Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Jairo Ferreira 266 a few titles that you like. We use these titles to “jump start” your recommendations. Choosing a few titles you like is optional. If you choose to forego this step then we will start you off with a diverse and popular set of titles to get you going. Once you start watching titles on the service, this will “supercede” any initial preferences you pro- vided us, and as you continue to watch over time, the titles you watched more recently will outweigh titles you watched in the past in terms of driving our recommendations system. Rows, rankings and title representation In addition to choosing which titles to include in the rows on your Netflix homepage, our system also ranks each title within the row, and then ranks the rows themselves, using algorithms and complex systems to provide a personalized expe- rience. To put this another way, when you look at your Netflix homepage, our systems have ranked titles in a way that is designed to present the best possible ordering of titles that you may enjoy. In each row there are three layers of personaliza- tion: • the choice of row (e.g. Continue Watching, Trending Now, Award-Winning Comedies, etc.) • which titles appear in the row, and • the ranking of those titles. The most strongly recommended rows go to the top. The most strongly recommended titles start on the left of each row and go right -- unless you have selected Arabic or Hebrew as your language in our systems, in which case these will go right to left. Howwe improve our recommendations system We take feedback from every visit to the Netflix ser - vice and continually re-train our algorithms with those signals to improve the accuracy of their pre- diction of what you’re most likely to watch. Our data, algorithms, and computation systems continue to