[dman]

Couple of points

1. It struck me at some point that Netflix UI is carefully designed to hide the fact on how little content they really have now. If you go into different genres at times there are barely 40-50 things you can watch (sometimes much lesser). They have lost a ton of items from their catalog (A queue I had which had ~85 items has dropped to 3 items without me removing anything because of shows / movies being removed). If you think of content that in the past would be > 4 stars, you will see most categories have <5 titles that fall under this criteria.

2. Netflix UI is now optimized only for surfacing the 3-4 new shows they launched this month.

3. The autoplay feature (with an impossibly short hover timeout ) appears to be an output of a quantitative metric based engagement maximization process. I suspect they have some charts internally which measure engagement and this specific design hits some local optimum there.

4. Lastly, as a world cinema movie buff I do not think I am the audience anymore. The long tail of delightful movies from across the world is long gone.

I wish them well, they were immensely educational when I first moved to the US. Growing up in India I never had the means to see cinema from across the world, so a service that would allow me to go through various best movies lists and see them two movies a week at a time was magical.