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Comment by wgerard | Hacker News Reader

Total anecdote:

Kinda sucks when shows leave Netflix and don't get replaced; half the appeal of Netflix is the ability to quickly switch between Futurama and Always Sunny, and more importantly to be able to watch those shows on a platform that doesn't completely suck (FX's app has got to be one of the worst apps I've ever used). When "Parts Unknown" was about to leave Netflix, I really questioned whether it was worth keeping my subscription. It feels like it's happening at an accelerated pace in the last couple of years.

The original content is good, and I realize that those shows leaving Netflix is probably more about Fox/CNN than it is about Netflix, but still makes me less interested in Netflix nonetheless.

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Another anecdote: I’d have cancelled Netflix a while ago if my family wasn’t using it. Their UX has been on a steady decline for me:

- Audio previews make it so I never want to browse for what to watch next. I hate having to fumble with my tv/home theatre remote because of this.

- If you leave it hanging, the previews count towards a watch! Wow. God help you if you wanna make some popcorn.

- Their sorts are always shuffled around, pushing whatever content is on their agenda.

- Im bilingual, and I can’t belive there’s no way to turn off captions for some of their shows. I can’t watch a show like Narcos without having subs for either English or Spanish. This might sound nit picky, but bilinguals aren’t exactly edge cases, either (SV is full of bilinguals!)

I’ve talked to some of their UX designers, and data seems to rule all there, so they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if it didn’t help them. But damn it is infuriating. Crazy that my favorite netflix client is the one Apple designed for them in the older Apple TVs

Audio previews! Holy shit! Terrible experience. And auto-play for episodes. I know it gets people hooked to watch, but still annoying.

There are so few configurable items in their Netflix menu.

I have noticed lately that the "Are you still there" message has gone away. While it is nice when you are awake, it sucks when you fall asleep and wake up on season 6 of something when last you knew you were on season 2. Then you have to figure out exactly what episode you fell asleep on, not impossible but can be a pain.

You can turn off "play next episode" in the web page based interface. Or, you could. I turned it off a while ago, and that change still works for me.

I turned off the auto-episode advance just for this reason. When I'm awake it's a perfect feature but when I'm asleep it's a total misfeature.

Hate that option. I tend to work from home and leave my TV with something on. Picking up my remote every few hours is a waste. I don’t see why it’s so hard to let users turn it off.

I think your arm could deal with the pain every few hours.

Netflix carries a decent selection of kid's entertainment, where having a 10-minute show followed by the next episode automatically is useful.

On the Apple TV app, at least, the "Are you still watching" message is still there.

I don’t find this useful. I really just want for my kids to watch one episode and then we can decide if we want to do something else.

I also find it infuriating that when we watch a kids film, your immediately shown a preview for another film during the credits.

I get it, but I wish there was an option to turn them off.

You can turn off auto play of the next episode. It both saves your sanity and avoids that problem.

What's going to happen when Originals directors realise and make the first 10 minutes much more compelling than the rest, by making it unrepresentative of what the show actually is? Hmm, I might already have experienced that...

I'd add to this their removal of star ranking and that percentage system. It's so geared to what they want to promote vs what is good TV.

I honestly don't care about what ranking they use as it gives good results. Thumbs up, 5 starts, 10 starts, %, it's all the same. What frustrates me is that even after changing it, the recommendations are still just as bad, so the whole change was basically pointless.

The recs were very good back when it was the DVD service.

Wild conjecture: A paucity of things to recommend, combined with a desire to not concede that there are only like 3 things left I haven't watched yet but would be likely to give 5 stars, prompted them to first tweak the recommender's calibration, then eventually to wholesale switch to a metric that blurs the distinction between, "Yeah, I'll watch it", and "That was great!"

My guess is that they’re using variable-scheduled rewards: they’ll recommend you a bunch of shows they know you’d only give 3-4 stars, and “hold back” a 5 star show, surfacing it at some random set time since the last time they gave you something good.

Such a strategy would get you more addicted, but also allow them to stretch their supply of subjectively-five-star-rated shows at the same time. It’s win-win ...for them.

