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Comment by joncp | Hacker News Reader

Remember when you didn't have to wade through that awful carousel view to find what you wanted to watch? Or when they didn't try to hide your "continue watching" list in a steaming heap of inaccurate recommendations?

Except for a couple of shows, I've almost completely switched to Prime.

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"continue watching" being deep down is my biggest pet peeve. Nothing gets me angrier than having to scroll and search just to continue watching the same show every single day.

Statistically, if each show is 8 episodes, then 88% of the time when I come to the homepage, I want to "continue watching" not "find a new show". Why the hell is continue watching not always the very first row.

They deliberately switch around the placement of the homepage queues. The goal is to keep you engaging with the product and discovering new things. They don't want you holding a Netflix subscription just for Friends, or whatever.

But why? Isn't watching Friends a viable reason to own that subscription?

You're more likely to cancel when you're done watching that one show. They want to continuously give you a new reason to keep paying.

Their awful UI was one of the reasons I dropped the service. I wonder what fraction of former customers are like me.

They're hoping to hook you on something else so you'll keep your subscription after you get tired of watching Friends.

The Prime interface is way worse than Netflix. Admittedly it didn't have this awful autoplay but even continuing a show I'm currently watching is a game of Where's Waldo.

It's bad, I'll give you that. On the other hand, Prime shows you user star ratings and IMDb scores which, when taken together, give a much better idea of watchability than Netflix's match scores.

The thing I hate about Prime is when I start a movie, it needs subtitles enabled, I go do that, then when I hit the back button, instead of taking me back to the movie, it takes me back to the top-level and they've removed the movie I was just watching, so now I can't find the damn thing! They do that when I start a movie, I don't like it, and I go back; I get that. But the messed-up Back function when enabling subtitles does the same thing. Then I have to scroll through a huge amount of stuff trying to find the "Continue watching" thing.

Other things I don't like about Prime:

- they used to have a setting for "Show Prime only", because I am never going to pay for TV. They removed that and now you have to see all their pay crap.

- if I run across a Prime thing that looks interesting and add it to my watchlist, it might no longer be free when I get around to watching it. This sucks so bad, and I was bitten by it so often, that I no longer use the watchlist feature. It made me too mad.

I have given up trying to watch TV. I was spending half an hour scrolling through menus of crappy movies, then giving up. I won't cancel Prime because I split that with a friend and we both get the 2-day shipping, and I probably won't cancel Netflix because I have 4 other friends on my subscription, but I haven't used either video service for over a month.

The Netflix UI is very abusive. They have no respect for the value of your time or your attention.

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