Slashdot Mirror
Netflix Is Looking To Pay Someone To Watch Netflix All Day
An anonymous reader writes with news about a dream job for binge-watching couch potatoes in the UK. Ploughing through your new favourite series on Netflix is something you probably enjoy doing after a working day, but what if it was your working day? You see, Netflix has a fancy recommendation engine that suggests movies and shows you might like based on your prior viewing habits. To do that successfully, it needs information from a special group of humans that goes beyond the basics like genre and user rating. "Taggers," as they're known, analyse Netflix content and feed the recommendation engine with more specific descriptors if, for example, a film is set in space or a cult classic. In short, these people get paid to watch TV all day, and Netflix is currently hiring a new tagger in the UK.
Because they want shills to recommend shows nobody else wants to see so they'll get kickbacks from the clueless publishers.
I like spending the occasional 1 - 4 hours watching a few episodes in a row or maybe two movies, but doing that 8 hours a day / 5 days a week? Enjoyment soon turns into torture, hope they get paid good.
Given how poor the Netflix rating engine is surely their money'd be better spent hiring a programmer? I mean, how about not suggesting to me the movie I've just watched? (Low hanging fruit?)
I've heard about this thing called metamoderation. Rumor has it that it is already being used on some sites to weed out garbage user inputs...
Ezekiel 23:20
Why not just let the users do the job? Cheaper, faster and easier...
Generally, when somebody is paying for what it sounds like they could get for free, or even get paid for, there is good reason to suspect that the job description is either underplaying the exact level of difficulty and/or boredom involved, or that somebody has already learned the hard way that what they can get for free isn't exactly what they want.
In this case, I'd be inclined to suspect that the job is closer to being a 'machine vision' substitute for stuff that machines can't yet see or which it wouldn't be cost-effective to have an expensive analyst cobble together a ruleset and then cheap labor check for mistakes when you could just have cheap labor classify it (eg. 'movies set in space' is probably something that you could achieve reasonable accuracy on, if you do some futzing with detecting starfields and common flavors of "rocket thruster jet of flame"; but you'd have your false positives and false negatives from things in space that happen mostly inside spacecraft, and things not in space that happen to involve looking at the sky more than usual, and so on).
It's probably a hell of a grind, actually, given that (unlike, say, being a film critic or some film-studies culture critic type) Netflix is going to want everything ground through and tagged on a variety of parameters, not just the stuff you happen to be a geek about, or the stuff that's worth watching, or what have you. It wouldn't much surprise me if, for efficiency's sake, they have you monitoring more than one stream at a time, or working in faster-than-real time, or a combination. You can probably extract the data they want rather faster than you can enjoy the program, even if it is one you like.
But it only works if you participate.......which might explain Slashdot.
Generally, when somebody is paying for what it sounds like they could get for free, or even get paid for, there is good reason to suspect that the job description is either underplaying the exact level of difficulty and/or boredom involved, or that somebody has already learned the hard way that what they can get for free isn't exactly what they want.
Bingo.
You won't watch what you want. You probably won't have enough time to finish watching anything... 99% tagging accuracy for comedy, sci-fi, action, etc, etc, can be assessed within the first half.
And I can't think of much that would need to see the whole movie to tag correctly, except for "twist ending".
For TV series you'll probably just watch a few parts of a few random episodes, and then move on.
Your notion that you'd do it watching multiple streams is quite likely too -- and sped up... probably even skipping... watch 5 minutes, skip 5... watch 5 ...
Because as you say, your job is to tag movies, not critique them. You'll only spend as much time with a movie as you need to tag it accurately, and that is far less than the 90-150 minutes it would take to watch it from start to finish.
As an aside, another "dream job" that is truly abysmal in practice is "video game tester".