In my case, I think it's even more stark: I've definitely wasted the odd hour hunting for something to watch, and, in the process, have become keenly aware of just how minuscule their library is right now.

They're building it back up with their private content, but, quite understandably, only in some very focused areas - presumably, the stuff that they expect to have the widest appeal. They originally built their business on basically owning the long tail, but now they've been forced to forsake it.

I think that's where a lot of the discontent is coming from. Folks are realizing that Netflix has turned into something very akin to the Blockbuster outlets that everyone had once cheered them for running out of town.

I visited my father this weekend who has an older 'smart' tv and the app on his TV was still using the star system. It also had no auto-play which was awesome. I wonder if he's using an older version of the app and if there's a way to roll back on newer tvs.

I've shared a lot of your issues with Netflix as well, and I don't think it's nitpicky to want to watch Narcos without any subtitles. I feel like especially for that show where it really tried to capture the feeling of Colombia watching it and having to read half dialogue takes away from my enjoyment.

You can always just give up on their UI. I've seen my friends open their phones to search for a show to watch instead of using the Netflix UI to find something. There are multiple sites with listings, which suggests this is a fairly common practice.

Yep, I always open Netflix, tell myself my show should be near and start scrolling, then give up and use the search. It's so so bad. Now with the audio previews, I just bookmark shows and go straight to there. Their UI is completely useless.

100% on the bilingual thing. For my family and I, it's kinda awkward - weird localization failure for such a large corp. Not to mention completely botched translations like the title of Money Heist (actually called The Paper House), which is the dumbest name I've ever seen.

I don't think they 'botched' the translation; I think they just thought the name would be more appealing.

Translations of movie titles are a pet peeve of mine. They are bad everywhere, and have been since way before the times of Internet streaming.

My favourite example is Die Hard, which was translated to Polish as "Szklana Pułapka" (a glass trap). Presumably because the action took place in a skyscraper. I just wish I could have seen the faces of TV execs when they learned that Die Hard 2 came out, and was about airplane hijacking.

I always love when English movie titles are translated for the German market into different-but-still-English movie titles.

My favorite example is Zootopia, which got changed into Zoomania for the German market.

Seems like Zootopie (Zoo + Utopie) would've worked just fine.

> My favourite example is Die Hard, which was translated to Polish as "Szklana Pułapka" (a glass trap). Presumably because the action took place in a skyscraper. I just wish I could have seen the faces of TV execs when they learned that Die Hard 2 came out, and was about airplane hijacking.

Same. In Spanish that title was translated as "La Jungla de Cristal" (The Glass Jungle). There seems to be some common agreement here :D

The problem with the UX of netflix, spotify, etc is that their tied to the service, they have a monopoly on that service. I should be able to watch content I've paid for through they player I want with the features I want and not be forced to use the netflix player. I just want a textual list of shows available, apparently this technology is beyond the abilities of the tech team at netflix.

Autoplay is another pet peeve, I like the feature but if I fall asleep then netflix considers the show watched and removes it from my continue list.

The worse it get's the more I'm tempted to go back to less legal means of acquiring content, then I can watch it in any player without an arbitrarily gimped resolution.

I've started to get fatigue with the style of a lot of NetFlix shows. They're not just designed to be binged on, the plot only exists if you binge on it! Instead of having one plot every episode, most series seems to have one plot every season and then they draaaaaaaw that shit out like it's you're last Christmas cookie before the New Years' diet.

Yup. After being burned on this, I avoid Netflix-made shows altogether. I love binging interesting shows. I hate being dragged into binging by some screnwriting dark patterns.

I don't get your complaint, season-long plots have always been common (outside of comedy shows). That's why the cliffhanger trope worked!

Season-long plots are awesome, I personally much prefer shows with a long story arc than ones in which episodes can be watched in any order.

The complaint here is different though. Netflix-made shows seem to be deliberately designed so that all plot subpoints get dragged through the entire season. Each episode will introduce something, later episodes will occasionally remind you of it, but you have to wait 'till the very end for everything to be simultaneously resolved. Basically, what would be a classical story arc gets stretched in a way that 90% of its mass falls into the last episode.

