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Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website

176 points by cpeterso 8y ago

hak8or 8y ago
Wow, what a massive total waste, shame on netflix. In the early days people relied heavily on those reviews, and spent hours writing those reviews. I understand them wanting to keep that data for data analysis purposes, and I understand them wanting to not share it, but to delete it? At least make it rate limited tied to a paid Netflix account or something, not wipe it away for ever. What a shame.
- parent5446 8y ago
  How is it a shame if nobody uses the reviews and they're basically useless? Sounds like they're just deleting an unmaintained and unused feature.
  - evfanknitram 8y ago
    Maybe it's just me but my experience is that except for the actual streaming (after you started to watch a movie), the Netflix UI is super bad. It recommends movies which I hate, it shows series which have been on Netflix for years under "New on Netflix", it doesn't provide any usable sorting, the searching is crap and so on. I would put zero faith in a statement by Netflix saying that something is "useless". The actual streaming experience is super good but when it comes to everything else they seem clueless to me.
    - derefr 8y ago
      I find it interesting that there isn't yet a sort of "streaming-service library discovery/manager" app that doesn't do any streaming of its own, but rather just offers a good discovery UI for the streaming services you connect it to, where clicking "watch" in the service deep-links to the individual content item in the respective streaming app. This has been done to death in other content areas (I think there are more emulated-game library browsers than there are emulators!) so why not for streaming services? Is it that the streaming services don't expose the deep-linking ability?
      - chatmasta 8y ago
        Sounds like a great idea. You should build it!
      - prades 8y ago
        This app already exists for Netflix (25 countries) and Hulu: https://www.coollector.com/#netflix https://www.coollector.com/#netflix
    - Rapzid 8y ago
      I'm miss the old days of reviews and Genre grouping on the home page. I used to get great indie film recommendations and could occasionally go "dumpster diving" for lower rated movies and find some gems. Honestly, I think Netflix has become full of themselves. They pretend to have discovered some universal truths in how to create the best UI experience and suggestion system, and yet they have A/B tested tge interface over the years to this pile of garbage. It even hangs Edge frequently when I first open it there; the only browser that will play 1080p for me! Give me a break Netflix; you're drunk on data.
  - h4b4n3r0 8y ago
    I used the reviews. Sometimes a movie would be polarizing and I’d read the good ones and the bad ones to see if I’d like it myself. It’s not a hugely valuable feature (I can do the same on eg Rotten Tomatoes), but it wasn’t unused.
    - parent5446 8y ago
      Maybe you used it, but overall few people were using it. That's why they got rid of it.
      - mygo 8y ago
        Maybe few people were using it because they made it hard / impossible to use? 70% of Netflix's viewing happens on TV. You couldn't even access user reviews on tv. 15% of Netflix's viewing happens on smart phones and tablets. You couldn't even access user reviews on mobile. So 85% of Netflix's viewers (TV, phones, tablets) couldn't even access the reviews from their viewing-devices. You could only access reviews on desktop/laptop... Which accounts for only 15% of Netflix's viewers.
        ghaff 8y ago
        I can believe that's all true. So people now primarily consume the content through interfaces that inherently would make it difficult to interact with reviews. (And I suspect if they did pop up a box asking you to add a review after you watched something that would really annoy everyone.) In a lot of ways, the user reviews are mostly a vestige of when people used them while adding DVDs to their queue.
        mygo 8y ago
        They didn’t have it in the UI. There is nothing inherently difficult about browsing reviews on a mobile device. Millions do it every time they’re about to download an app. There is no option to read reviews given to effectively 85% of their viewers. That was their design decision. And now they’re citing review usage numbers when their design decisions promoted low review usage numbers. They’re providing a circular argument which implies that it is not the main reason.
  - j88439h84 8y ago
    "Declining use" is a result of Netflix's own decisions to downplay reviews because they were helping people decide not to watch movies they wouldn't like.
    - Reason077 8y ago
      Why should Netflix care if you watch or don’t watch a given movie? What they should care about is whether you stay a subscriber or not. If they try to push too much garbage, and not provide good tools to filter out the crappy content, they’re just wasting people’s time. Users will get frustrated and leave. I did!
      - burfog 8y ago
        You'd think, but the people running Netflix are human. They do not always put business success first. There have been a number of highly political things produced by Netflix that were heavily promoted. People slammed them hard in the reviews and comments.
      - j88439h84 8y ago
        If the ratings show you that there aren't any shows you'll like, then you won't watch them. If you don't watch any shows, might as well unsubscribe.
  - smnrchrds 8y ago
    > How is it a shame if nobody uses the reviews I am not a Netflix user, so this is just a guess, not an analysis. But could it be because user reviews used to be featured more prominently, but they were de-emphasized into oblivion over multiple years and UI updates? I know a news organization I visit frequently did this to their comment section. After their last UI design, they might as well have been put them the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
- Finch2192 8y ago
