Here is a blog post from Netflix staff members where they explain the recommendations: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-recommendations-beyond-the-5-

Here is a blog post from Netflix staff members where they explain the recommendations: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-recommendations-beyond-the-5-stars-part-1-55838468f429 https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-recommendations-... . It's from 2012 so things might very well have changed since then. apenwarr talks about this on his blog. He claims Netflix purposely switched from a good recommendation algorithm to a worse one after the transition from their DVD-by-mail days to their streaming offering. See https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 (find the section titled "Netflix"). I recommend reading that section (or even the whole article, though the main point of the article is something only tangentially related), but I'll try to summarize. The argument goes that Netflix doesn't need to find the best movie or TV show for you; instead it tries to find one that is just good enough for you, but at the same time good enough for lots of other people too (apparently in your case they fail at that). From their standpoint it doesn't matter if you watch something you really really like instead of something mildly entertaining: Netflix noted that the probability of people cancelling depends on the number of hours they watch Netflix content, not on the quality of that content. Nudging people to select what they watch out of a smaller pool of offerings enables them to save on bandwidth costs because a lot of content can be served out of distributed caches. There's a word for it even, apparently: "satisficing" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing). It doesn't work for everyone: it doesn't work for you, and it mostly doesn't work for me (I don't watch a lot of Netflix, and when I do it's mostly based on recommendation from friends or online sources). And I'm not sure how it works in the long term.