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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain the reason behind the UX design? I have already paid for subscription and this is a yearly one too on auto re-enroll, why does Netflix have to do so much to make me watch? They only need to worry about providing great content. People already paid for it and they have algorithms that will guess what a user might like and bubble up those shows.

Why does it have to do one click play and auto play without even clicking? It’s the most annoying feature ever and they seem to love it. There is no way to disable it. What are they getting out of it? It has gotten to a poi t where I expressly avoid Netflix unless I know there is a show I want to watch. All because of auto play. May be my hatred of it is extreme but I don’t get the point of it.

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I still use Netflix on my old Panasonic plasma, rather than my Nvidia Shield as the hardware obviously doesn't support that autoplaying video nonsense. I absolutely hate, despise and loathe that "feature" with a passion. It's brought me close to cancelling many times just out my sheer hatred for that alone.

Like with any subscription, if you don't use it much, you'll eventually realize it's not worth the cost and cancel it.

If people subscribe to 3 TV streaming services and realize they're mostly watching only 2 of them, they'll cancel the 3rd.

So for Netflix, it's extremely important that you watch a lot, because that's precisely what prevents you from cancelling.

So every minute spent watching Netflix is one minute not spent on Disney et al? Makes perfect sense to me in a space with increasing competition.

As companies like Disney pull they content from Netflix and put it in their own services, Netflix will need other avenues to hook people in order to keep their subscriber counts up.

Great content alone won't maximize stickiness - better UX than competitors is also a major selling point. For example, on Netflix you currently don't get ads, which when compared to broadcast TV or even some streaming services, you have to suffer through (seeing ads on YouTube even while paying for a subscription is an example of user hostility).

Competitors don't sit still either - they're busy trying to put together a package of good content and improved UX as well in order to better compete with Netflix. Incumbents generally are harder to unseat though, whether it be in politics or in business, the bar that needs to be passed is "Why should I move from/pay for X?" - in this case, Netflix wants to be the X.

I get all that. It’s the autoplay while browsing feature I hate and strongly think is a discouraging thing for viewers like me. I am already there in the app, paid for it, opened the app, looking for content to watch. At that point they don’t have to sell me shit. I am already there. Auto play doesn’t make sense to me. You can make great UX without that feature which Netflix already has. In fact the auto play does the exact opposite of what they think it achieves.

Same here. I don't get it: if Netflix UI causes me to go through all the episodes of a show faster, that's one less show available for me to watch on Netflix, making the service less valuable.

I actually asked a friend who is/was a product manager there about the autoplay thing and he said something like "I hear this from everyone I know but when I bring it up [making it an option] it's just a solid 'no'" -- presumably from some UX team or something.

It's awful. Very obnoxious.

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