  I am not surprised at all. When they switched to this percent system, it was clear from then that they want to ensure that there's no chance you'll be turned away from watching something on account of some random human who doesn't have netflix's interests in their heart. Their new system is clearly based on the data they have on you, and really feels like netflix picking for us rather than helping the user pick on their own. It does not provide much value to me at all.
  - mygo 8y ago
    Reminds me of facebook and how they stopped showing me all of my friends' posts because they thought they knew what I wanted to see. I eventually left facebook.
- dasil003 8y ago
  Yeah I remember a page-long review of Caillou that proposed an elaborate theory that the entire show was actually a flashback of the parents after Caillou's passing, having died of terminal cancer (evidenced by his baldness as a result of chemotherapy). This was the ostensible explanation for their limitless patience and coddling as Caillou whines and pouts his way through every episode with no boundaries, discipline or consequences of any form. That review truly was lemons-to-lemonade as all other aspects of that show I wish I could expunge from my memory.
  - coderdude 8y ago
    That's called creepy pasta.
  - hyperdimension 8y ago
    Off-topic, but was it https://www.wattpad.com/205511535-creepypasta-caillou-has-cancer https://www.wattpad.com/205511535-creepypasta-caillou-has-ca... ? Your description was too good, so I had to look it up.
mygo 8y ago
Let's be real. They didn't delete the user reviews. They just stopped showing the reviews to the user.
electrograv 8y ago
> Netflix said in a statement that “the reviews and our redesigned ratings system (thumbs up/down) never contributed to how we approach personalizing recommendations for members and writing a ‘bad’ review never had any bearing to whether a title was recommended to another viewer or not.” THAT explains why Netflix keeps recommending me garbage quality content! I had a suspicion this was true, but couldn’t imagine anyone would make such a terrible design choice: 95% of content Netflix recommends me now is unwatchably bad in content quality (including Netflix originals too, of course). IMO abolishing user ratings is quite probably the worst possible solution to losing user engagement due to low quality content.
- scarface74 8y ago
  How in the world does this make sense? The entire competitive advantage of having the scale and user information that Netflix has is to be able to do personal recommendations by recommending shows based on what others with similar taste like. Heck, I know very little about big data and even I have walked through a simple sentiment analysis proof of concept demo to rate comments as positive or negative.
  - QasimK 8y ago
    They are probably determining this directly on when someone is watching a show, which shows, etc.
    - slededit 8y ago
      I can only watch shows they recommend though! You get stuck in a local maxima with no way to escape. God help you if you watch a WWII documentary. I so rarely find a title I search for that I don't bother with that anymore.
      - sosborn 8y ago
        > I can only watch shows they recommend though! That's not true at all. You can absolutely browse by genre, actor, etc.
rdtsc 8y ago
I can see why they would do it. When I cancelled them 2 years ago their selection was kind of limited. Lots B movies and average or below titles. A lot of reviews were the same. Reading made me not watch a lot of them. Deleting the reviews hides the below average movie selection under the carpet in a way.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  I believe this as well. Since years now I have the very strong suspicion that they aren't all optimizing for me finding something great but rather to waste my time on their platform and hide that I in fact might have already watched everything I'll like. But then I'll sometimes find something in there only after some digging that obviously should have been heavily suggested to me.
  - meesterdude 8y ago
    That's exactly what it feels like for me too! I get suggested all sorts of terrible stuff, but sometimes I'll be digging about in a category and find something interesting. But then the show has 7 seasons and netflix only has season 3, and calls it season 1. I've started to just let the lapse in membership run for longer; that way i can (hopefully) come back to some worthwhile stuff in 6 months.
amelius 8y ago
Offtopic: there's nothing more hilarious than to read the reviews after having watched a bad movie. However, I use IMDB for that.
- __s 8y ago
  IMDB also got rid of their forums. Such gold in there
- conjectures 8y ago
  Alternately to look at how bad the reviews were for titles I enjoyed, but which I suspected enjoying would brand me a philistine. I'm looking at you Valerian ;)
doiwin 8y ago
For personalized movie recommendations http://www.gnovies.com http://www.gnovies.com is a nice alternative. I wonder if movie reviews could be done via ActivityPub somehow.
api 8y ago
I've noticed for a while that Netflix seems to be making it a lot harder to rate content and find high quality content. It's like they want you to watch junk. Maybe junk has lower licensing fees so it increases their margins. I've found some amazing gems digging through Netflix and relying on user ratings. They were films I probably never would have found otherwise. A few somewhat recent examples that come to mind are Enter the Void, The Discovery, Upstream Color, and A Dark Song.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  If you like Enter the Void, have you seen Irreversible? [Edit: typo]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway0255 8y ago
  > Maybe junk has lower licensing fees so it increases their margins. It has to be something like this. Licensing fees based on views, or maybe the license terms stipulate that they're not allowed to promote it or something. Often I'll be browsing around in some deep page in Netflix and randomly see some AAA major Oscar title that's not mentioned or promoted anywhere. It just makes no sense. Maybe these are expensive views, so Netflix reserves surfacing them only for people who have taken actions that indicate they're having trouble finding anything they like? To kind of "rescue" users who are on the verge of cancelling?
