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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I still can't get my head around how user hostile they made this. I mean, why? I understand showing the most likely languages on top, but why hide content that's available?

I have bilingual kids (Dutch and Danish, living in NL) and the amount of setup we have to do each week to get and keep Danish audio for cartoons on Netflix is pretty nuts.

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Strangely enough, many countries also have cultural laws around what languages can be used for subtitles and audio tracks. For example, IIRC there is a country in SA that doesn't allow non-Spanish subtitles if the primary audio is in Spanish.

There are all kinds of permutations like that which can look like arbitrarily bad UI decisions if you don't know the greater context.

They're still pretty poor UI decisions if you're implementing misfeatures for every country based on the limitations of some countries. The more harmful it is, and the more money you have, the less justifiable it is.

I'm fairly positive, at the scale of Netflix, and the relatively minor amount of UI work they need to do, they aren't struggling to implement country-specific features. More likely than not, the ball either got dropped, or the misfeature wasn't understood as one.

I don’t think it is malicious - many people are overwhelmed when presented with more then a few choices, they are catering to that crowd.

If (say) I specifically want Danish subtitles, Netflix already knows that I use them, and I know they exist, that option is available to me nowhere.

Just keep preferences and not stop giving choice.

Keep thing simple but not too simple.

I could see this as a reason to keep "you might also like ____" lists short, but for languages/subtitles I'm going to seek out one of the four languages that's even slightly useful for me to switch to.

I swear there's a subset of designers who are just blindly wrecking tons of what we collectively as an industry know about UX. "Overwhelming the user with too many options," or "Can't find the option I want" are both discoverability issues that design needs to take accountability for. Hamstringing your product by removing options because you don't know how to properly set up your discoverability is just insane to me.

I’ve traveled around the world and have seen how insane the differences are with Netflix experiences. It’s interesting though, you can almost see how they struggle with licensing issues mainly, while from a consumer’s perspective it seems like issues with their competency or offering. You get lucky sometimes, like catching Better Call Saul 2 weeks earlier in Malaysia randomly, than the US release.

Yeah but it's Netflix, the company that plays audio previews at you with no way to disable the misfeature, so they could just be fuckups

I just mute until I've found what I want to watch :(

I bothered to write an email to them asking about other subtitles, than the handful I'm not interested in. Never got a reply. Would be really nice to watch some series/movies with, in our case at home, Russian subtitles. Or heck vice versa, Russian audio track with English subtitles, I honestly don't care anymore.

And I'm sure they exist, I remember their subtitle 'program'.

https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/115...

I really thought that would provide users with more subtitle options to choose from.

Not sure, but maybe the subtitle tracks have different licensing?

Wouldnt they need to check this based on location, and not on user interface language though?

Shouldn't they just ask the user what their preferred languages are?

What makes you think everybody in a particular place speaks a particular language?

Please don't do this. I can manage to read enough to do certain workflows, but I get so frustrated when Google presumptuously shows me dates according to the Buddhist calendar just because my IP is in Thailand. If my browser is reporting 'en-US' as the locale, the when available I expect to get that.

But you cannot expect to get unlicensed content, which is what your parent was talking about.

Prime video shows all subtitles. Even if we assume it is licensing, then Netflix's own shows should show more subtitles, but they just don't. I think they see showing tons of subtitle languages being shown as an UX issue.

So form over function then?

That’s also a form of UX fail.

It's available, you just need to jump through undocumented hoops to get it. I know not to underrate the media industry on this stuff, but I doubt they have licensing that says "make available but only through shitty UX".

Licensing might have given the impetus for the gating. And then the implementation is made like this, either as an oversight, or to provide plausible deniability to Netflix.

Here in Germany violence in video games used to be heavily censored. Much less so now, but when I was growing up, you basically couldn't have blood in games. I remember playing a GTA game that had bleeding NPCs or not, depending on whether you selected German or English as the game language.

But "hide from the UI" might be sufficient to pass legal review for a "make only available to users of language x, y and z" clause.

I could easily imagine this happening if they have two separate layers of availability checks. One general authentication check (likely with coarse "DVD region" baked in) owned by one suborg and another to handle all the eccentric subtleties of hundreds of different licensors owned by a different suborg. As laughable as "security by hiding the UI" is, when it's only protecting licensing nuances that have traditionally only been enforced by broadcast range (which is roughly continental for satellite) pressure to fix it can be very, very low.

Do elaborate on said hoops.

> you just need to jump through undocumented hoops to get it

The hoops are documented: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13245 ("Change your subtitle language" section)

It says "Due to the large number of languages available, Netflix only displays the 5-7 languages most relevant to you while streaming." and then proceeds to tell the steps to change profile language to get other languages.

No, it is simply to avoid clutter in UI:

https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-all-subtitles-available-in-a...

> There are too many languages to list them all in the menu and have the one you want be easily selected - especially when you are viewing on a TV with only a left-right-up-down remote. Accordingly, we show the commonly used languages in any country.

Well that's the first time I've legitimately gotten upset at a UX decision in a long, long time. My wife is homesick, 5000 miles from her country and can't watch anything in her language... Because they couldn't be bothered with an advanced settings UI anywhere? Seriously, Netflix?

Maybe that's an entitled attitude, but to me it's in the same ballpark as accessibility. It might not make a difference to 99% of users, but to the 1% of users in the long tail, it's royally screwing them for lack of a relatively small amount of effort. (In this scenario, a tiny amount of effort).

As someone said above, she should try to change the language of the interface to her language.

In my experience, that’s not a solution. I always use Netflix in English, but frequently encounter US content with only regional subtitles and no English track.

So set the UI language to watch she wants it to be? This is what profiles are for.

Because things such as Netflix are "boxed goods". You only get what's written on the box, and not a gram of extra value than that.

To better explain, with Netflix (any modern offering in fact) mentality one can't invent and market LEGO or even the PC or other general purpose toys. They want to capitalize on every bit of value from the product, and as a result, they can only give away "experiences" and not "platforms".

With a platform users generate extra value from which they can draw, with an experience it's just boxed, single-purpose consumer products.

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