It could also tell us customers a bit about what kind of impact to expect from this. Content -wise if it's buyers. Or reliability wise if it's tech people.
There were claims that the last round significantly impacted folks working on some critical intersectional across race / ethnicity / gender identity type programming.
There were some articles about the layoffs last time and the major backlash that resulted. Protocol covered this, noting "Protocol identified at least 40 people from marginalized backgrounds who lost their jobs in the latest round of cuts."
Interestingly, as I read this Meta announcement a settlement on similar discrimination claims:
"Discrimination in housing, employment and credit is a deep-rooted problem with a long history in the US, and we are committed to broadening opportunities for marginalized communities in these spaces and others," Roy Austin Jr., Meta's vice president of civil rights, wrote in a blog post.
It was people working for marketing related to gender- and race-based programming that Netflix also mostly dropped in the past year when it decided to shift from targeting niche audiences to going for the pure-blockbuster play (i.e., from Babysitters Club to Squid Game).
I took a look at netflix's top 20 or so shows on their feed. Pretty eye opening in terms of what is getting watched, even down out of the top 10 or so.
My credit card expired last month and I forgot to update Netflix with the new one. They remind me every time I open Netflix, but I haven't bothered to update it, since there is nothing I really want to watch myself, but mostly because nobody in my family has complained yet.
Hopefully they spend more resources on better content. I personally find many netflix originals to be template series not worth watching unless you stretch your imagination well beyond sanity and suspend disbelief with the aid of some kind of medication.
Having said that, in my experience their app and streaming quality is just perfect. Unlike hbo’s. It would be a shame if these layoffs would be among tech departments because i imagine their engineering is awesome. As a bonus i read somewhere that they use freebsd and that’s a huge plus in my books. Shows that they understand tech well beyond the basics.
We might simply be at peak content. Better content requires better talent. The pool of talent is finite. Perhaps there aren't enough talented writers and producers to make better content happen.
What “woke” content is bending objective facts? The only one I can think of in the past few years was The Wheel of Time keeping the family trait and bloodlines plot line(including one character recognizing another characters heritage based solely on their looks) while not keeping that casting consistent.
The other end is shows like Foundation which might look like a woke cast at first but if you pay close attention you’ll realize that the galaxy spanning Empire has the diverse population due to being diverse while all the smaller planetary kingdoms are ethnically homogenous in casting which I thought was a clever attention to detail while satisfying politics.
Netflix is pretty smack in the middle in that they produce content for the woke crowd, but that’s just by focusing on including diverse characters. They tend to not get into complicated plots that are defeated by casting.
Unless my take on that is wrong I can’t see how minorities’ or womens’ existence can be bending any objective facts
And The Foundation is on Apple TV, I was using the examples to compare Netflix’s offerings compared to what I saw of as the most glaring example of wokeness “bending objective facts” and the best example of including diversity without weakening the story and in fact strengthening it.
Netflix’s offerings in comparison are middle of the road and kinda just have the people exist as either main characters are the quirky friend(tall girl for example) but nothing that bent objective facts
> The other end is shows like Foundation which might look like a woke cast at first but if you pay close attention you’ll realize that the galaxy spanning Empire has the diverse population due to being diverse while all the smaller planetary kingdoms are ethnically homogenous
Well, considering that in the Foundation books there are only humans, their ethnicity it's not an important trait (we can assume they are all white or all black for that matter), while their social class is often outlined and the only real difference is their gender, making it a mixed race show it's a sign of the times.
I have no problem with it or the gender swaps. But they had to make it that way because for starters it is certainly more accurate to say that 500 quadrillion people living in countless planets won't look the same, there are 40 billion people on Trantor alone, but it would also been unacceptable for the audience of today to blindly accept the fact that when Asimov wrote the Foundation series he wasn't interested in the skin color of the characters, he was writing of a greater story spanning over a very long period, not about social conflicts over individual identities, which, if you think about it, are a mundane topic in that settlement.
But in the end its real fault is being IMO a bad representation of the original material, that totally misses the point.
I happened to really enjoy the section that followed Empire which I understand was off page in the books, and every scene with Hari Seldon. The section following the rest of the foundation was pretty boring to me once they got to their planet.
Anyways this sentence I think is at the heart of the question I was asking.
