It is an amazing fumble from Netflix. I thought Reed Hastings actually understood the space pretty well back when he somewhat famously said (paraphrasing) "We have to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix" and pivoted to making content.

They've been making content now for a long time, Lilyhammer came out in 2012.

They had all the data telling them that long lived series that built dedicated followings like The Office, Friends, Star Trek, etc. were reasons that people stayed on the platform.

They had 14 years to put together their own dynasty series, shows that people could connect with over the years that would become their comfort shows that they could return to again and again, fully owned by Netflix and completely locked in their walled garden.

Instead they pursued a strategy of starting a thousand promising ideas but if they didn't instantly take off, done. No room for a show to grow and mature and develop, you better have a great first season and you might get a second.

And I think everyone I know has at least one show on Netflix that they got invested in only for it to get axed with a dozen unresolved story threads. I think the one that made me go "why bother?" was Santa Clarita Diet. A funny dramatic show with star power, Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, interesting character development, a 3 season run and then just killed.

It wasn't the first series they killed with a dozen loose threads dangling, but it was the last one I watched. At first I told myself, "I might watch another series after it goes the distance and I know they won't just leave it half-finished" but that quickly just turned into "I don't watch netflix produced series" and as they lost more and more of their licensed content "I don't watch netflix" and this month I realized I was still handing them nearly $30 a month for nothing and canceled.

I think about a lot of the most popular shows and how bad their first seasons are. But audiences like to see characters grow and that's a big part of what causes people to connect with a show and want to come back to it again and again.

The ‘replace creatives with AI’ industry started with Netflix years before we called it AI, and they’re going to see their shares fall further when the market realizes they’ve been sold a false front. Their growth curve was built up on a lie about curation, revealed as such at last by their own metrics, and I’d put my bet on Netflix taking itself private somehow rather than admitting how badly they’ve misjudged customer patience for expensive mediocrity.

HBO’s priority was to tell excellent stories with big budgets and charge slightly more than average.

Netflix’s priority was to tell stories excellently with big budgets and charge as much as was necessary to accelerate growth in revenue y-o-y.

HBO was really damn good at picking great stories to show us. (Maybe not so great at winding them up before they jump the shark, but we have the trope because humans suck at that universally.) Netflix seemingly believed in its recommendation algorithm so strongly that they let it pick stories for them — but most recommendation engines wear thin, and trying to make a movie from ‘Latinx Moody Deadpan’ or ‘Cooking Biography 4K’ only works so many times before viewers realize that the content is just like the recommendations: a ‘false front’ designed to make Netflix seem like it can pick an entire theater full of stories, that wears off rapidly once you exhaust the algorithm’s top picks. Today, I cannot think of any modern flashy topic-generated Netflix thing that is as strong a story as HBO’s Westworld — or Hulu’s Palm Springs. Whatever their flaws, they’re compelling stories, that you can’t just pick out of an algorithm envelope; Netflix’s are, uniformly, not.

Letterboxd exists now as an immune response to this artificial theater, proof that humans are better at picking recommendations given a starting point than Netflix’s billion dollars of algorithms, and that humans are willing to congregate around something made with good taste. It used to be a sign of social status to have an HBO subscription, and now it’s a sign of social status to earn lots of likes on Letterboxd. In both cases, that social status stems directly from the excellence of curation, whether of what movies to make or of what movies to see. For the categories of curation and respect and social signaling, Netflix and The Algorithm doesn’t earn a single nomination.

They optimized for what they measured.

They measured the wrong thing because it was easier for them.

Some of the most important things can't be measured.

The future can't actually be pre-computed, the forecast isn't the terrain, it isn't even the map.

Netflix has internally treated their employees like machines for a long time and they treat their "content" the same way.