5 ms·

Netflix and Amazon are terrible. Want to continue what you were watching? Gonna have to find where we hid that this time, g’luck!

KyeRussell 4y ago
Which they openly admit to doing on purpose to “increase engagement” or whatever, even attaching a monetary value to shoving new stuff in your face before you can finish the old stuff.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  This is why I believe forced interoperability is essential to the future of online consumer tech. We've discussed it here in the context of social media monopoly regulation, but it has far greater implications. Salient examples are the alternative Twitter interfaces that proliferated, and indeed those for Hacker News. One huge benefit is that users won't be stuck with a single, often hostile UI, but be free to either interpret data client-side, or make use of a possible open market in presentation layer websites which may add their own value.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    That would be cool, but then some of those interfaces (probably the ones with the most ad funding) would be part-owned by one of the streaming services and would push their content the most. Feels like it'd be just one more hull on the Titanic.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      Which is fine as long as the better ones are available.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        My point being that most people will get the experience I mention, as they'll only be able to follow the ads.
  - barnabee 4y ago
    Couldn’t agree more. Infrastructure/service providers cannot be allowed to continue to control the interfaces that are used to access their services.
buro9 4y ago
Disney is worse. Which itself is unbelievable as Amazon Prime and Netflix set a very low bar.
- jmmcd 4y ago
  But Apple TV (the streaming service that I can access on the web, not the hardware smart TV thing) is much worse than Disney. Literally can't find the name or number of the episode that I'm currently watching in order to tell my wife.
  - aniforprez 4y ago
    The apple TV app on the mac is utterly horrendous. On my M1 macbook, it lags every time you queue something for download or delete an episode or try to view the details of an episode or series. It's so dumb that a first party app lags on their own line of hardware. Not to mention just how horrible the UX is. None of the clickable elements turn the cursor into a pointer and it takes just a little too long for the hover to trigger which makes it really irritating to use. The player is just as terrible. It automatically opens in full screen and is missing a lot of small quality of life features that other players have had for decades. Even as the cheapest subscription service I just cannot put up with how horrible it is
mjlee 4y ago
John Siracusa, a fairly well known Apple pundit, wrote one of his semi-annual blog posts on this - https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments It's a follow up to an earlier article where he lays out the table stakes for streaming apps, both worth reading.
- lightbendover 4y ago
  I found it incredibly amusing to sit through spec discussions of {big company's} new shiny long-term A/B success metric a few years ago. Hundreds of inputs, ML-based modeling, etc.. all to decide if change #574843 will eventually make more money or not. CX scoring was hotly debated as a model input and was ultimately voted against. Companies don't care if you enjoy your experience, they only care if you engage and spend money. Streaming, social media, retail, gaming; they're all full of dark patterns that lead to bad experiences so the company makes an extra buck. Honestly, I'm tired of this industry.
intothemild 4y ago
It's why I'm being driven back to piracy, because the UI/UX is do horrible on these platforms, that and believe it or not because Content discovery is easier a couple of the piracy apps look at what I have in my collection, and do recommendations off that... And guess what.. it's really good. So a bunch of people in their spare time seem to be doing a better job than Netflix, why is that? Because I don't think Netflix is trying to achieve the same goal They are trying to push content Netflix wants you to watch. Not content that you want to watch.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  I have the same issues with all of these services. But I'm wondering if it's some kind "expert mode" issue which is only a problem for a small advanced-user minority - many of whom will be reading HN. Do most users want to be told what to consume? Circumstantially I'd guess so, because otherwise it's a lot of effort to add friction for no reason. But I don't know. Possibly Spotify and Netflix do. Or possibly not. Perhaps they're just dysfunctional?
  - spaniard89277 4y ago
    I can see regular people struggling with Netflix when I'm at some elses home. I don't have a huge sample size though. For me is that I just refuse to pay because I know they can just do a regular interface but they want to trick you into some stuff with their UI. I just don't feel in the mood of paying for being treated as laboratory mice.
  - kroltan 4y ago
    A better question is can most users be inconvenienced into preferring to be told what to consume? As a sibling commenter says, these issues are not an "expert mode" problem, you can see regular people facing them too. But they usually give up and eventually comply, watching something else. The frustration is still there, but we bitch about it and try something else, while a bunch of people just go watch Trending Show #229. (I realize it might sound harsh/pretentious/"sheeple", but it genuinely happened to me last month. I wanted to watch Truman Show with my nephew at my sister's house, and it was a genuine clown show to try to find a service that would play it. Netflix didn't have it, their ISP's service didn't have it, it was available on Apple TV but we couldn't get the device to work because it required an update and we didn't have a computer at hand to be able to pair it or whatever, I was there so we even tried casting from a piracy app in my phone, but their Smart TV only accepted some weird proprietary method that was not available on my phone, so we ended up watching El Camino, a terribly mediocre Breaking Bad spinoff, my nephew was bored halfway through and went to play Fortnite instead)
avgcorrection 4y ago
Something funny about Netflix: after they implemented double thumbs up they made the three buttons (two thumps up, one, thumbs down) hidden behind one thumbs up icon and exposed on hover. Next to the My List button. The double thumbs up then is superimposed on the My List button. So if I move my cursor from right to left in order to remove some show from my List I might give it two thumbs up instead.
- WiSaGaN 4y ago
  I wonder why they haven't fixed that already. Even just recording the button clicking sequence alone, they should have more than enough data in which people clicking thumbs up button before immediately unclick it and click 'list' to show that it is a bad design.
lemursage 4y ago
Agreed, I feel that in the case of Netflix et al., it's just orders of magnitude more ridiculous -- may I just get the list of the films instead of being force spoon-fed crap content, please? I don't even know how to begin to tell the recommender engine that it's completely missing my preferences. That would be somewhat digestible if their search experience wasn't terrible as well -- no facet search, no dynamic category browsing? What the heck.
- pigeonhole123 4y ago
  It feels like these design choices are there to hide the fact that their catalog is tiny (maybe especially in Europe). The majority of what I search for just displays things that are similar to what I actually wanted to watch. For example if I search for Family Guy I get some off-brand Netflix cartoon in the "irreverent" category.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Yeah, they can't even tell you they don't have it. I wanted to watch лучше чем люди (Better Than Us), which was recommended to me by a co-worker as available on Netflix. It looks like I was too late and it had left their catalogue again, but anything I found on the internet was either "look at this nice show available on Netflix" (posted 2 years ago) or, very very rarely, a Netflix page with a grayed out play button. Again, no explanation. It was the first time in a long while I had opened it and also the last.
    - lemursage 4y ago
      One more thing I've also noticed. I wanted to exchange movies with a Turkish friend. We both realised that the best movies/series from our regional Netflix offerings are not available in other's Netflix feed. The only available movies were either regional Netflix productions (of contestable quality) or absolutely low-quality non-Netflix productions. Bad search does not help in conscious discovery either. I cannot understand why the best regional movies/series/classics are not shared between regions (excluding UK and US maybe). Those that happen to be available had a very lackluster translation. I doubt this is exclusively licensing issue, but I may be wrong.