> Well, considering that in the Foundation books there are only humans, their ethnicity it's not an important trait (we can assume they are all white or all black for that matter), while their social class is often outlined and the only real difference is their gender, making it a mixed race show it's a sign of the times.
Did mixed races no exist at the time of the stories writing? Did the robot characters who looked human but were from a completely different world view connecting not exist? I don’t think additional diversity is as big a sign of the times as the source suggests.
Anyways the phrase that sparked my question was “bending objective facts”. A cultural change in what his good or even acceptable story telling is a subjective opinion and not something that can be stretched as far as “objective fact”
> Did mixed races no exist at the time of the stories writing?
Not really, Asimov was born in 100% white Russia and then moved to USA during the 1920s where segregation was still a thing.
> Did the robot characters who looked human but were from a completely different world view connecting not exist?
Of course there were different worlds with different cultures, rites, traditions, religions and even food (or martial arts), but their look is not taken into great account. Asimov was a biochemist after all, not an anthropologist.
I agree that actualization of a work of fiction it is not bending objective facts, my impression though is that content platforms are more following than leading, they are giving the public what the public will consume, which is dull, it is like giving kids candies or cake because we already know they'll eat them.
There is no real surprise, no Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead or Carpenter's The Thing/Assault on Precint 13/They live, no Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, everything is so canonical and completely unimaginative. There is no space left for provocative, out of the box, even offensive, creation (unless it is sexually defining for minorities, like a dildo, homosexual intercourse, etc. something that wouldn't even shock my 82 years old dad)
In a way they are segmenting the market based on the idea they wanna project of themselves:
- Netflix: social activists involved in identity politics, teenagers (with superpower or supernatural powers), binge watchers, kids and some old show to entertain their parents too (all of Star Trek for example, the only reason I still use Netflix)
- Prime Video: crime aficionados, intelligent comedy (it better be British), superheroes with a twist, people like me who already pay for amazon prime and are not young anymore
- Apple TV: fancy, grandiose, epic stories, that unfortunately lack in writing and results are mixed. For people who love a great cast in a show.
- HBO: actual quality content, for people who love to pay for quality content.
> Not really, Asimov was born in 100% white Russia and then moved to USA during the 1920s where segregation was still a thing.
It was a facetious question. Of course mixed race people existed! There was no such thing as a 100% white Russia by any definition of the term in any era! It was an imperial state with explicit multiple ethnicities as far as the locals were concerned.
Like Jesus Christ, Asimov himself was Jewish and then migrated to the multi ethnic United States when he was three!
Do you honestly believe there were states with 100% pure ethnic polities at any point in history? Even supremacists states like the American South in the slave era had other ethnic groups as an underclass and frequently had children with them.
Like I can’t even look at the rest of your comment when you’re claiming Russia was 100% white. I couldn’t handle it if you said it was 90% white. All of Siberia? Dagestan? Tatarstan? Chechnya?
Edit:looked it up to make sure my Russian history knowledge hadn’t been made obsolete by new primary sources. Inorodtsy was the term in the Russian empire for the non Russian ethnic groups controlled by the empire.
You seriously need to take a look through history if you think the acknowledgement of minorities existence is a modern interpretation of historical facts
> There was no such thing as a 100% white Russia by any definition of the term in any era!
He was born in 100% white Russia.
In 1998 the village were Asimov was born counted 215 residents...
Of course Asimov being Jewish from a Russian Jewish family that dated back at least 4 generations, knew very well of being Jewish.
> You seriously need to take a look through history if you think the acknowledgement of minorities existence is a modern interpretation of historical facts
You're overreacting mate.
I know very well Russian history, there were no black people and still there are few. That's all I meant, you're arguing in bad faith.
Ad hominem won't cancel the fact that Asimov wasn't interested in mixed races in the Foundation, he was interested in everything else but identity politics for the influencers.
> Do you honestly believe there were states with 100% pure ethnic polities at any point in history?
You're confused.
Take China for example, there are at least 50 official ethnic groups.
But 92% of the people are Han.
It means there are 1.3 billion Han people, more than US+Europe+Russia combined.
So yes, there are large areas of China where 100% of the people are Han.
Modern Japan is 98.5% Japanese.
It's like saying it's 100% Japanese.
In the past?
Except for salves, prisoners and Ainu in Hokkaido, we can say it was 100% Japanese with a very high confidence.
For a foreigner Ainu and Japanese would also look the same.