(And then the resolution turns out to be meh, and you end up wondering why did you just waste 10 hours of your life on this show. It's quite like modern journalism - a bit of clickbait at the beginning, then a long article giving exactly zero useful information, and then a meaningless conclusion at the end.)

What shows are you thinking of?

"The OA" would be a stellar example.

I share your observations, but wanted to add the their browsing system is just bonkers.

Discovery is impossible — imo they overoptimize for engagement and make it hard to explore the catalog. I find out about many new shows via PR placements in newspapers.

Try one of the standalone discovery sites. These improve this aspect a lot. I'm using Flixboss (https://flixboss.com).

Does this deal with Netflix in other countries?

I'd just like a big table of everything available with meta-data in columns and the ability to hide rows

Flixbox is USA only, but there are some websites like unogs.com who can handle more countries. In addition to a more convenient browsing of the catalog, if you also want an alternative recommendation system (with really accurate and unbiased predicted ratings), there's the Windows/Mac app Coollector Movie Database: https://www.coollector.com/

I was completely out of stuff to watch about a month ago. No matter what I did I could only get the same ~100 shows and movies that I'd either already watched or had no interest in.

On a whim I switched over to my step father's profile - holy shit! There were at least 15 movies I wanted to watch that I absolutely could not get to show up on my profile without searching by name. I found a handful more on other family member's as well.

If we weren't on a 5 person family plan I would have cancelled long ago because from what they will show me there isn't any to watch.

And herein lies the issue with filtering/tailoring based on what you've watched/liked before: it can never 'escape' and give you something different that you might actually really like.

I don't know how many good titles I discovered browsing random titles in video stores back in the day.

And it would be so simple to solve. Prepare a tailored list. Instead of using it on all available space, fill only 90% of the space with items from the list. Fill remaining 10% with random items that do not belong to that list.

Yep this is how you’re supposed to escape from a local maximum. But maybe Netflix’s usual customer doesn’t stick around long enough to have this problem so it’s not worth fixing. I can’t imagine none of their machine learning engineers know how to fix this.

Yeah, I bet they know. Question is, do their managers want them to fix this?

There is this hypothesis that I've seen floating on HN at times, that Netflix does this to hide the fact that their selection is very small. I'm not totally convinced, but a lot of their UI choices feel like good evidence in favour of this hypothesis.

Thankfully there are alternative interfaces to browse the Netflix catalog:

https://www.coollector.com/index.html#netflix

I think that could be solved by having a button to mark something as watched, removing it from recommendations and the catalog other than the list of things you watched.

You could hide episodes you've seen or entire seasons up to entire shows. Would fix a lot of the issues I'm having.

And it's not just the subpar discovery features. It's the combination of awful discovery and their abysmal recommendation engine that renders exploration impossible. When will those engines understand that I'm not interested in every mediocre drug/crime/sports/[any other broad topic] documentary just because I watched this one exceptionally good documentary that happened to deal with the topic Netflix now decides to push down my throat?

I want outstanding content regardless of topic and these days Netflix seems to be delivering less of that or at the very least makes it incredibly hard to find in a sea of mediocre content.

Discovery is pretty much impossible for anything with a lot of products, I think mainly because there's no way to account for someone's personal taste, a pretty intangible concept.

Trying to find actual hidden gems on Steam or iOS is a nightmare, to the point where I waste the time I set aside to play games because I'm looking for one instead. Same with Amazon, the best it can do is "people who bought this product also bought this other sort of related product."

I also agree that UI like Netflix currently has -- big giant vaguely descriptive rectangles that only fit a handful on screen at once -- make discovery super discouraging, since it becomes tedious to scroll through everything and find more info about it.

> no way to turn off captions for some of their shows

There are all sorts of inconsistencies with subtitles and dubbing. For example, suppose a show has options for 5 languages, but not Portuguese. If you switch your profile to Portuguese (i.e., by logging to the Netflix website and selecting Portuguese as your main language), then lo and behold Portuguese appears as a choice for subtitles and audio for many shows where it wasn't offered before.

