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Comment by rumblestrut | Hacker News Reader

Reed Hastings makes me wonder what kind of company Netflix is.

Does Netflix listen to its customers? I've hated the website redesign since it launched and from what I've read, I'm certainly not alone. I find the redesign to be much less user friendly than the old one, which I loved. I don't login as much as before to browse, review and add to my queue. I avoid the website and stick to watching stuff on my Roku. In my opinion, the redesign took the Netflix website from one that was fun to use, to one that devalued the company to being just another company that provides movies. The charm is gone.

And now this odd, Qwikstupid thing. That site isn't even up yet. Is it because they planned it that way, or are they looking for customer feedback first before making any concrete changes?

And that takes me back to my original point: does Netflix care about customer feedback?

(edited for my terrible typos)

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In my 3 or so years as a Netflix subscriber I have noticed an extremely disturbing trend of Netflix killing useful features simply because they aren't good for the business.

I can think of 2 off the top of my head:

- You used to be able to easily access a page of latest release DVDs. They killed this page because "too many people were using it" - and they had a pretty audacious blog post assuring that now it is a better customer experience claiming "it caused contention to ship" - although I never had a problem and sorely missed the feature when it was gone

- You used to be able to see the top 50 streaming movies. It almost always had the top new hollywood blockbusters which I really wanted to see. This feature vanished one day with no explanation that I could find.

The new site redesign is also a good example, making it harder and harder to find the movies you actually want to watch.

For these reasons alone I was a relatively happy customer but I would never have invested in them as a company due to their lack of customer focus. This latest price fiasco was the nail in the coffin. I cancelled my membership.

For the price of the streaming plan, I will just watch one or two movies a month on Amazon Instant Video with a much bigger selection and much stronger customer focus. All the nice features which Netflix killed for no reason are featured prominently on the Amazon web page for starters.

I cancelled my membership a while back also -- difficulty in finding content I actually wanted to watch was a huge factor.

It's almost like an insurance company -- they want you to buy their plan, but not actually use it! (Why, then they'd have to pay out to the movie studios!)

I agree. They push the lower level movies intentionally.

I've stopped trusting the Netflix so-called "Latest Release" and other lists a while ago and started using http://instantwatcher.com for this reason. Good filtering & sorting features.

Netflix does listen to user feedback. Back in 08, the profiles feature almost got the ax before vocal user feedback convinced them to keep it. I'm sure they're listening, regardless of what the final outcome is.

June 19, 2008 - Removing Profiles - http://blog.netflix.com/2008/06/profiles-feature-going-away....

June 30, 2008 - Nevermind - http://blog.netflix.com/2008/06/profiles-feature-not-going-a...

(Work has any URL with "netflix.com" blocked, so I'm guessing these are right blog posts.)

I remember vocal user feedback telling them not to ax the "friends" feature too, but that's long gone. (And sorely missed, at least by me.)

I also remember vocal user feedback telling them not to switch to Silverlight, for that matter. I was one of the many who stopped being able to use their streaming service when that change went through, until I recently bought a PS3.

I don't consider pissing off a large portion of your customer base causing a backlash so strong that you backtrack to be "listening to customer feedback". It's more like "poking the hornets nest & getting stung". Netflix has a history of shooting first & asking questions later.

As far as giving feedback or suggestions voluntarily as a customer, good luck. You can't do it on the website & any suggestion you give to a customer service rep stays with the customer service rep & goes no further. It's a sad state of affairs when the best 1-on-1 communication with customers Netflix has had as a company is their CEO doing damage control in Facebook comment threads.

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