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.