If you were born in 1919 your World would have been the people around you, Internet did not exist, television did not exist, books were hard to find, traveling was expensive etc etc.
> You can’t say it’s 100% one group but also the main person we’re talking about isn’t white
The person we are talking about was born in a country that considered people not white because they weren't white enough (would you say, for example, that Asimov is not Caucasian?), like Americans did to Italians, it happened to my grand-grand-father too.
If that's not 100% white country mentality I don't know which one qualifies...
> Also reiterating the question, where did diversity in the show bend objective facts?
Is it a fact that in a distant future the human space colonies will be racially diverse in the way it is depicted in the show?
Or is it a decision from the authors?
I mean, if it was an historical documentary on South Americas in the 14th century we could talk about facts (and even there... we should present different theories on controversial topics, not just embrace one), but in a work of fiction every single detail count as "bending facts".
Looking forward to the new season of Umbrella Academy and it looks like there's going to be a trans element to it, which, drum roll please, actually mirrors reality (as the actor transitioned). Versus all of the absolute non reality zero object facts of the story itself.
The "reality" of media of yesteryear was the domain of white men. So yes, reality is changing. There's plenty of rage being generated about this, so I have to imagine your media intake might be influencing you in this regard.
There are definitely enough talented writers, it’s just that the Hollywood system is notorious for gatekeeping good writers, and thats if the writer had the perseverance and material support to even finish a spec script.
It’s a pool with a lot of constraints on it, many of which are artificial.
Netflix started to disrupt Hollywood, but it looks like Hollywood figured out how to manage Netflix. Rumours abound of conflict between the tech branch and content branchs (which is mostly Hollywood types now) of the company.
I know a few dozen struggling screenwriters who are trying to get (a) their screenplays produced or (b) contracted to write scripts. Note that these are all female screenwriters with an actual track record in industry (in this case, episodic broadcast TV).
It really boils down to a few gatekeepers (mostly old white guys) giving the screenwriting jobs to the same idiots over and over again. For example, the guys who wrote Morbius have never written a successful film that made money back at the box office but already have 1 new screenplay in production and have been contracted to write several more; meanwhile the screenwriter of Crazy Rich Asians (which not only outgrossed Morbius but nearly grossed as much as Morbius' screenwriters' other films combined) has only been hired for a single film (Raya and the Last Dragon) since.
? Wikipedia says the writer you are referring to as disadvantaged is working on a project as a writer, producer and director and has some pretty heavy backing
No, she might be working as a director on a film that has yet to be made; she is not the writer on that film. And she is not an "executive producer," so the title of "producer" is meaningless (it doesn't actually entail any responsibilities and is generally an honorific).
And the point is that while she had a major blockbuster success, this will only be her second film since that success; in that time, the losers behind Morbius will have worked on 4 films.
The point you are trying to make is starting to require a lot of caveats. She might be director not a writer, she's a producer not an executive producer, etc.
Also, Lim lists herself as a director of the film in her Twitter bio[0], so it seems like a lot more than a maybe at this point.
Separate from all that, I don't understand your larger point about Lim. She went from Crazy Rich Asians which grossed over 200 million, and then went directly to work on Raya, which grossed over 100 million, and now is directing and producing her own movie with hand chosen writing talent. Where exactly is she struggling? And where are writers being forced on her?
One thing I realized from "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is that although I never heard of the directors before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniels_(directors)), and never would have predicted that movie and it content, the moment I started watching it, I realized there was another pair of people to put on the List of People I Trust To Make Good Stuff. For example, I'd like them to go back and make Cat's Cradle, or even better, Sirens of Titan.
How many other second-tier directors who could make great films are out there not getting funded?
> How many other second-tier directors who could make great films are out there not getting funded?
I don't know, how many? Your example of Daniels is interesting because Daniels were discovered, so it doesn't help me understand how many people are out there that could do a great job but don't have the opportunity.
I've consumed a lot of amateur writing, music, and comedy. Most people just suck at creative endeavors. On the other hand, I once saw the most beautiful performance by a girl busking on the street. Fast-forward a few years, and now she's doing world-wide tours constantly and has a great musical career. With YouTube, Twitch, Spotify, and TikTok, it's never been easier for talented young artists, writers, and directors to rise up from obscurity.
