[StavrosK]

I noticed something that struck me as an extremely dark pattern the other day. I was in the Netflix menu on my TV, and I loaded a show and was hovering over the "play" button, but figured I'd leave it there and not start it yet.

A few seconds later, the video fades in and the episode starts playing! I didn't even notice it and kind of started watching the episode, but then realized that I hadn't actually started it myself!

Netflix almost roped me into watching an episode even though I didn't explicitly ask them to, and that seems very manipulative to me.

[giggles_giggles]

This only just started happening? I use a PS4 to watch Netflix and the auto-play has been happening for months. I find it so irritating that now I don't go to Netflix to browse anymore, because I don't have long enough to consider an option before it involuntarily begins happening to me. Now I only open the interface if I already know what I want to watch, which means I'm no longer exposed to anything new they add. That single feature has single-handedly driven me into being almost entirely a Hulu watcher, because I can browse their app and not be blasted by whatever the algorithm wants to force on me. If my fiance didn't watch a number of Netflix Originals specifically, I would've cancelled my account by now, and not out of principle or something, just because I cannot stand the autoplay interface. It's completely killed Netflix for me. I used to go to Netflix by default to browse, when I didn't know what I wanted to watch. Not anymore..

[jerf]

I wonder if Netflix has overoptimized this for their metrics. I realize "the plural of anecdote is not data", but I've had the same problems with it lately; it's impossible to "browse" anything before the UI starts yelling at you. I'm sure their metrics look awesome, though, with engagement up in all sorts of ways, but I question if it's "real" engagement.