  - cptnapalm 8y ago
    I've noticed that too. Looking and looking for a certain type of thing, can't find anything worthwhile until, randomly, something good in the you might like trio which should have obviously shown up in the genre browsing.
throwaway0255 8y ago
The biggest problem with the Netflix content discovery algorithm is that it's in total conflict with Netflix's brand management, and brand management will always win. By far their most prominent platform for brand impressions is what the user sees when they first log in and view their home page. So what displays on that screen is of vital importance to their brand management team, and what kind of content they associate with that brand is everything. Which is the reason why when I log into Netflix as a middle-aged software developer who watches war documentaries, true crime series, and old episodes of Frasier, I see a wall of hot focus-grouped twenty-somethings pulling their hair out and trying to fuck each other. Because Netflix is young and cool and I just need to get with it, and if I can't get with it then that's my problem. Because Netflix is fierce. Netflix is the pulse of a new generation.
gdsdfe 8y ago
Netflix's stupid UX and recommendation engine, will be the end of it!
apo 8y ago
It may also be the case that negative reviews of movies, TV shows, and stand-up specials did more to dissuade potential viewers than positive reviews did them to draw in; ... Netflix's bigger problem is that much of its content looks good on the surface, but on closer inspection is not worth the time. A lot of this stuff is produced by Netflix itself. Bill Nye's most recent show comes to mind, but there's a lot more. Netflix shouldn't have deleted those reviews. It should be using them to clean the junk out of its lineup.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  Hah, wouldn't you love it if the junk was removed and one day you log on and you just get a message telling you that you've watched all the stuff the algorithm thinks you'll like and you might as well go do something else?
  - MiddleEndian 8y ago
    The one thing I liked most about Netflix back when it was a DVD service was the recommendation system. I could rate things with stars, and Netflix could figure out, with reasonable accuracy, what movies I would consider junk and what I would consider quality, rather than the opinions of the general public. They have some good shows but their streaming movie selection and recommendation system doesn't hold a candle to what they used to have.
    - danmaz74 8y ago
      I remember that in the beginning the recommendations for the streaming service were pretty good. But they became worse and worse, at least for me.
      - smsm42 8y ago
        One has to wonder how comes that recommendations were pretty good, but then they spent millions of dollars on improving them, including highly-publicized competitions and a lot of work inhouse I assume, and not they are not.
ghaff 8y ago
It's hard for me to get too upset. Personally, it seems a bit conspiracy theory to think it's people might read negative reviews. Seems more likely it was a poorly used resource and Netflix didn't see the value in continue to support, maintain, and screen it. That aside, it points to a couple of issues. There is a lot of bad content on Netflix. It never had a good film catalog and their TV strategy has clearly evolved from at least a supposed "mine data to create great shows" (which always seemed a bit unlikely create all sorts of content, including niche content, throw it at the wall, see what sticks, and plump up the catalog in any case. Second. No one has come close to solving recommendation. If Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc. can't (and Facebook ads are a form of recommendation too), I think it's fair to conclude it's a really hard problem that no one knows how to solve well at scale. There are a few people whose taste in movies are very well aligned with mine. But that's not a general solution.
- tonysdg 8y ago
  I remember reading a blog post somewhere describing the problem with modern recommendation engines being their reactive nature. Say you purchase a cell phone on Amazon -- they'll start showing you other cell phones, cell phone accessories, more electronics, etc. The problem is, you just bought a phone -- you don't need 5 more, and you max need 1 or 2 cases. So the recommendations are garbage, since the engine has no way of knowing what your current mindset is and what you actually might be interested in. In hindsight, that's obvious, but it struck me at the time. I don't ever want to see my thoughts get read by a computer (personal choice), but until such technology exists, recommendation engines will continue to suck.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    There are a bunch of problems. Paul Lamere has done a number of talks on the topic at SXSW and the like. I know him from Sun Labs but I think he's at Spotify these days. https://www.coursera.org/lecture/matrix-factorization/recommending-music-interview-with-paul-lamere-665tz https://www.coursera.org/lecture/matrix-factorization/recomm...
  - derefr 8y ago
    > the engine has no way of knowing what your current mindset is and what you actually might be interested in You'd think, with enough data, you could build causal models of purchases of product types. Amazon certainly has associative models (people who buy this also buy that)—it seems like they would just need to add a temporal dimension to the input data.
was_boring 8y ago
I'm glad they did this because: 1) I didn't realize there were written reviews; and 2) I have found Netflix's move to up or down, and a percent recommendation a good move. For instance, I'm a sucker for space movies of any sort, I just love them, and they have picked up on that and recommended me a few movies I would have never watched if I just went to rotten tomatoes. I don't need social validation to enjoy or not enjoy content. It's not a perfect system, but it's better then anything else out there.