Increasingly found that HBO is the only service worth paying for. They're the only ones capable of putting out high quality, well-produced shows. The rest are all 80% misses, 10% hits, and 10% "I got time and nothing else to do"
Apple TV has been putting out quite a bit of art in the decent to great category at the moment imo. I think that might be a function of trying to buy their way into a crowded market so I guess we’ll see how long it lasts
They're already spending countless of billions. Higher quality artistic output isn't primarily a question of money, you really can't buy yourself originality and creativity.
The entire structure and model of the business leads to produce exactly what Netflix makes. Season after season of mediocre TV that keeps people subscribing, using the same formulas over and over for more growth. Just like traditional TV at this point.
Occasionally they'll get a good indie hit but that's about it. It's telling that much of the best content, like Dark or some of the South Korean shows is not coming out of the typical studios.
Well.. you kind of can? For at least as long as other providers are producing content you think is good. The creativity comes from humans who work somewhere; you can you can't buy creativity but you can 'buy' humans.
Also you can buy the rights to old good stuff. Might not make good business sense (some (weird! senseless!) people will only watch new stuff) but it'd please me. My favourite stuff's all older than I am (i.e. I don't think you can claim it's just fond childhood memory or whatever) and there's plenty of greats I've yet to see, why restrict myself to this year's crap (and perhaps hit or two).
Buying rights is more difficult with so many platforms banking on their own backlog of content. It locks up much of the highest quality content by making their owners think they can be Netflix too. (Some of them are right.)
I sort of disagree. In the beginning of Netflix they were releasing hit after hit in terms of artistic/innovative media. I think they had a very different approach, they were looking for special products but it is clear as they grew big they started focusing on cheap to make, low retention but high viral potentiality shows.
That's a business decision. They made a decision to go for quantity over quality, and that's fine for the short-term.
I think Netflix simply didn't find the right balance. It's okay to have cheap shows to fill in the blanks, I mean, I enjoy some of them. But the biggest problem is that they give up on pretty much every other more "artistic" work too easily; even when these can only become popular years later.
It was likely easier to pick up the products that were passed on by tv for various reasons when it was mainly TV and FX that were their competitors. Now there's quite a few more competitors for edgy quality content.
Most of the stuff they pump out is just nauseating. I don't blame them though, they will make a show about whatever current event or cultural item possible. People are mostly at home surfing on their phone with some background low grade show on netflix, puffing a nic stic or sipping a craft beer. It doesn't take much for people to keep paying the 20 bucks a month or whatever it is now. "Cheaper than a meal for 2 at mcdonalds"
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 96.7 ms ] threadThere were some articles about the layoffs last time and the major backlash that resulted. Protocol covered this, noting "Protocol identified at least 40 people from marginalized backgrounds who lost their jobs in the latest round of cuts."
Interestingly, as I read this Meta announcement a settlement on similar discrimination claims:
"Discrimination in housing, employment and credit is a deep-rooted problem with a long history in the US, and we are committed to broadening opportunities for marginalized communities in these spaces and others," Roy Austin Jr., Meta's vice president of civil rights, wrote in a blog post.
Well played.
These days, I would not count on an expiring credit card to automatically cancel services.
Having said that, in my experience their app and streaming quality is just perfect. Unlike hbo’s. It would be a shame if these layoffs would be among tech departments because i imagine their engineering is awesome. As a bonus i read somewhere that they use freebsd and that’s a huge plus in my books. Shows that they understand tech well beyond the basics.
The other end is shows like Foundation which might look like a woke cast at first but if you pay close attention you’ll realize that the galaxy spanning Empire has the diverse population due to being diverse while all the smaller planetary kingdoms are ethnically homogenous in casting which I thought was a clever attention to detail while satisfying politics.
Netflix is pretty smack in the middle in that they produce content for the woke crowd, but that’s just by focusing on including diverse characters. They tend to not get into complicated plots that are defeated by casting.
Unless my take on that is wrong I can’t see how minorities’ or womens’ existence can be bending any objective facts
Netflix’s offerings in comparison are middle of the road and kinda just have the people exist as either main characters are the quirky friend(tall girl for example) but nothing that bent objective facts
Well, considering that in the Foundation books there are only humans, their ethnicity it's not an important trait (we can assume they are all white or all black for that matter), while their social class is often outlined and the only real difference is their gender, making it a mixed race show it's a sign of the times.