KyeRussell 4y ago

Which they openly admit to doing on purpose to “increase engagement” or whatever, even attaching a monetary value to shoving new stuff in your face before you can finish the old stuff.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
This is why I believe forced interoperability is essential to the future of online consumer tech. We've discussed it here in the context of social media monopoly regulation, but it has far greater implications. Salient examples are the alternative Twitter interfaces that proliferated, and indeed those for Hacker News. One huge benefit is that users won't be stuck with a single, often hostile UI, but be free to either interpret data client-side, or make use of a possible open market in presentation layer websites which may add their own value.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  That would be cool, but then some of those interfaces (probably the ones with the most ad funding) would be part-owned by one of the streaming services and would push their content the most. Feels like it'd be just one more hull on the Titanic.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Which is fine as long as the better ones are available.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      My point being that most people will get the experience I mention, as they'll only be able to follow the ads.
- barnabee 4y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. Infrastructure/service providers cannot be allowed to continue to control the interfaces that are used to access their services.

buro9 4y ago

Disney is worse. Which itself is unbelievable as Amazon Prime and Netflix set a very low bar.

jmmcd 4y ago
But Apple TV (the streaming service that I can access on the web, not the hardware smart TV thing) is much worse than Disney. Literally can't find the name or number of the episode that I'm currently watching in order to tell my wife.
- aniforprez 4y ago
  The apple TV app on the mac is utterly horrendous. On my M1 macbook, it lags every time you queue something for download or delete an episode or try to view the details of an episode or series. It's so dumb that a first party app lags on their own line of hardware. Not to mention just how horrible the UX is. None of the clickable elements turn the cursor into a pointer and it takes just a little too long for the hover to trigger which makes it really irritating to use. The player is just as terrible. It automatically opens in full screen and is missing a lot of small quality of life features that other players have had for decades. Even as the cheapest subscription service I just cannot put up with how horrible it is

mjlee 4y ago

John Siracusa, a fairly well known Apple pundit, wrote one of his semi-annual blog posts on this - https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments It's a follow up to an earlier article where he lays out the table stakes for streaming apps, both worth reading.

