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I just don't feel like Netflix is made to make my video viewing experience better anymore. They don't take customer feedback seriously, they're removing feature
by pixelbath 7y ago
I just don't feel like Netflix is made to make my video viewing experience better anymore. They don't take customer feedback seriously, they're removing features that people obviously love, and becoming victims of the ever-growing race to "increase engagement."
1. Autoplaying trailers: Netflix straight-up says that's not going away (https://twitter.com/Netflixhelps/status/947587245086859265 https://twitter.com/Netflixhelps/status/947587245086859265), and I haven't met a single person who actually likes it. When stopping to talk about a show, my wife just mutes the television on the main screen, and I navigate to the Search screen, which is the only one that doesn't autoplay something. It's almost hostile amount of "HERE LOOK AT THIS SHOW" going on, and I despise it.
2. Removing reviews: If you've been on Netflix long enough, chances are you remember the pages-long reviews left by extremely passionate users on all kinds of films. Netflix just decided one day to throw all that away, probably because negative reviews decreased engagement or some other silly reason. The users added value to your service, and you actively threw it out. This also had the side-effect of tossing aside the count of films I've watched or rated, which I found to be an interesting bit of data.
3. Shuffling algorithms: Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I have a difficult time navigating to anything that's not a specific title. Genres, their weird made-up categories ("Comic Book Superhero Movies" or "Classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy"), or even foreign films. There's no way to browse this stuff unless the category happens to pop-up on screen. In addition, the "Continue Watching" category moves around randomly. Sometimes it's right at the top, sometimes 3 pages down. Similarly, why is "My List" not always at the top? It used to be a top-level navigation element.
4. Already seen: There's no way to hide anything in the UI. Not things I watched, not things I'm uninterested in, and certainly not things I dislike. I used to be able to signal disinterest in shows; now I can't.
I could go on at length despite having already done so, but I think there's more at play here than Netflix's catalog. They're showing that all they're chasing is more money and bigger deals, and damn what the users think. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe it really is their "content slate drove less growth in paid net adds" this quarter, but I'm willing to bet that (at least in part) it's because even Hulu, owned by a bunch of traditional television media corporations, gives more consideration to its users.
- programmertote 7y agoI share the same thoughts. That's why I even wonder how data scientists and UX/UI folks, who work at Netflix, feel like when their recommendations to the management are not heeded by the latter. Maybe Netflix data scientists have a hard time finding useful insights out of the trove of data they have.