The greatest loss is the innocence and aligned incentives DvD Netflix had. They pioneered eerily accurate recommendations (anyone remember the Netflix recommend

The greatest loss is the innocence and aligned incentives DvD Netflix had. They pioneered eerily accurate recommendations (anyone remember the Netflix recommendation challenges?). You rated all the movies out of 5 stars and Netflix recommended the best movies without any limits. Because they more or less had every movie ever made in their library! Their only incentive was to make you discover the best movie you wanted to watch! Irony was that dvd Netflix still maintained this rating system at least a few years back when I used it. I paid and kept it more for the list and recommendations than the discs themselves. When streaming started Netflix’s incentives changed: if you had a rank ordered personal watchlist, you’ll notice if the movie you added left the service. Back then they were also playing this game of circling the expensive movies in and out of the service every six months or a year - if your watchlist was unordered, you eventually saw the movie you wanted to watch in that list and could see it. They end up paying only half the license fees. In the end their recommendation system couldn’t be honest because they basically couldn’t stream the best movie you’d like to see. Not to mention they’d have to openly say the movies they commissioned are likely not going to be enjoyable for you personally. So they completely gutted the recommendation system into the ghastly crap we have today which is designed to hide their selection flaws than to serve you honestly. The other frustrating thing for me to see online is when people criticize Netflix for bad design decisions - till Hastings was running the ship, I felt every bad UX move they made was in genuine service of hiding the flaws necessitated by their limited licensing abilities. And they were damn smart about it too. Netflix’s greatest downfall was their content strategy which seems to be some idea of data driven predictive crap. They likely got buoyed by the success of the first few shows into thinking they can do everything with data. For the budget Netflix has nowadays if they actually got their content act together theyd be a much larger powerhouse. Hope they do it before it’s too late. It will be missed for sure.