[gathersnow]

I was a member of Netflix from 90s to about 2021. The beginning of the streaming era was great. But since then Netflix has a long history of being user-hostile that I said goodbye to them many years ago. I got sick of their stupid auto-play feature that couldn't be disabled.

They used to seemingly care helping you find new movies you like based on a star rating. Remember the Netflix challenge? Now I suppose there's a thumbs up, but really they probably just gauge based on if you watch or not.

Instead of adding tools to help people find a life-altering hidden gem of a movie they took them away. When their catalogue got exposed for being mostly garbage they just made it harder to stray from the most popular movies on the service. They had a social component I liked but they got rid of it a decade ago. Imagine if it were like letterboxd and you could have people you follow whose taste you liked and could trust to recommend movies? A company the size of Netflix would find this trivial to implement and yet they haven't because they want to make their service as stupid as possible. What about something like a faux-cable experience for people that don't want to pick from a list of 30k things? They refused to do that so now Pluto exists.

There are tons of ways that I think you could add community value-add but Netflix never did because they take their users for granted. I am sure this is literally a play to boost subscriber numbers based on how it went down in other countries. We'll see how it works but I for one have zero loyalty based on the contempt they show for the people that consume their product.