Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jerzyt 1810 days ago
What Netflix is doing is hiding the fact that they have very little new content. If they implemented all your suggestions, I'd have about 3 titles to watch, which I would like, but they're worried that I'd cancel the subscription.
2 comments

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I don't care that much about new content, I care about good content. For quite a while I thought Netflix had a very small catalog, until I started deliberately going to specific categories that the recommendation engine never show me, then I realized that there is actually a fairy extensive back catalog of shows that are interesting, especially various shows in non-English languages.
The kind of content that works well for Netflix does not work so well for me. They introduce just enough content that works for me that I don’t cancel the subscription.

I still find it a marvel that despite the majority of content introduced being not for me, I have been able to watch something unseen approximately every night and have given up on so little. In that sense, it is better than TV – even if the impression I get from the new content I scroll past is that it appears to be following all the same trends that made TV less appealing to me.

The most irritating consequence of this content problem for me is that nothing remains in the same place. Is continue watching going to be one, two or even three down button presses tonight? The reward is occasionally something gets suggested that is worth watching that would have been found anyway within a few minutes of searching.

I would imagine what they’re doing makes sense for the majority, but it would be wonderfully nice if there were some kind of alternate "advanced" mode for people who understand the lack of content where all this suggested and popular stuff went away and the search filter improved.