dig1 8y ago
Now someone needs to create a site that will collect reviews from imdb, metacritic or rotten tomatoes, only Netflix related. Will this be legal after all?
blubb-fish 8y ago
Are there alternatives to Netflix? Amazon Prime certainly isn't. Serious question - especially for German audience. I would like something with older and more niche movies. F.x. on Netflix Germany neither is nor ever was a Fellini flick ... actually "Federico Fellini" is not even suggested upon searching for "Fellini". https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2017/oct/23/more-niche-than-netflix-nine-specialist-streaming-services-you-should-try https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2017/oct/... - Fandor: only US and CAN - Mubi: also Germany - Filmstruck: not Germany - Yaddo: apparently worldwide (skipped what didn't appeal to me)
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Kind of. I run Streama https://github.com/streamaserver/streama https://github.com/streamaserver/streama Combined with ripped dvds and/or pirate bay, can make for a refreshing video streaming service you own and host.
  - blubb-fish 8y ago
    I left my bootlegging days behind ...
    - zouhair 8y ago
      I have a Netfilx account and yet torrent all their stuff because I watch on my monitor and can't stand watching videos on a browser. I don't watch Youtube on a browser either. Using stuff like Radarr/Sonarr/Jackett/... makes for a higher quality experience.
      - cpeterso 8y ago
        If you use Windows, Netflix has a native Windows app that uses hardware decoding and DRM so you get both less CPU/battery usage and higher resolution.
      - blubb-fish 8y ago
        How is watching a movie or a clip in a browser on full screen not highest possible quality experience? What is gained from not watching in a browser?
joshuaheard 8y ago
I used to read reviews on a movie I was on the fence about watching. I used the 5 star rating for the same reason. Now I have no information to guide me and in the last month, I have started several movies and stopped watching after 10 minutes because they sucked. Then there's the week delay to send in the DVD and have another one arrive by mail. This makes the service worse in my opinion.
- AquaMorph 8y ago
  Why not just look the movie up on an actual review site?
  - joshuaheard 8y ago
    I could, but I use Netflix on Tivo, so it's right there on the TV. I would have to go to another device.
humantiy 8y ago
> “Netflix customers were able to leave reviews on Netflix.com until mid-2018, when reviews were removed due to declining use.” I still think this was done on purpose to an extent. In the beginning the reviews were really easy to find when you were looking to see if you wanted to spend time watching something. As they "upgraded" their UI on the web they really buried it and made it more difficult to find. I had to use the netflix help a few times just to find it near the end. And with most people now using the app on a smart tv or roku, fire tv, ect, they never integrated the reviews into those apps. So to me its saying declining use is of course it was, the only way to get to it was having a laptop handy to check. At that point you can read reviews from any other site.
karolg 8y ago
I didn't know until today that there were user reviews on Netflix.
- noitsnot 8y ago
  I started the free trial maybe two years ago. I can't recall reviews. I remember the star ratings, though.
novaRom 8y ago
For me, the value of Spotify is much higher than Netflix, because it gives me access to the best music while former contains a small collection of mostly shitty TV shows. I cancelled Netflix few years ago and never regret it. There are much better video content providers, for example The Great Courses Plus is my favorite even if it's twice more expensive than Netflix
cptnapalm 8y ago
Recently, I watched a few horror movies because they got good ratings (which I interpret as good-for-a-horror-movie, rather than good per se). Between seeing the rating, watching (half usually) of them and going to rate it myself, the ratings had gone from 4-5 stars to 1-2. That's a big drop in star rating in a period of, at most, 90 minutes, usually, 40.
singularity2001 8y ago
While not legally 'censorship' we should develop a culture where such arbitrary deletions are heavily frowned upon.
phobosdeimos 8y ago
I love Netflix, I prefer shows being payed for by subs not Burger advertising agencies. Regular cable TV is about the eyeballs- the shows are just a way to get them.
JCharante 8y ago
Wow I've never seen parallax ads before.. I kinda like them, as long as they're in the minority so they're refreshing.
tokyodude 8y ago
I found the star ratings useful and wish they were on the main browsing page so I do have to click into a movie to see the details. That said I actually loath Netflix's UI. I'm sure they have some metric which shows it works but I hate hate hate the instant preview/playback. I want to browse quietly reading the descriptions and then possibly checking the internet but the distraction of Netflix starting the auto play makes that impossible for me so I end up just turning it off and googling for things to watch. This usually fails so I watch nothing. My current pattern is wait for a friend to recommend something and then subscribe and a few days later cancel my subscription. In the month I have the service i rarely turn it on the browse because of the aforementioned issue. When I do convince myself to try to browse the issue comes up again and I just turn it off. I probably pay for 1 to 3 months a year. Kudos to Netflix for not forcing a yearly subscription otherwise I'd just find other sources
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Svoka 8y ago
So much negativity. Netflix is doing OK. In watch with pleasure their shows and movies and don't even miss any of the mainstream TV. But this is not what my thoughts are: in days of modern data collection votes/reviews are useless. Self-reported data is notoriously unreliable and replacing it with behavioural pattern tracking is smart a smart move.

