I'm pretty confident that that horrorshow was a case study in A/B testing: People can't decide what to watch and agitate over flicking through titles, so some bright spark had the idea of just starting stuff in the background to see if that helped.

It did! People started watching stuff sooner!

Mostly because it was so incredibly irritating that I'd start a show just to make the random autoplay cease. Of course, what it really meant was that I'd go to amazon and agonize over what to watch, but at least I was doing it at my own speed and not being harassed by noise autoplay.