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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

Several Netflix UI changes have been pretty anti user. I'm more upset at the way they mask an incomplete catalog by pretending most Hitchcock films or French new wave don't even exist. I'm more upset about auto play. I'm more upset at the retooling of the recommendation engine away from finding gems you didn't know you would like to just finding ways to convince you to watch Netflix owned content.

Adding a badge system? Not wonderful, but basically just brings them up to par with almost anything else on the internet. If we want to oppose badge systems, and maybe we should, we should start with the entire gaming industry and social media.

Netflix has so many other sins that they have raised the bar on my outrage. That in itself is sad...

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Personally I didn't like their decision to "randomly" switch the movie's image thumbnails. This way they keep catching my attention on titles which I already decided I was not interested in. Quite annoying.

This is my most disliked feature as well and it causes the opposite, inconvenient effect for me: I add to my playlist a movie or show that I want to watch in the future, days later, I go back to my list and it takes me an unnecessary extra amount of cognitive effort to find the same item because it had a different thumbnail back when I first added it. So irritating.

I decided to use W10 application solely to avoid autoplaying in browser version but recently they introduced that amazing "feature" even there. But what's more annoying is that my currently watched series tends to pop between various genre sections on the titles grid, not mention that sections themselves are also being swapped every now and then just to lure me into watching something. No idea if that happens also in the browser version but I assume it does.

And I also noticed that my profile has different images than one used by my partner - but that's not a surprise from what I recently read; netflix algorithm uses some heavy profiling - more black characters on thumbnails for those who seems to be black person etc.,; and the algorithm thinks I am black person because I'm watching Star Trek DS9...

> I'm more upset about auto play.

What's upsetting about autoplay?? If you are truly "upset" about things netflix does did you ever think maybe you should just not subscribe to it?

> What's upsetting about autoplay??

I should have been clear, I meant the trailers. I'm browsing for specific content but getting blasted by ads for Netflix originals.

> did you ever think maybe you should just not subscribe to it?

I often don't. They've pushed me from a habitual subscriber to an occasional subscriber. Perversely that means I'm opting out of providing them ux data.

But in general people can have complaints about something even if it's not a dealbreaker. For another example, the ux on aging isn't great, but it beats the alternative.

It’s really painful to browse Netflix, I want to read the descriptions, but I get a loud trailer with every selection. There’s no way to turn it off afaik, so I mute my tv whenever the Netflix app is open.

That's a shockingly terrible argument. A person can object to parts of a service while still wanting to purchase the service.

If only the world was so simple.

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