176 points by cpeterso 8y ago

Wow, what a massive total waste, shame on netflix. In the early days people relied heavily on those reviews, and spent hours writing those reviews. I understand them wanting to keep that data for data analysis purposes, and I understand them wanting to not share it, but to delete it? At least make it rate limited tied to a paid Netflix account or something, not wipe it away for ever. What a shame.

parent5446 8y ago
How is it a shame if nobody uses the reviews and they're basically useless? Sounds like they're just deleting an unmaintained and unused feature.
- evfanknitram 8y ago
  Maybe it's just me but my experience is that except for the actual streaming (after you started to watch a movie), the Netflix UI is super bad. It recommends movies which I hate, it shows series which have been on Netflix for years under "New on Netflix", it doesn't provide any usable sorting, the searching is crap and so on. I would put zero faith in a statement by Netflix saying that something is "useless". The actual streaming experience is super good but when it comes to everything else they seem clueless to me.
  - derefr 8y ago
    I find it interesting that there isn't yet a sort of "streaming-service library discovery/manager" app that doesn't do any streaming of its own, but rather just offers a good discovery UI for the streaming services you connect it to, where clicking "watch" in the service deep-links to the individual content item in the respective streaming app. This has been done to death in other content areas (I think there are more emulated-game library browsers than there are emulators!) so why not for streaming services? Is it that the streaming services don't expose the deep-linking ability?
    - chatmasta 8y ago
      Sounds like a great idea. You should build it!
    - prades 8y ago
      This app already exists for Netflix (25 countries) and Hulu: https://www.coollector.com/#netflix https://www.coollector.com/#netflix
  - Rapzid 8y ago
    I'm miss the old days of reviews and Genre grouping on the home page. I used to get great indie film recommendations and could occasionally go "dumpster diving" for lower rated movies and find some gems. Honestly, I think Netflix has become full of themselves. They pretend to have discovered some universal truths in how to create the best UI experience and suggestion system, and yet they have A/B tested tge interface over the years to this pile of garbage. It even hangs Edge frequently when I first open it there; the only browser that will play 1080p for me! Give me a break Netflix; you're drunk on data.
- h4b4n3r0 8y ago
  I used the reviews. Sometimes a movie would be polarizing and I’d read the good ones and the bad ones to see if I’d like it myself. It’s not a hugely valuable feature (I can do the same on eg Rotten Tomatoes), but it wasn’t unused.
  - parent5446 8y ago
    Maybe you used it, but overall few people were using it. That's why they got rid of it.
    - mygo 8y ago
      Maybe few people were using it because they made it hard / impossible to use? 70% of Netflix's viewing happens on TV. You couldn't even access user reviews on tv. 15% of Netflix's viewing happens on smart phones and tablets. You couldn't even access user reviews on mobile. So 85% of Netflix's viewers (TV, phones, tablets) couldn't even access the reviews from their viewing-devices. You could only access reviews on desktop/laptop... Which accounts for only 15% of Netflix's viewers.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        I can believe that's all true. So people now primarily consume the content through interfaces that inherently would make it difficult to interact with reviews. (And I suspect if they did pop up a box asking you to add a review after you watched something that would really annoy everyone.) In a lot of ways, the user reviews are mostly a vestige of when people used them while adding DVDs to their queue.
        mygo 8y ago
        They didn’t have it in the UI. There is nothing inherently difficult about browsing reviews on a mobile device. Millions do it every time they’re about to download an app. There is no option to read reviews given to effectively 85% of their viewers. That was their design decision. And now they’re citing review usage numbers when their design decisions promoted low review usage numbers. They’re providing a circular argument which implies that it is not the main reason.
- j88439h84 8y ago
  "Declining use" is a result of Netflix's own decisions to downplay reviews because they were helping people decide not to watch movies they wouldn't like.
  - Reason077 8y ago
    Why should Netflix care if you watch or don’t watch a given movie? What they should care about is whether you stay a subscriber or not. If they try to push too much garbage, and not provide good tools to filter out the crappy content, they’re just wasting people’s time. Users will get frustrated and leave. I did!
    - burfog 8y ago
      You'd think, but the people running Netflix are human. They do not always put business success first. There have been a number of highly political things produced by Netflix that were heavily promoted. People slammed them hard in the reviews and comments.
    - j88439h84 8y ago
      If the ratings show you that there aren't any shows you'll like, then you won't watch them. If you don't watch any shows, might as well unsubscribe.
- smnrchrds 8y ago
  > How is it a shame if nobody uses the reviews I am not a Netflix user, so this is just a guess, not an analysis. But could it be because user reviews used to be featured more prominently, but they were de-emphasized into oblivion over multiple years and UI updates? I know a news organization I visit frequently did this to their comment section. After their last UI design, they might as well have been put them the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
Finch2192 8y ago
I am not surprised at all. When they switched to this percent system, it was clear from then that they want to ensure that there's no chance you'll be turned away from watching something on account of some random human who doesn't have netflix's interests in their heart. Their new system is clearly based on the data they have on you, and really feels like netflix picking for us rather than helping the user pick on their own. It does not provide much value to me at all.
- mygo 8y ago
  Reminds me of facebook and how they stopped showing me all of my friends' posts because they thought they knew what I wanted to see. I eventually left facebook.
dasil003 8y ago
Yeah I remember a page-long review of Caillou that proposed an elaborate theory that the entire show was actually a flashback of the parents after Caillou's passing, having died of terminal cancer (evidenced by his baldness as a result of chemotherapy). This was the ostensible explanation for their limitless patience and coddling as Caillou whines and pouts his way through every episode with no boundaries, discipline or consequences of any form. That review truly was lemons-to-lemonade as all other aspects of that show I wish I could expunge from my memory.
- coderdude 8y ago
  That's called creepy pasta.
- hyperdimension 8y ago
  Off-topic, but was it https://www.wattpad.com/205511535-creepypasta-caillou-has-cancer https://www.wattpad.com/205511535-creepypasta-caillou-has-ca... ? Your description was too good, so I had to look it up.

