Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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Yes! I recently went on a little trip and the AirBnB host had Netflix. This is the first time I’ve ever used Netflix. And oh my god how do people find anything with it?? I didn’t realize that you could scroll horizontally for about a day. And the categories are… useless. +1 for traditional “action” categories. And the content was mostly straight to DVD B-movies with a few “80s oldies.” I did manage to watch the new Blade Runner there so ok they did have something I could recognize.

And the TV shows were awful. Nothing I’ve never heard of. I couldn’t even find Seinfeld reruns or something normal. And after watching a random selection of them I am so glad we never wasted our money on the service. My wife picked a show (neither of us ever heard of) apparently about a narcissist woman who moves to Paris for work and it was just a low budget list of every “arrogant American visits France” trope and stereotype ever invented.

The experience was very much like visiting my devout Christian friend who has a huge bookshelf full of religious movies I’ve never heard of, and nothing “mainstream popular”. Like when you turn on Netflix you enter an alternate universe where nobody’s ever heard of The Wrath of Khan, The Godfather or Pulp Fiction.

Modern videostreaming is such a poison pill. Where the rights come and go arbitrarily. So Netflix decided they were going to do their own content because they couldn't rely on production studios. Since they don't have to pay royalties on their own content the streaming apps intentionally push the homegrown movies and obscure the slightly better 3rd party content. And it was not always like this. In their early streaming days the AAA titles (The Godfather, The Matrix, etc) were front and center. The recommendations engine was actually useful. And there were few competitors so AAA titles would stay on their platform for years.

I've been using their service since 00s when they were shipping DVDs. I barely recognize the same company even though they are wildly successful.

To be fair, I think their algorithm is way better once it gets a bead on your interests. Now, that definitely results in some shows never pop up in your 'feed,' but overall I'm in 2 modes of watching:

1. Scrolling into something that suits my interests 2. Navigating straight to something I want

If I'm in mode 1, then the feed works pretty well. If I'm in mode 2, then I can search straight away for the thing I'm looking for (and usually that search starts at the Google layer so I can be sure I'm going into the correct app in the first place!)

> I couldn’t even find Seinfeld reruns

Guess it depends on what you mean by "recently" and maybe it depends on region as well, but Seinfeld is on Netflix!

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