The original DVD-only Netflix was amazing - it expanded my horizons, I started watching entire catalogs of French, Serbian directors, and not very popular but d

The original DVD-only Netflix was amazing - it expanded my horizons, I started watching entire catalogs of French, Serbian directors, and not very popular but deep films of both U.S. and non-U.S. origin. It's not the DVDs - it's their matching engine. You wrote reviews, 1-5 stars, you could type in reviews (which I loved doing), and the matching engine was suggesting stuff and it was AMAZING. When streaming came online, I was excited. Everything since is a blur. All I know is, now, I spend 10 minutes scrolling stuff that is not even remotely a match for me - you don't need to be Pappa Google to know I won't like Marvel or various woke-y movies. I have esoteric tastes, but more importantly I want to discover more. But the entire 'Silicon Valley content' culture appears to be: get stuff TO the customer, don't let the customer get stuff on their own. Which, if you recall, television used to be. Broadcast television you had to wait til 8pm for your show, and sit through endless commercials every 8 or 10 minutes. Then there was a solution: Remember TiVo? HBO isn't any better, it just has better content. I was looking for "Stand-up comedy" and I couldn't really get that as a category, just UNSORTABLE search results. So stuff from years ago is mixed in with stuff that is recent. God forbid I look for RECENT stand-up comedy. It's pathetic and it's a "conspiracy" in the sense that it's clearly intentional: it's a disempowering of the consumer with some vague promise of customization, AI, so forth and so on. God, I am angry at Netflix after all.