mygo 8y ago

Let's be real. They didn't delete the user reviews. They just stopped showing the reviews to the user.

electrograv 8y ago

> Netflix said in a statement that “the reviews and our redesigned ratings system (thumbs up/down) never contributed to how we approach personalizing recommendations for members and writing a ‘bad’ review never had any bearing to whether a title was recommended to another viewer or not.” THAT explains why Netflix keeps recommending me garbage quality content! I had a suspicion this was true, but couldn’t imagine anyone would make such a terrible design choice: 95% of content Netflix recommends me now is unwatchably bad in content quality (including Netflix originals too, of course). IMO abolishing user ratings is quite probably the worst possible solution to losing user engagement due to low quality content.

scarface74 8y ago
How in the world does this make sense? The entire competitive advantage of having the scale and user information that Netflix has is to be able to do personal recommendations by recommending shows based on what others with similar taste like. Heck, I know very little about big data and even I have walked through a simple sentiment analysis proof of concept demo to rate comments as positive or negative.
- QasimK 8y ago
  They are probably determining this directly on when someone is watching a show, which shows, etc.
  - slededit 8y ago
    I can only watch shows they recommend though! You get stuck in a local maxima with no way to escape. God help you if you watch a WWII documentary. I so rarely find a title I search for that I don't bother with that anymore.
    - sosborn 8y ago
      > I can only watch shows they recommend though! That's not true at all. You can absolutely browse by genre, actor, etc.

rdtsc 8y ago

I can see why they would do it. When I cancelled them 2 years ago their selection was kind of limited. Lots B movies and average or below titles. A lot of reviews were the same. Reading made me not watch a lot of them. Deleting the reviews hides the below average movie selection under the carpet in a way.

ajmurmann 8y ago
I believe this as well. Since years now I have the very strong suspicion that they aren't all optimizing for me finding something great but rather to waste my time on their platform and hide that I in fact might have already watched everything I'll like. But then I'll sometimes find something in there only after some digging that obviously should have been heavily suggested to me.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  That's exactly what it feels like for me too! I get suggested all sorts of terrible stuff, but sometimes I'll be digging about in a category and find something interesting. But then the show has 7 seasons and netflix only has season 3, and calls it season 1. I've started to just let the lapse in membership run for longer; that way i can (hopefully) come back to some worthwhile stuff in 6 months.

amelius 8y ago

Offtopic: there's nothing more hilarious than to read the reviews after having watched a bad movie. However, I use IMDB for that.

__s 8y ago
IMDB also got rid of their forums. Such gold in there
conjectures 8y ago
Alternately to look at how bad the reviews were for titles I enjoyed, but which I suspected enjoying would brand me a philistine. I'm looking at you Valerian ;)

doiwin 8y ago

For personalized movie recommendations http://www.gnovies.com http://www.gnovies.com is a nice alternative. I wonder if movie reviews could be done via ActivityPub somehow.

api 8y ago

I've noticed for a while that Netflix seems to be making it a lot harder to rate content and find high quality content. It's like they want you to watch junk. Maybe junk has lower licensing fees so it increases their margins. I've found some amazing gems digging through Netflix and relying on user ratings. They were films I probably never would have found otherwise. A few somewhat recent examples that come to mind are Enter the Void, The Discovery, Upstream Color, and A Dark Song.

ajmurmann 8y ago
If you like Enter the Void, have you seen Irreversible? [Edit: typo]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway0255 8y ago
> Maybe junk has lower licensing fees so it increases their margins. It has to be something like this. Licensing fees based on views, or maybe the license terms stipulate that they're not allowed to promote it or something. Often I'll be browsing around in some deep page in Netflix and randomly see some AAA major Oscar title that's not mentioned or promoted anywhere. It just makes no sense. Maybe these are expensive views, so Netflix reserves surfacing them only for people who have taken actions that indicate they're having trouble finding anything they like? To kind of "rescue" users who are on the verge of cancelling?
- cptnapalm 8y ago
  I've noticed that too. Looking and looking for a certain type of thing, can't find anything worthwhile until, randomly, something good in the you might like trio which should have obviously shown up in the genre browsing.