Another irritation when trying to learn a foreign language is that foreign subtitles and the foreign audio often don't match. They are both correct translations, but it's as if they were translated by entirely different people. Maybe Netflix gets the subtitling done by one agency, and then later, if there's enough demand for the show, they get dubbing done by another agency (but don't update the subtitles to match the new translation).

Yet another oddity is that, on rare occasion, they will take away a language choice they offered for a show. A show might have, say, Polish as a audio option, but the next day it's gone. Completely puzzling.

>Another irritation when trying to learn a foreign language is that foreign subtitles and the foreign audio often don't match.

This is industry standard, not specific to Netflix: - subs are generally direct translations of the script/transcript - dubs are often done by mouth-movement matching to make it look right

I would agree that the language tools on Netflix are unnecessarily bad.

English subtitles often don’t match the spoken dialogue for shows in English either. They are often simplified, probably for space and time constraints. I assume that the primary intended audience is the hearing impaired, not language learners.

> I’ve talked to some of their UX designers, and data seems to rule all there, so they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if it didn’t help them.

They wouldn't be doing what they're doing if it didn't help them in the short term.

Data is great but you never have a perfect picture. What boosts your numbers in the short term could be the thing that makes your customers resent you and move on in the long term.

Also, some things are not easy to track. How would they track "there’s no way to turn off captions for some of their shows"? They see an user watching a show. The data does not show that this user is slightly pissed because they can't turn off captions, but they still care about the show so much that they watch anyway.

"You make what you measure" cuts both ways.

> data seems to rule all there

Data is only part of the equation. The other part is what you look at, and yet another is what you aim for. The data might tell them that bilingual users are not being properly accommodated by the service (or may not tell that - after all, in what way are you giving this feedback that would also show up on Netflix's surveillance panels?) - but then the business people will say that already subscribed users are less important than getting new subscriptions, and this problem will have to wait.

EDIT:

> Their UX has been on a steady decline for me

Agreed. It's less clear, and it seems to be optimized for Internet equivalent of channel hopping. For people who know exactly what they're searching for, Netflix becomes more and more difficult to use.

Also - and this really annoys me - their UI changes tend to make the interface heavier each iteration. It's not a problem when I use it on my desktop, but then sometimes I'd like to watch a movie on a tablet (e.g. when in a hotel), and then I have to face the absolutely ridiculous situation, in which a full-HD movie seems to cause smaller load on my device than the interface to select what to watch.

They've been so aggressively getting rid of "real" content and replacing it with their in-house productions, the quality of which has slid quite a bit as they've ramped up volume.

I'm on the verge of canceling it, since most of what I want is on Prime anyway.

Same. I nearly cancelled when they got rid of Chuck. Amazon Prime picked it up shortly afterwards and lately most of what we watch is on Amazon.

Well, I’ve got the opposite reaction with Amazon: I can’t watch even some of their own shows when they get released in US. For example The Man in the High Castle’s second season whas unavailable here for quite a while after the release. You can’t blame the content producers here.

I don’t think they’re replacing their content on purpose, they have no choice. Around ten years ago when Netflix streaming started to take off studios thought they were taking Netflix for a ride, selling new-fangled “streaming” rights for old catalogue films that otherwise weren’t making much money. Now the game has changed and Netflix effectively can’t afford to renew these contracts, so little by little the stuff people actually know and love is leaving the service. To Netflix’s credit, they started trying to make their own content, but for every hit there’s about twenty misses. And frankly, even if everything they made turned to gold they still wouldn’t have age-old classics that everyone still wants to see.

I actually think they’re going to be in a lot of trouble a few years down the line as their catalog is going to be a handful of great originals, tons of garbage originals, and a bottomless pit of Z-grade studio films.

I've realized the same. I'm always surprised they are part of the FAANG stocks given how little they have control they have over their catalog.