lightbendover 4y ago
I found it incredibly amusing to sit through spec discussions of {big company's} new shiny long-term A/B success metric a few years ago. Hundreds of inputs, ML-based modeling, etc.. all to decide if change #574843 will eventually make more money or not. CX scoring was hotly debated as a model input and was ultimately voted against. Companies don't care if you enjoy your experience, they only care if you engage and spend money. Streaming, social media, retail, gaming; they're all full of dark patterns that lead to bad experiences so the company makes an extra buck. Honestly, I'm tired of this industry.

intothemild 4y ago

It's why I'm being driven back to piracy, because the UI/UX is do horrible on these platforms, that and believe it or not because Content discovery is easier a couple of the piracy apps look at what I have in my collection, and do recommendations off that... And guess what.. it's really good. So a bunch of people in their spare time seem to be doing a better job than Netflix, why is that? Because I don't think Netflix is trying to achieve the same goal They are trying to push content Netflix wants you to watch. Not content that you want to watch.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
I have the same issues with all of these services. But I'm wondering if it's some kind "expert mode" issue which is only a problem for a small advanced-user minority - many of whom will be reading HN. Do most users want to be told what to consume? Circumstantially I'd guess so, because otherwise it's a lot of effort to add friction for no reason. But I don't know. Possibly Spotify and Netflix do. Or possibly not. Perhaps they're just dysfunctional?
- spaniard89277 4y ago
  I can see regular people struggling with Netflix when I'm at some elses home. I don't have a huge sample size though. For me is that I just refuse to pay because I know they can just do a regular interface but they want to trick you into some stuff with their UI. I just don't feel in the mood of paying for being treated as laboratory mice.
- kroltan 4y ago
  A better question is can most users be inconvenienced into preferring to be told what to consume? As a sibling commenter says, these issues are not an "expert mode" problem, you can see regular people facing them too. But they usually give up and eventually comply, watching something else. The frustration is still there, but we bitch about it and try something else, while a bunch of people just go watch Trending Show #229. (I realize it might sound harsh/pretentious/"sheeple", but it genuinely happened to me last month. I wanted to watch Truman Show with my nephew at my sister's house, and it was a genuine clown show to try to find a service that would play it. Netflix didn't have it, their ISP's service didn't have it, it was available on Apple TV but we couldn't get the device to work because it required an update and we didn't have a computer at hand to be able to pair it or whatever, I was there so we even tried casting from a piracy app in my phone, but their Smart TV only accepted some weird proprietary method that was not available on my phone, so we ended up watching El Camino, a terribly mediocre Breaking Bad spinoff, my nephew was bored halfway through and went to play Fortnite instead)

avgcorrection 4y ago

Something funny about Netflix: after they implemented double thumbs up they made the three buttons (two thumps up, one, thumbs down) hidden behind one thumbs up icon and exposed on hover. Next to the My List button. The double thumbs up then is superimposed on the My List button. So if I move my cursor from right to left in order to remove some show from my List I might give it two thumbs up instead.

WiSaGaN 4y ago
I wonder why they haven't fixed that already. Even just recording the button clicking sequence alone, they should have more than enough data in which people clicking thumbs up button before immediately unclick it and click 'list' to show that it is a bad design.

lemursage 4y ago

Agreed, I feel that in the case of Netflix et al., it's just orders of magnitude more ridiculous -- may I just get the list of the films instead of being force spoon-fed crap content, please? I don't even know how to begin to tell the recommender engine that it's completely missing my preferences. That would be somewhat digestible if their search experience wasn't terrible as well -- no facet search, no dynamic category browsing? What the heck.

pigeonhole123 4y ago
It feels like these design choices are there to hide the fact that their catalog is tiny (maybe especially in Europe). The majority of what I search for just displays things that are similar to what I actually wanted to watch. For example if I search for Family Guy I get some off-brand Netflix cartoon in the "irreverent" category.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Yeah, they can't even tell you they don't have it. I wanted to watch лучше чем люди (Better Than Us), which was recommended to me by a co-worker as available on Netflix. It looks like I was too late and it had left their catalogue again, but anything I found on the internet was either "look at this nice show available on Netflix" (posted 2 years ago) or, very very rarely, a Netflix page with a grayed out play button. Again, no explanation. It was the first time in a long while I had opened it and also the last.
  - lemursage 4y ago
    One more thing I've also noticed. I wanted to exchange movies with a Turkish friend. We both realised that the best movies/series from our regional Netflix offerings are not available in other's Netflix feed. The only available movies were either regional Netflix productions (of contestable quality) or absolutely low-quality non-Netflix productions. Bad search does not help in conscious discovery either. I cannot understand why the best regional movies/series/classics are not shared between regions (excluding UK and US maybe). Those that happen to be available had a very lackluster translation. I doubt this is exclusively licensing issue, but I may be wrong.