Readit Newsksey3 commented on Netflix prepares to send its final red envelope nytimes.com/2023/09/23/bu... · Posted by u/thm
I know this is asking a lot, but do you have a reading list/ any other type of media format playlist that you want to recommend? I ask because your comment was incisive.
Follow the banter around a single term "Financialization" (setup a google news alert). It will lead you to everything else, including how the financial sectors thinking about it.
ksey3 commented on Netflix prepares to send its final red envelope nytimes.com/2023/09/23/bu... · Posted by u/thm
Netflix is such an interesting company. They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office. I knew Los Gatos was well known for being an incredibly wealthy zip code but I had no idea it was pretty much the #1 most expensive city in the USA. Netflix pays their engineers a ton of money, no equity. We're talking 300-500k cash. As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs. I absolutely dreamed that one day I'd be capable enough to work for Netflix or Pixar on high end network lowest throughput-we-can-accomplish infra. Now it's all a joke to me. I don't even have Netflix account anymore. I've attempted to launcha a multitude of Netflix OSS projects like ConsoleMe and Conductor. I have never ever, and I'm saying this as someone who hopped onto Kubernetes version 1.1 in 2015. I have never had a worse open source experience than Netflix OSS projects. They basically shoot them out then abandon them and never touch them again.
This post made me hit up their Github again and there are (possible) gems like Zuul, Falcor, Chaosmonkey.. but seriously, go try and deploy them. It's embarassing.
Thats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content.
In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head.
Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter.
After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash.
And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers.
Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo.
Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.
How many didnt get famous? Thats what no one reports.
If the UN report on the attention economy is saying 0.5% of content produced is consumed and dropping, then how are people getting views? It doesnt make any sense. Unless the game is rigged.
People have limited attention to give anything but unlimited capacity to receive attention. The platforms are taking full advantage of that fact to keep this ponzi scheme running.
This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006.
Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the Newsvine backend. If the troll flag was set to true, Newsvine would add a random 10-60 second delay to every page load for the troll's account. IIRC it solved the problem pretty effectively.
Spam and trolling even happens on a physical newspapers/radio/tv/books/magazines. Its just that you have to pay to do it.
The rich/ceremonial/leisure classes have through out history been constantly spamming everyone with whatever shit occurs to their 3 inch brains, because they can afford to buy the largest amount of attention.
To bad there is not enough attention for anything anymore cause production of content is happening at volumes that dwarf Consumption of content.
If 99% of comments and links on HN are not read by anyone, do you think the great geniuses who run HN will tell you that? Whats the use of such systems no one asks. They want to just keep it alive like some dumb engineers in the control room of Jurassic Park after the children are lost and the T Rex is loose.
The platforms, without knowing what the fuck they are building, have made it Free for everyone to Broadcast. So its now not just the rich who are spamming and trolling. Its everyone. For free. All you get is noise. Read the UN Report on the Attention Economy.
One dimensional software engineers now have capability to build and scale systems quickly. Thats the only reason we have these dumb fucking mindless systems wasting everyones time and energy.
i don't think any safeguards will protect us from evils brought about by technology - it evolves too fast already for the society to catch up .
Well someone has to pay for the tech. Its not free. And that puts an automatic upper limit on what happens.
People have no idea how much debt Police depts (lets not even talk about the military) have racked up playing with high tech toys and paying off compensation every 2 days for people they accidentally harm or kill. So whats funny here as Big Bro gets access to more and more tools the more broke he gets.
And guess what the financiers of this debt will do when it cant be paid off. Raid police pension funds. Thats how financialization of public service works
No free lunch big bro. Have fun with all the "cool toys" while the good times last.
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