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> What's the larger cause here? Delivering high-quality entertainment people enjoy watching, and doing it in a way that "just works?" I don't know if that's t

by biztos 6y ago

> What's the larger cause here? Delivering high-quality entertainment people enjoy watching, and doing it in a way that "just works?" I don't know if that's the larger cause as they pitch it to engineers but as a Netflix subscriber, it sure seems like they care a lot about that cause; and as a cinephile I think it's definitely doing something special for society. Not unique, but special: these production-and-streaming companies are revolutionizing film art, and happen to also employ a lot of my friends. But... I probably wouldn't work there as a techie.

pizza234 6y ago
I strongly disagree. It doesn't "just work"; it has a very specific target, for whom I don't doubt it works, but it costs a lot to the rest. Until a short time ago, you couldn't even directly remove entries from the "Continue watching" row, unless you used the sledgehammer approach of marking a series as never watched (which, conceptually, doesn't make sense - I may want to stop watching a movie, but still retain the information that I've watched it). Row categories don't have a fixed position; sometimes I have to scroll to find the "Continue Watching". It's impossible to remove movies/series already seen from the interface. Not only that, but the interface has a row with movies already watched. There's no management concept, I mean, even very basic functionality (the only concept is starring). Searching movies requires navigating through undesirable entries (in particular, already watched ones), rather than helping the user finding new content. This is a intentional design, and a clever one. However, it's shoved-in-the-throat fast-food rather than slow food. It's not random that they've introduced the speedup functionality. I believe that Netflix is meaningful to society as much as McDonald is; it's fast and cheap, but I wouldn't classify this as a benefit to the food culture. Even if all the above was false, the movies catalogue is relatively small. I can tolerate the above (although I don't, really), but as a cinema lover, I need a very large catalogue.

by biztos 6y ago

pizza234 6y ago

I strongly disagree. It doesn't "just work"; it has a very specific target, for whom I don't doubt it works, but it costs a lot to the rest. Until a short time ago, you couldn't even directly remove entries from the "Continue watching" row, unless you used the sledgehammer approach of marking a series as never watched (which, conceptually, doesn't make sense - I may want to stop watching a movie, but still retain the information that I've watched it). Row categories don't have a fixed position; sometimes I have to scroll to find the "Continue Watching". It's impossible to remove movies/series already seen from the interface. Not only that, but the interface has a row with movies already watched. There's no management concept, I mean, even very basic functionality (the only concept is starring). Searching movies requires navigating through undesirable entries (in particular, already watched ones), rather than helping the user finding new content. This is a intentional design, and a clever one. However, it's shoved-in-the-throat fast-food rather than slow food. It's not random that they've introduced the speedup functionality. I believe that Netflix is meaningful to society as much as McDonald is; it's fast and cheap, but I wouldn't classify this as a benefit to the food culture. Even if all the above was false, the movies catalogue is relatively small. I can tolerate the above (although I don't, really), but as a cinema lover, I need a very large catalogue.