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Comment by fighterpilot | Hacker News Reader

The most annoying thing about these streaming platforms is no IMDB rating being displayed. I have to type in every suggestion one by one which is annoying, or use a third party search engine. It'd be such a huge UX boost to simply include the rating, and better yet allow filtering by rating, I really don't get it. Perhaps they're trying to build network effects around their own rating system but it really detracts from the UX.

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Maybe it's because filtering by rating would expose how shallow the catalogue is?

At least in my locale a good way to be reminded of this is searching for any movie you'd like to watch but isn't on the front page of netflix, typically they won't have it.

I think you are right. My impression is that all the UI is dedicated to fool the user perception of the catalog, to make it look better than it is.

They made a change at some point (2017?) so as not to show movie ratings. I figured the reason was to give low rated movies a chance because I won't necessarily dislike a movie with IMDB rating 5.2/10. I've seen excellent movies with rating < 6.0 and lousy movies with rating > 7.5 It's just that my taste sometimes doesn't match with IMBD users.

> I really don't get it

Presumably poorly rated movies are a lot cheaper to license; and when you're licensing 2/10 rated movies, user satisfaction is a lot higher if you don't show the ratings.

IMDb is owned by Amazon. Amazon Prime shows IMDb ratings in its app.

They display IMDB rating only for some titles and it has to pass certain level of rating ( 6 +)

And at least when I'm on it through my browser, I need to actually click on the title to see the rating, which makes it difficult to use it to filter out junk quickly.

You can add IMDB ratings with extensions. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/trim-imdb-ratings-...

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