perfect algorithms, which like its cousins in deep learning, may ultimately produce more black boxes that execute tasks but remain internally inscrutable.”

Director Noah Hutton spent a decade following Henry Markram’s journey to build a fully simulated model of the brain — both at the Blue Brain Project and the Human Brain Project. As the years passed and Hutton spoke to more and more neuroscientists, the initial excitement he felt first listening to Markram’s 2009 TED talk began to strip away, replaced with skepticism and, ultimately, no clear answers. Except perhaps that “flashy presentations and sheer ambition are poor indicators of success” when it comes to understanding the brain.

“As technology races ahead and a certain strain of technocratic salesmanship continues to command the collective human ear, the line between fiction and reality will continue to be blurred, leading to cycles of hype and disappointment that threaten long-term public confidence in science.” Check out the trailer for Hutton’s documentary below.