[jonfw]

> Netflix is horrible. It's slowly turning back into broadcast TV

It's amazing how this describes a number of the tech 'industry disruption' companies... Amazon used to have better quality standards than eBay or Wal-mart, Uber used to be cheaper and have cleaner cars and drivers than Taxis, Netflix used to have a larger variety of classics but now largely makes their own content

[jm4]

So true. It's like they forget what made them popular in the first place.

What was special about Netflix was this large library of on-demand content and things you may not find anywhere else. I think what early adopters liked about it was you could be deliberate about sitting down to watch something. You'd put some thought into creating your list. We were trained to do this going back to the DVD days - probably even more so during the DVD rental days. And remember that Netflix had that massive collection of quality movie reviews. I suspect that early adopters had much different viewing patterns than the people who hung around on cable for longer.

So what does Netflix do? Make it more like a broadcast. Maybe that's what they discovered was necessary to attract the masses. I don't know. All I can say is it's much different than it used to be and, aside from some really good in-house content, I don't like it anymore.

[pixelbath]

Prior to on-demand content, I was a faithful "red envelope" subscriber because not only was it convenient (and I didn't really have to worry about returning a RedBox DVD), but Netflix kept _all_ my ratings for _all_ the movies I'd seen. They still have that data last I checked, but it's very much hidden in the account settings and they've long since deprecated user reviews. They now say "98% match." Match to what? We pretty much use a single user account across two households; what is that statistic referring to?

Nowadays, I never find anything I want on Netflix and am glad I'm borrowing an account, otherwise I'd drop it. Hulu's trying to catch up, but Netflix is easily the most user-hostile media interface I've ever used, and that includes hotel channel guides.

[lukeramsden]

Maybe it's an inevitability of scale?

[dreamcompiler]

It's an inevitability of incentivizing growth over all else. So scale per se is not the problem. The problem is incentivising the first derivative of scale.

[Pet_Ant]

> Maybe it's an inevitability of scale?

Increased quality is a good marketing ploy for growth, producing shit is a good way to increase margins. I notice a lot of restaurants have great food opening week, and then a return to median over the following year until they go bust.