I have no problem with it or the gender swaps. But they had to make it that way because for starters it is certainly more accurate to say that 500 quadrillion people living in countless planets won't look the same, there are 40 billion people on Trantor alone, but it would also been unacceptable for the audience of today to blindly accept the fact that when Asimov wrote the Foundation series he wasn't interested in the skin color of the characters, he was writing of a greater story spanning over a very long period, not about social conflicts over individual identities, which, if you think about it, are a mundane topic in that settlement.
But in the end its real fault is being IMO a bad representation of the original material, that totally misses the point.
Anyways this sentence I think is at the heart of the question I was asking.
> Well, considering that in the Foundation books there are only humans, their ethnicity it's not an important trait (we can assume they are all white or all black for that matter), while their social class is often outlined and the only real difference is their gender, making it a mixed race show it's a sign of the times.
Did mixed races no exist at the time of the stories writing? Did the robot characters who looked human but were from a completely different world view connecting not exist? I don’t think additional diversity is as big a sign of the times as the source suggests.
Anyways the phrase that sparked my question was “bending objective facts”. A cultural change in what his good or even acceptable story telling is a subjective opinion and not something that can be stretched as far as “objective fact”
Not really, Asimov was born in 100% white Russia and then moved to USA during the 1920s where segregation was still a thing.
> Did the robot characters who looked human but were from a completely different world view connecting not exist?
Of course there were different worlds with different cultures, rites, traditions, religions and even food (or martial arts), but their look is not taken into great account. Asimov was a biochemist after all, not an anthropologist.
I agree that actualization of a work of fiction it is not bending objective facts, my impression though is that content platforms are more following than leading, they are giving the public what the public will consume, which is dull, it is like giving kids candies or cake because we already know they'll eat them.
There is no real surprise, no Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead or Carpenter's The Thing/Assault on Precint 13/They live, no Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, everything is so canonical and completely unimaginative. There is no space left for provocative, out of the box, even offensive, creation (unless it is sexually defining for minorities, like a dildo, homosexual intercourse, etc. something that wouldn't even shock my 82 years old dad)
In a way they are segmenting the market based on the idea they wanna project of themselves:
- Netflix: social activists involved in identity politics, teenagers (with superpower or supernatural powers), binge watchers, kids and some old show to entertain their parents too (all of Star Trek for example, the only reason I still use Netflix)
- Prime Video: crime aficionados, intelligent comedy (it better be British), superheroes with a twist, people like me who already pay for amazon prime and are not young anymore
- Apple TV: fancy, grandiose, epic stories, that unfortunately lack in writing and results are mixed. For people who love a great cast in a show.
- HBO: actual quality content, for people who love to pay for quality content.
It was a facetious question. Of course mixed race people existed! There was no such thing as a 100% white Russia by any definition of the term in any era! It was an imperial state with explicit multiple ethnicities as far as the locals were concerned.
Like Jesus Christ, Asimov himself was Jewish and then migrated to the multi ethnic United States when he was three!
Do you honestly believe there were states with 100% pure ethnic polities at any point in history? Even supremacists states like the American South in the slave era had other ethnic groups as an underclass and frequently had children with them.
Like I can’t even look at the rest of your comment when you’re claiming Russia was 100% white. I couldn’t handle it if you said it was 90% white. All of Siberia? Dagestan? Tatarstan? Chechnya?
Edit:looked it up to make sure my Russian history knowledge hadn’t been made obsolete by new primary sources. Inorodtsy was the term in the Russian empire for the non Russian ethnic groups controlled by the empire.
You seriously need to take a look through history if you think the acknowledgement of minorities existence is a modern interpretation of historical facts
He was born in 100% white Russia.
In 1998 the village were Asimov was born counted 215 residents...
Of course Asimov being Jewish from a Russian Jewish family that dated back at least 4 generations, knew very well of being Jewish.
> You seriously need to take a look through history if you think the acknowledgement of minorities existence is a modern interpretation of historical facts
You're overreacting mate.
I know very well Russian history, there were no black people and still there are few. That's all I meant, you're arguing in bad faith.
Ad hominem won't cancel the fact that Asimov wasn't interested in mixed races in the Foundation, he was interested in everything else but identity politics for the influencers.
> Do you honestly believe there were states with 100% pure ethnic polities at any point in history?
You're confused.
Take China for example, there are at least 50 official ethnic groups.
But 92% of the people are Han.
It means there are 1.3 billion Han people, more than US+Europe+Russia combined.
