We are building bridges between our differences to understand our users
A streaming-discovery platform powered by humans through AI.
Merely the words company and culture in combination make me want to put my sunglasses on, turn around and walk out the same way I came in. The idea of motivational posters on office walls making sure no one misses the rules of the game, with value words like “Togetherness”, “Kindness” or even better “Fun” needs to be put in place just so that people treat each other decently can really make you wonder. Most people that have worked in similar environments must have come to the same conclusion, that these so-called rules serve as office jokes and people thinking it’s real or even being followed are simply blue eyed fools. It’s almost like a pretend game, something leaders put there to not having to deal with the real issues themselves.
Lucky for us, we’re not here to solve the problems of company cultures. We are here to build the world’s best recommendation system for streaming. Company culture can have many meanings but for Hint it seems to have taken a special form.
Hint is a diverse team from scratch. The reason for that isn’t sprung from an idea of an equal world, even if we’d love to be able to say so. We realised early on that biased AI is causing some serious damage to recommendation algorithms. Like it or not, people’s values and ideas are always built into the code. When they start influencing people’s taste and recommendations we have a problem.
Just look at IMDb, the world’s most popular websites for movies and TV-shows, as an example of why this is a major threat to all streaming platforms. This quote from ABC News owned blog FiveThirtyEight summarises it well:
“We’ll start with every film that’s eligible for IMDb’s Top 250 list. A film needs 25,000 ratings from regular IMDb voters to qualify for the list. As of Feb. 14, that was 4,377 titles. Of those movies, only 97 had more ratings from women than men. The other 4,280 films were mostly rated by men, and it wasn’t even close for all but a few films. In 3,942 cases (90 percent of all eligible films), the men outnumbered the women by at least 2-to-1. In 2,212 cases (51 percent), men outnumbered women more than 5-to-1. And in 513 cases (12 percent), the men outnumbered the women by at least 10-to-1.”
This example is just the tip of the iceberg, it doesn’t even take the issues with origin, sexual preference, or even differences between ages into consideration — and guess what, there are not many titles on the top 250 that are not from the US. Even if these numbers are a couple years old, nothing has really changed. Add to this equation that streaming platforms use IMDb scores as a way to build their own recommendation systems and that IMDb is owned by Amazon and this is where things get really dark. Something we keep coming back to and love to discuss in the team.
What does this have to do with company culture you might ask. Well, having a team of people from different ages, genders and cultures we’ve noticed is not always easy. We all have our own opinions on certain topics and our current culture is all about understanding each other no matter the differences. All in the name of our users often unique taste and circumstances and that is the proof of our culture. Everyone in our team needs to feel comfortable voicing their needs, concerns and ideas in how we solve this problem. That part seems to have built a trust between us that I have rarely come across in other companies.
In the end of all of this, we too will probably be forced to put a value word on a poster to explain our culture on the wall. This word would be “Empathy”, because there is a lot of empathy needed in order to have discussions with people that do not agree with you and to really listen and understand as well as respect the differences and also celebrate it in the end, that part even takes courage and is not always as easy as it sounds.
The thing with empathy is that some people have more of it, some have less and it means more to some than it does for others, we are all different. In order to build an actual inclusive culture and AI, all of this needs to be taken into account. Our main goal is for our team to thrive, we strongly believe our people need to be able to take their own initiatives and decisions. If the team thrives, our AI will too. In one way you could even say that we are building empathy into our AI.
We are working on creating an inclusive product and at the same time finding tools to build bridges between our differences and information bubbles as we truly believe this to be crucial for survival, not just for us but for everyone working on solving this problem.
Come help us understand more about ourselves and each other, help us build the world’s best recommendation engine and join a team of passionate people that always will fight for inclusiveness and diversity, for the greater good, on-site, hybrid or remote, whatever floats your boat and makes you happy.
Send your resume to hey@hint.media and let’s talk!