I took the N out and realized that would never fly. As Netflix is the odd duck of the group, maybe some banking associate put it in there just to give some ferocity to the acronym (I.e. engineered a backronyn).

I always thought it odd that Netflix was picked instead of Microsoft for the "FAANG" group, considering market cap.

Microsoft wasn't a growth stock for many years.

Their licensing deals with studios such as NBC, Fox etc. are time-based. Netflix is not purposely getting rid of shows. Nor is Netflix the one deciding that "Parks and Recreation" is to only be available in the US.

Netflix is producing all of their own shows precisely so that they will no longer be held hostage by other license holders. Of course, now everyone doing the same thing, and consumers are left having to subscribe to a ton of providers (even when said providers currently are in a "drought" between seasons of your favourite shows) and jump between apps to get what they want.

(As an aside, Hulu stands out here in providing a "pause" button on your subscription. But it's month-based, and you still have to manage that yourself; it doesn't automatically credit you for those months when you didn't use the service.)

Happened to me with Amazon Prime as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16937290

The moment they announced the price hike, it's like something cracked in my rationalization to maintain the service, and every adverse complaint I've ever queued up in my mind against the service floated right to the top.

I'm on the verge of the same with Netflix. If I see a price hike, I'll quit just the same. They've been losing far more content than they've been adding.

...which I'd be happy to do. The production shops behind the prestige and niche films these streamers are lapping up for fixed fees (something like n% of budget paid to the production house, where n is a value over 100) are utterly crippling the production of quality titles that aren't things like event pieces or sequels.

As the good production houses dip because of the rates the streamers are paying, you're more frequently being left with new or inexperienced production houses filling the void, producers with less experience IDing the creatives (writing/acting/etc), finding directors who can cast successfully, doing accurate budgeting, etc.

I'll stop short of turning this into too much of a rant. Basically: the Netflixes and Amazons of the world have crippled the business case for an entire class of motion picture and subverted the quality of output in this class as a result.

I had prime through subscribing for the shopping service. I never found one show I wanted to watch on there apart from old stuff I'd already seen elsewhere.

At least in my area, most of my orders still arrive in 2 days after cancelling. I just have to order a little less frequently to get that $35 free ship threshold.

I was noticing I was ordering far less recently (mostly settled in the new house now), and the fact they still refuse to support Chromecast meant Prime Video was useless for me. The price hike was the final nail.

I cancelled my Netflix account around a year ago because of issues that kept accumulating. Removal of shows, deteriorating UX, price hikes, etc. I haven't missed it.

I stopped renewing Prime when they announced the most recent price hike. It runs out in a week and I already don't miss it. If I need something in two days I'll pay for two day shipping. In all likelihood I'll save money this way.

Agreed. Recently, Netflix reminded me why ultimately, torrents are simply superior.

You see, I initially subscribed to Netflix because it had most of Star Trek on it - all the TV shows + many (I think most) of the movies. The ability to watch an episode every now and then was what kept me subscribed even through the periods I couldn't find anything else interesting there. Now, recently came a time I actually wanted to watch a Star Trek movie I loved ("Generations"). I looked for it, but it was nowhere to be found. Just gone. So was "First Contact". So were all the others (except the bastardizations of JJ Abrams). This prompted me to ask, what other (non-Trek) movies and series I loved and even watched on Netflix are still available? Turns out, the list of movies and series has been gradually decreasing behind my back. A lot of the interesting things I watched on Netflix, that I used as an argument to recommend Netflix to friends, are simply gone.

Torrents cause a PITA with storage management, but have this one lovely feature - once a file is on your hard drive, it stays there. And this generalizes to SaaS vs. local software and files, too.

> Torrents cause a PITA with storage management, but have this one lovely feature - once a file is on your hard drive, it stays there.

Same reason why I still buy my music on actual CDs. Sure, I rip them once and only use the files afterwards, but I can be assured that no matter what happens to my backup, I'll still have a large chunk of my music collection available in 30 years.

Alternatively, one could just burn FLACs to recordable Blu-rays (preferably M-Discs) and achieve the same result.

