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.
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.
I don't know how many good titles I discovered browsing random titles in video stores back in the day.
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.
You could hide episodes you've seen or entire seasons up to entire shows. Would fix a lot of the issues I'm having.
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.
I'd just like a big table of everything available with meta-data in columns and the ability to hide rows
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.