Hacker News Reader

Comment by sundayedition | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of what I'd consider "noise" popping up on Netflix that they won't let me filter out. I don't care for most dubbed shows, and I haven't had any luck with any of the foreign imports. No way to filter them out that I'm aware of, so half of the "New shows" don't appeal to me

I wouldn't give up Netflix for cable, it's more likely to be Prime only, or something with quality content that I wouldn't watch as often because they don't have as much variety (HBO, Showtime, AMC, CBS)

Stranger things was released and we watched that but I haven't been on Netflix in weeks since; another price hike and the values no longer likely there for me.

View on HN

Netflix is blatantly user-hostile. The UX is designed to get you to spend more time with Netflix, not to make you like it more.

Many of the shows it suggests to me are not in english, yet the UX rarely discloses this in the description or (infuriatingly auto-playing) preview. Some people don't mind reading subtitles but I detest it - they could at least tell me the show is in German before wasting my time.

Yes! They've optimized for the wrong metric. Users should feel like it's time well spent.

After their $1MM prize years ago, they didn't even bother implementing the winning algorithm.

Then again, nobody really recommends media well. You can't mine the media directly, and people have very different preferences. It's just too many factors that you can't infer from the usage.

I've recently started using ReelGood more often. (Not affiliated just a happy user.) You tell it which streaming services you have, what shows you've liked, etc and it gives you decent-ish recommendations from across all your services. More importantly it also shows the IMDB score, the Rotten Tomatoes score, and usually provides a trailer, and then they deep-link to the actual content so you can avoid all the Netflix dark-patterns.

Just tried this out for the first time. Am I missing something? I linked services, marked some movies as watched, but don't see any way to _rate_ movies I've watched. So it doesn't have any kind of (useful) signal from me for recommendations?

You just mark movies/shows as seen it or want to see it and it gives you recommendations based on that. There's no "I've seen it and I hated it" option...I wish it would take a star-rating into account but it does not. Despite this the recommendations are still pretty good. It's a much better content-discovery experience than any content provider's native experience, especially that of Netflix.

Just out of general interest, do you watch foreign TV and movies at all then? If not, why?

Or just dubbed? If so, how do you bear it?

Not the GP, but:

> Just out of general interest, do you watch foreign TV and movies at all then? If not, why?

Because it's an additional barrier to enjoyment.

Dubs are irritating and often lose cultural context. From your post I think we're in agreement there.

Subs mean I have to watch intently, I can't cook dinner/play a video game/clean the house/fold laundry while I'm listening and glance over at the screen every few seconds. And I don't spend much time doing nothing but watch TV, unless it's a show I really care about. Stranger Things 3 got my uninterrupted attention this last week.

I'm not against watching foreign media, but it's a negative modifier to my chances to watch it. If I get a recommendation from someone I trust, I'm much more likely, but then I have to set aside time to do nothing but watch it.

As a side note, if I get a recommendation from someone with an anime avatar, I'm much less likely to watch it. I don't care that "it's not a 12 year old girl, it's a 500 year old dragon that looks like a 12 year old girl." It's still creepy.

Movie recommendations are either deeply generic (other movies in the same genre) or deeply personal (recommendations on myriad things apart from genre). Netflix has tried (and imho failed) at the deeply personal style.

So I agree with your comment except for the anime avatar aside. I personally don't trust 90% of movie recommendations, even from friends. It has to be somebody who I know has good (for me) taste. I don't think avatar-selection would correlate one way or another with movie-selection :)

I do watch movies with subtitles but very rarely (my vision isn't too great). (Dubbing is intolerable.)

It's a terrible UX and just wastes everyone's time to not disclose the dubbing/subtitles in any way in the front-matter.

I personally cannot stand dubbed shows, but YMMV. It just comes across as way too fake. Also I attribute at least half of my ability to speak English well to the fact that NRK - and cinemas - in Norway never bothered to dub everything, unlike in Germany, France, etc.

I just wish for dialogue only English subtitles of English language content: I'm not deaf, I just can't always hear the mumbling if I haven't turned my good old Rotel 5.1 system to 11. I have no issues hearing (clears throat), (coughs), (rain falls) and (engine rumbling) .. yet I'm forced to see these using the SDH subs as none other are available. It's great that they are there, but we also need non-SDH subs.

Netflix should make its API more widely available. 20 Instantwatcher/Flickmetrix type sites, all of which would likely window into the NF dataset differently according to their creators' preferences, would seem to more adequately address users' needs than a single UI.

Exactly. Sorry if this comes off as a rant, but contrary to the article, I've never been overwhelmed with any choice on Netflix myself, just frustrated by poor discoverability, their teasing shows they didn't even have the rights to anymore (e.g., The Expanse), and to top it off, being full of filler content that's just unwatchable for me with no obvious way to remove it or create a custom bookshelf.

I had cable growing up, but ditched it in my adult life and never looked back so far. Netflix's recommender is some blackbox that I don't ever find useful. If they added some way to channel surf like broadcast television, I assume I'd just be wasting my time wading through that.

Then there are some older shows in their catalogue that I wouldn't even have known existed unless I'd searched for them - I'd even go so far as to say purposely hidden from navigation.

Another personal pet peeve is the lack of subtitles or CCs. I suppose it's some licensing issue, but I can buy a Blu-ray or DVD here that will come with lots of languages, but on Netflix, they started adding a lot of local movies with no subtitles, and "foreign" shows or movies without any English subtitles, which are preferable for me.

Maybe it's because I've never had the pleasure of the US version, but I've only ever sporadically kept a subscription for over almost a decade now, quickly exhausting what I did find interesting. Back when brick n' mortar video stores were still a thing, I didn't feel overwhelmed by having too much decent choice there.

P.S., what's the annoying "are you still watching" prompt interrupting the current show instead of just being in between them? As if the UX wasn't annoying enough already.

What irks me the most is when I search verbatim for the name of something, and it's on the 3rd page of results, hidden by completely unrelated stuff.

There was a time where every login was followed by auto-playing trailers for a show about suicide, during a time that I really just didn't need to be seeing that. With no way to prevent it... other than canceling and ceasing usage.

I don't understand the dark patterns and general user hostility. I don't need to watch Netflix 20 hours a day to feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Do they somehow benefit from me utilizing more of their bandwidth, if I'm already paying?

Signal-noise ratio is how I'd put it, too. There's a lot of stuff it recommends to me over and over that I have no interest in watching, like generic mockbusters and Korean soap operas.

It could really use a YouTube-style "not interested" button. It's so stubborn that it feels like it's trying to force shows on me instead of helping me find what I want to watch.

It used to have this. The recommendation engine used to actually be good.

One thing that frustrates me about Netflix is how I'll watch an item X but after a few minutes decide I don't like it and watch something else. My home screen will be clouded for quite some time with recommendations based on X. How are they missing such an obvious signal that I didn't like X?

> I don't care for most dubbed shows

I don't know of any show on Netflix that I've watched that has an audio dub but doesn't also have the original language available as an alternative audio track. What are you watching?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com