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Comment by parent5446 | Hacker News Reader

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parent5446·

Maybe you used it, but overall few people were using it. That's why they got rid of it.

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Maybe few people were using it because they made it hard / impossible to use?

70% of Netflix's viewing happens on TV. You couldn't even access user reviews on tv.

15% of Netflix's viewing happens on smart phones and tablets. You couldn't even access user reviews on mobile.

So 85% of Netflix's viewers (TV, phones, tablets) couldn't even access the reviews from their viewing-devices.

You could only access reviews on desktop/laptop... Which accounts for only 15% of Netflix's viewers.

I can believe that's all true. So people now primarily consume the content through interfaces that inherently would make it difficult to interact with reviews. (And I suspect if they did pop up a box asking you to add a review after you watched something that would really annoy everyone.)

In a lot of ways, the user reviews are mostly a vestige of when people used them while adding DVDs to their queue.

They didn’t have it in the UI. There is nothing inherently difficult about browsing reviews on a mobile device. Millions do it every time they’re about to download an app. There is no option to read reviews given to effectively 85% of their viewers. That was their design decision. And now they’re citing review usage numbers when their design decisions promoted low review usage numbers. They’re providing a circular argument which implies that it is not the main reason.

It's not at all hard to "interact with" reviews on mobile or with a remote.

Talking about a popup is a non sequitur, it's not like the web site does that.

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