[pembrook]

The reason behind this is widely known. If you could easily scroll through their entire catalog as a list, it'd feel kinda like walking through a small, underwhelming Blockbuster.

The whole point of the UI is to give you this un-ending sense of abundance, ie. "You like 1980s action comedies? Scroll through 20 of them here! Like 1990s female-driven drama? Here's 10 we picked for you! Keep scrolling! We have everything!"

In reality, their catalog (while having about 10,000 items) is quite limited in terms of big name films and TV shows you'd recognize.

[StillBored]

But in reality what happens is that it recommends the same shows over and over. So pretty soon the 50 or so shows fall into two categories. Things you have no desire to watch or things you've already watched. Making it feel like the catalog is _EVEN_ smaller than it already is. Why it puts things you have already watched into the normal categories when they are already in the "watch it again" category I will never know. Plus, if you happen to watch say horror/scifi/action movies, you will find a movie sitting in three+ different rows reducing the overall selection even further.

I sometimes scroll around on the wifes account to see if there is anything interesting there, because that is about the only place I ever see anything new on netflix. My account never shows me anything that isn't really bad b-movie fiction and documentaries. Where as my wife only gets the comedy and romance, the kids get all the "family" movies and animation. <sigh>

There is probably more there, but the only way to find it is 3rd party sites. If I happen to type something into the search bar there is pretty much a 99% chance netflix won't have it. At least on prime they seem to have a fairly deep catalog of older movies, even if 3/4 of them are pay per view.

[dmitriid]

This is even worse outside US where Netflix doesn't have the license for most of its catalog. The recommendations are 90% Netflix originals, 10% decade old or older movies, and 1 movie from last year. And the catalog is... the same.