So yes, there are large areas of China where 100% of the people are Han.
Modern Japan is 98.5% Japanese.
It's like saying it's 100% Japanese.
In the past?
Except for salves, prisoners and Ainu in Hokkaido, we can say it was 100% Japanese with a very high confidence.
For a foreigner Ainu and Japanese would also look the same.
If you were born in 1919 your World would have been the people around you, Internet did not exist, television did not exist, books were hard to find, traveling was expensive etc etc.
Also reiterating the question, where did diversity in the show bend objective facts?
The person we are talking about was born in a country that considered people not white because they weren't white enough (would you say, for example, that Asimov is not Caucasian?), like Americans did to Italians, it happened to my grand-grand-father too.
If that's not 100% white country mentality I don't know which one qualifies...
> Also reiterating the question, where did diversity in the show bend objective facts?
Is it a fact that in a distant future the human space colonies will be racially diverse in the way it is depicted in the show?
Or is it a decision from the authors?
I mean, if it was an historical documentary on South Americas in the 14th century we could talk about facts (and even there... we should present different theories on controversial topics, not just embrace one), but in a work of fiction every single detail count as "bending facts".
The "reality" of media of yesteryear was the domain of white men. So yes, reality is changing. There's plenty of rage being generated about this, so I have to imagine your media intake might be influencing you in this regard.
It’s a pool with a lot of constraints on it, many of which are artificial.
Based on? There aren't even many good technical writers, which is a lot easier than writing fiction.
It really boils down to a few gatekeepers (mostly old white guys) giving the screenwriting jobs to the same idiots over and over again. For example, the guys who wrote Morbius have never written a successful film that made money back at the box office but already have 1 new screenplay in production and have been contracted to write several more; meanwhile the screenwriter of Crazy Rich Asians (which not only outgrossed Morbius but nearly grossed as much as Morbius' screenwriters' other films combined) has only been hired for a single film (Raya and the Last Dragon) since.
And the point is that while she had a major blockbuster success, this will only be her second film since that success; in that time, the losers behind Morbius will have worked on 4 films.
Also, Lim lists herself as a director of the film in her Twitter bio[0], so it seems like a lot more than a maybe at this point.
[0]: https://twitter.com/adeleblim?lang=en
Separate from all that, I don't understand your larger point about Lim. She went from Crazy Rich Asians which grossed over 200 million, and then went directly to work on Raya, which grossed over 100 million, and now is directing and producing her own movie with hand chosen writing talent. Where exactly is she struggling? And where are writers being forced on her?
How many other second-tier directors who could make great films are out there not getting funded?
I don't know, how many? Your example of Daniels is interesting because Daniels were discovered, so it doesn't help me understand how many people are out there that could do a great job but don't have the opportunity.
I've consumed a lot of amateur writing, music, and comedy. Most people just suck at creative endeavors. On the other hand, I once saw the most beautiful performance by a girl busking on the street. Fast-forward a few years, and now she's doing world-wide tours constantly and has a great musical career. With YouTube, Twitch, Spotify, and TikTok, it's never been easier for talented young artists, writers, and directors to rise up from obscurity.
In other words, they found a couple of plot recipes that stoners like, and are cashing in on that.
Which isn't reprehensible or anything in itself, it's just not worth so much of the hype it's getting, but that's hype after all.
But I do dislike the overall cultural dumbing down.
The entire structure and model of the business leads to produce exactly what Netflix makes. Season after season of mediocre TV that keeps people subscribing, using the same formulas over and over for more growth. Just like traditional TV at this point.
Occasionally they'll get a good indie hit but that's about it. It's telling that much of the best content, like Dark or some of the South Korean shows is not coming out of the typical studios.
Also you can buy the rights to old good stuff. Might not make good business sense (some (weird! senseless!) people will only watch new stuff) but it'd please me. My favourite stuff's all older than I am (i.e. I don't think you can claim it's just fond childhood memory or whatever) and there's plenty of greats I've yet to see, why restrict myself to this year's crap (and perhaps hit or two).
That's a business decision. They made a decision to go for quantity over quality, and that's fine for the short-term.
I think Netflix simply didn't find the right balance. It's okay to have cheap shows to fill in the blanks, I mean, I enjoy some of them. But the biggest problem is that they give up on pretty much every other more "artistic" work too easily; even when these can only become popular years later.