throwaway0255 8y ago

The biggest problem with the Netflix content discovery algorithm is that it's in total conflict with Netflix's brand management, and brand management will always win. By far their most prominent platform for brand impressions is what the user sees when they first log in and view their home page. So what displays on that screen is of vital importance to their brand management team, and what kind of content they associate with that brand is everything. Which is the reason why when I log into Netflix as a middle-aged software developer who watches war documentaries, true crime series, and old episodes of Frasier, I see a wall of hot focus-grouped twenty-somethings pulling their hair out and trying to fuck each other. Because Netflix is young and cool and I just need to get with it, and if I can't get with it then that's my problem. Because Netflix is fierce. Netflix is the pulse of a new generation.

gdsdfe 8y ago

Netflix's stupid UX and recommendation engine, will be the end of it!

apo 8y ago

It may also be the case that negative reviews of movies, TV shows, and stand-up specials did more to dissuade potential viewers than positive reviews did them to draw in; ... Netflix's bigger problem is that much of its content looks good on the surface, but on closer inspection is not worth the time. A lot of this stuff is produced by Netflix itself. Bill Nye's most recent show comes to mind, but there's a lot more. Netflix shouldn't have deleted those reviews. It should be using them to clean the junk out of its lineup.

ajmurmann 8y ago
Hah, wouldn't you love it if the junk was removed and one day you log on and you just get a message telling you that you've watched all the stuff the algorithm thinks you'll like and you might as well go do something else?
- MiddleEndian 8y ago
  The one thing I liked most about Netflix back when it was a DVD service was the recommendation system. I could rate things with stars, and Netflix could figure out, with reasonable accuracy, what movies I would consider junk and what I would consider quality, rather than the opinions of the general public. They have some good shows but their streaming movie selection and recommendation system doesn't hold a candle to what they used to have.
  - danmaz74 8y ago
    I remember that in the beginning the recommendations for the streaming service were pretty good. But they became worse and worse, at least for me.
    - smsm42 8y ago
      One has to wonder how comes that recommendations were pretty good, but then they spent millions of dollars on improving them, including highly-publicized competitions and a lot of work inhouse I assume, and not they are not.

ghaff 8y ago

It's hard for me to get too upset. Personally, it seems a bit conspiracy theory to think it's people might read negative reviews. Seems more likely it was a poorly used resource and Netflix didn't see the value in continue to support, maintain, and screen it. That aside, it points to a couple of issues. There is a lot of bad content on Netflix. It never had a good film catalog and their TV strategy has clearly evolved from at least a supposed "mine data to create great shows" (which always seemed a bit unlikely create all sorts of content, including niche content, throw it at the wall, see what sticks, and plump up the catalog in any case. Second. No one has come close to solving recommendation. If Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc. can't (and Facebook ads are a form of recommendation too), I think it's fair to conclude it's a really hard problem that no one knows how to solve well at scale. There are a few people whose taste in movies are very well aligned with mine. But that's not a general solution.

tonysdg 8y ago
I remember reading a blog post somewhere describing the problem with modern recommendation engines being their reactive nature. Say you purchase a cell phone on Amazon -- they'll start showing you other cell phones, cell phone accessories, more electronics, etc. The problem is, you just bought a phone -- you don't need 5 more, and you max need 1 or 2 cases. So the recommendations are garbage, since the engine has no way of knowing what your current mindset is and what you actually might be interested in. In hindsight, that's obvious, but it struck me at the time. I don't ever want to see my thoughts get read by a computer (personal choice), but until such technology exists, recommendation engines will continue to suck.
- ghaff 8y ago
  There are a bunch of problems. Paul Lamere has done a number of talks on the topic at SXSW and the like. I know him from Sun Labs but I think he's at Spotify these days. https://www.coursera.org/lecture/matrix-factorization/recommending-music-interview-with-paul-lamere-665tz https://www.coursera.org/lecture/matrix-factorization/recomm...
- derefr 8y ago
  > the engine has no way of knowing what your current mindset is and what you actually might be interested in You'd think, with enough data, you could build causal models of purchases of product types. Amazon certainly has associative models (people who buy this also buy that)—it seems like they would just need to add a temporal dimension to the input data.

was_boring 8y ago

I'm glad they did this because: 1) I didn't realize there were written reviews; and 2) I have found Netflix's move to up or down, and a percent recommendation a good move. For instance, I'm a sucker for space movies of any sort, I just love them, and they have picked up on that and recommended me a few movies I would have never watched if I just went to rotten tomatoes. I don't need social validation to enjoy or not enjoy content. It's not a perfect system, but it's better then anything else out there.

dig1 8y ago

Now someone needs to create a site that will collect reviews from imdb, metacritic or rotten tomatoes, only Netflix related. Will this be legal after all?