I don't blame them. Netflix had 2 options:

1. Continue licensing content and be subject to the whims of the content creators who can destroy their margin by increasing fees. The content creators can also start their own streaming services like disney is planning on doing eating into that market of streaming.

2. Create their own content eliminating the 2 main risks in option 1.

Option 2 is really the only viable option even if competition for content will likely result in content providers (HBO,Showtime,Netflix,Amazon...) not making much profit as the industry goes towards more perfect competition.

Creating good content is harder than leasing it. Option 2 has it's risks, and honestly they seem higher.

Why would Disney or Comcast want Netflix to fail when it's a boon for them currently? Sure, they'll aggressively negotiate the best deals for themselves, sure they'll plan for a backup in the event Netflix would ever stop leasing their content, but why kick a cash cow in the teeth? It's bad business.

If anything, Netflix jumped the shark cutting their cheques to the providers and creating their own content.

> Why would Disney or Comcast want Netflix to fail when it's a boon for them currently?

See Pandora for a lesson in what happens when a content distribution company has no pricing power with their suppliers (content producers). Note that Spotify has been paying attention. [1]

1. https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/spotify-expands-its-push-i...

Disney is already working on their streaming service. Disney only wants Netflix around for as long as it takes for Disney to build a competing service made up of only Disney content that you have to pay a premium for. Even from Netflix's stratified perspective, Disney is a juggernaut, and Netflix's bargaining power goes away as soon as Disney has its own service running.

Netflix needs to give subscribers a reason to keep their subscriptions going and if licensed content goes away they're going to need compelling original content to keep their subs interested.

No one really wants a middle man to be making a lot of money off of them. They might tolerate it for some time, but if they ever have an option to do so they are either going to cut out the middle man (sell directly to consumers) or commoditize the middle man (lots of places to get the same content all making only a very small markup). A company with the potential investment capital of Disney or Comcast will almost certainly be able to manage one of those sooner or later. There is no path to long term profitability for Netflix just through reselling content from a few huge media conglomerates.

Adding my own anecdote:

I cancelled Netflix a while ago, I hadn't been watching it for a while but assumed the rest of my family was. Eventually got around to asking them and it turned out they hadn't used it in a while either. Turns out we all just kinda lost interest. I remember when streaming first came out I was excited to "see what's on streaming," it felt like so much content to explore. Then it gradually became: "let's see if I can find something tolerable on Netflix before I go to bed." So many nights I started 5 different things, giving up on each to start something new, before I eventually just gave up on Netflix all together and went to sleep.

Part of the problem, was that their content came to all feel bland in the same way to me. But I also think they slowly broke my media consumption habits. I remember the days of Blockbuster when you had to pick one movie, and then you were committed. Which meant I almost always finished the movies. Many times I'd watch them twice. Netflix creates this persistent FOMO over what you could be watching. Eventually, I just stopped watching anything.

There is a paradox of choice, for sure. I remember when my first car had a 6cd changer in the trunk... I could listen to the same couple of albums for weeks. Now ten million songs at my fingertips and sometimes you just don’t feel like dealing with it

Almost in the exact same situation here. I've switched to audiobooks before bed. I've started sleeping much better too.

Are there any good alternatives?

I've used Prime and Hulu before but they seem to have the same issue from time to time. The obvious alternative for me is to rent the content from Prime or iTunes (I have an Apple TV so my options are somewhat limited), but at $3-$5 per rental that's 3-4 movies on Netflix before I get my money back. I think I watch that many but I'm not sure. I watch a lot of crap I wouldn't otherwise that I feel like I'm settling for, but on the other hand Netflix is just my ticket to zone out and stop thinking about other stuff, so it does the trick.

Similar to you. All the shows I used to watch on it were gone or I'd already seen everything I could find worth watching. I canceled netflix about 2 years ago after being with them long before they ever did their streaming beta. I thought I'd just not subscribe for about a year and come back when they had made a bunch of new content. The bits and pieces I've seen or what I overhear about that content hasn't been very enticing.

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