blubb-fish 8y ago

Are there alternatives to Netflix? Amazon Prime certainly isn't. Serious question - especially for German audience. I would like something with older and more niche movies. F.x. on Netflix Germany neither is nor ever was a Fellini flick ... actually "Federico Fellini" is not even suggested upon searching for "Fellini". https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2017/oct/23/more-niche-than-netflix-nine-specialist-streaming-services-you-should-try https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2017/oct/... - Fandor: only US and CAN - Mubi: also Germany - Filmstruck: not Germany - Yaddo: apparently worldwide (skipped what didn't appeal to me)

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Kind of. I run Streama https://github.com/streamaserver/streama https://github.com/streamaserver/streama Combined with ripped dvds and/or pirate bay, can make for a refreshing video streaming service you own and host.
- blubb-fish 8y ago
  I left my bootlegging days behind ...
  - zouhair 8y ago
    I have a Netfilx account and yet torrent all their stuff because I watch on my monitor and can't stand watching videos on a browser. I don't watch Youtube on a browser either. Using stuff like Radarr/Sonarr/Jackett/... makes for a higher quality experience.
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      If you use Windows, Netflix has a native Windows app that uses hardware decoding and DRM so you get both less CPU/battery usage and higher resolution.
    - blubb-fish 8y ago
      How is watching a movie or a clip in a browser on full screen not highest possible quality experience? What is gained from not watching in a browser?

joshuaheard 8y ago

I used to read reviews on a movie I was on the fence about watching. I used the 5 star rating for the same reason. Now I have no information to guide me and in the last month, I have started several movies and stopped watching after 10 minutes because they sucked. Then there's the week delay to send in the DVD and have another one arrive by mail. This makes the service worse in my opinion.

AquaMorph 8y ago
Why not just look the movie up on an actual review site?
- joshuaheard 8y ago
  I could, but I use Netflix on Tivo, so it's right there on the TV. I would have to go to another device.

humantiy 8y ago

> “Netflix customers were able to leave reviews on Netflix.com until mid-2018, when reviews were removed due to declining use.” I still think this was done on purpose to an extent. In the beginning the reviews were really easy to find when you were looking to see if you wanted to spend time watching something. As they "upgraded" their UI on the web they really buried it and made it more difficult to find. I had to use the netflix help a few times just to find it near the end. And with most people now using the app on a smart tv or roku, fire tv, ect, they never integrated the reviews into those apps. So to me its saying declining use is of course it was, the only way to get to it was having a laptop handy to check. At that point you can read reviews from any other site.

karolg 8y ago

I didn't know until today that there were user reviews on Netflix.

noitsnot 8y ago
I started the free trial maybe two years ago. I can't recall reviews. I remember the star ratings, though.

novaRom 8y ago

For me, the value of Spotify is much higher than Netflix, because it gives me access to the best music while former contains a small collection of mostly shitty TV shows. I cancelled Netflix few years ago and never regret it. There are much better video content providers, for example The Great Courses Plus is my favorite even if it's twice more expensive than Netflix

cptnapalm 8y ago

Recently, I watched a few horror movies because they got good ratings (which I interpret as good-for-a-horror-movie, rather than good per se). Between seeing the rating, watching (half usually) of them and going to rate it myself, the ratings had gone from 4-5 stars to 1-2. That's a big drop in star rating in a period of, at most, 90 minutes, usually, 40.

singularity2001 8y ago

While not legally 'censorship' we should develop a culture where such arbitrary deletions are heavily frowned upon.

phobosdeimos 8y ago

I love Netflix, I prefer shows being payed for by subs not Burger advertising agencies. Regular cable TV is about the eyeballs- the shows are just a way to get them.

JCharante 8y ago

Wow I've never seen parallax ads before.. I kinda like them, as long as they're in the minority so they're refreshing.

tokyodude 8y ago

I found the star ratings useful and wish they were on the main browsing page so I do have to click into a movie to see the details. That said I actually loath Netflix's UI. I'm sure they have some metric which shows it works but I hate hate hate the instant preview/playback. I want to browse quietly reading the descriptions and then possibly checking the internet but the distraction of Netflix starting the auto play makes that impossible for me so I end up just turning it off and googling for things to watch. This usually fails so I watch nothing. My current pattern is wait for a friend to recommend something and then subscribe and a few days later cancel my subscription. In the month I have the service i rarely turn it on the browse because of the aforementioned issue. When I do convince myself to try to browse the issue comes up again and I just turn it off. I probably pay for 1 to 3 months a year. Kudos to Netflix for not forcing a yearly subscription otherwise I'd just find other sources

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Svoka 8y ago

So much negativity. Netflix is doing OK. In watch with pleasure their shows and movies and don't even miss any of the mainstream TV. But this is not what my thoughts are: in days of modern data collection votes/reviews are useless. Self-reported data is notoriously unreliable and replacing it with behavioural pattern tracking is smart a smart move.