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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

Netflix has only offered less and less yet they keep charging more and more. Their service is increasingly annoying to use and they refuse to address complaints users have had since the streaming service started (for example, the lack of an A-Z listing of all titles, or the countless times the same shows are repeated across the totally random and ever-changing categories they force on us.

Now Netflix seems to be perfectly happy to price out their poorer customers (or sell them out to advertisers) so long as enough people are still willing to pay to get screwed over and over again.

I've had an account from their early days mailing DVDs, and I loved supporting them when they were ad free, but at this point if it weren't for the others who still depend on my account, I'd have canceled already.

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So you're refusing to cancel, despite having a boat-load of complaints about them.

Why exactly should they do better? If people are happy to keep sending them money, even when the price increases, then they're doing the right thing. It's not like you don't have alternative services to choose from.

> So you're refusing to cancel, despite having a boat-load of complaints about them.

If I were the only person using the account I'd cancel, but I'm not the type of person to only think of myself. My canceling would inconvenience other people. There'll be some tipping point where netflix will piss me off enough to cancel anyway I'm sure, but we haven't reached it yet. I thought that netflix would force my hand when they started cracking down on password sharing, but so far it hasn't been a problem for us. If that stays true my guess is it'll be worsening ads that eventually drives me off.

> Why exactly should they do better?

They can tone down the ads for one thing. You should be able to pause a show for more than a few minutes without ads aggressively flashing at you. Multiple times I've seen full screen ads that had to be clicked past just to get to their main page which had a huge banner ad you have to click down from to get to "continue watching".

That's something else they can do better too. "continue watching" should always be at the top. I should never have to go hunting for it. Its contents shouldn't shift around based on what netflix wants you to be watching either. The last thing you were watching should always be first in that list.

As I mentioned, an A-Z listing of every show they have is something people have been asking for from the start of their streaming service. Same with a "not interested/never show me this again" option. It should indicate to you which shows you've already watched. It should provide options for sorting your queue. Provide a way to change the volume in-app. They should provide actual subtitles and not just closed captioning. They should not autoplay shows I only click on to view show information or an episode synopsis (they refused to listen while their customers begged them to stop autoplay while browsing for years, and now they started this new autoplay bullshit instead) and if they insist on autoplaying anything, anything they do autoplay shouldn't appear in "continue watching". They should notify you when things in your list or things you've been watching are leaving the service. In fact, they should have a category/section for shows leaving in the next month. Why the hell do we still have to google around to see what's coming and leaving every month! They could stop canceling their own shows without allowing for proper endings! the fact that they pollute their own catalog with shows they never allow to conclude reasonably is beyond stupid. Instead of having an asset, those shows will be ignored by anyone who already knows netflix screwed the show's fans over, or they will continue to disappoint and piss off the unaware who learn the hard way. I could go on and on about the many many things netflix could be doing better, but if they spent 5 minutes at /r/netflix they'd get an even longer list of annoyances and frustrations.

> If people are happy to keep sending them money, even when the price increases, then they're doing the right thing.

I guess it depends on what we think "the right thing" is. I don't think that greed is summum bonum.

> It's not like you don't have alternative services to choose from.

There are alternative sources. Even for netflix originals. Some of the people using my account would struggle with obtaining those shows via other means. I've resorted to delivering media to them by Sneakernet in the past, and I can in the future if I have to, but I hope I don't have to. Netflix might no longer be convenient enough to prevent people from returning to piracy, but it's still more convenient than collecting and hand delivering physical media to family/friends/lovers.

Netflix doesn't have many movies and any reasonable search interface would reveal this.

I'm not sure that "But our users would be upset if they saw how little their money was getting them" is a valid justification for failing to provide what your users want while actively annoying them in the process.

Netflix was hurt bad by the rise of steaming services owned by networks and content producers, but that's no reason to take it out on us paying customers. You'd think having the competition would cause them strive for better customer service and a better product.

I don’t use streaming services, so i might be misunderstanding: why is A-Z listing and Originals filtering needed? is new content discovery actually a major use of netflix? i was under the impression most people would just search for what they want

You can search, but that defeats the entire purpose of browsing. I can't know about everything there is out there.

Every once in a while I'll go into search and enter random three letter combinations like "Sta", "Tho", "Mon" etc. When I do, I often find things in the search results that I add to my list and would have done sooner, except I never knew they existed because netflix refused to show them to me. I've also been to other people's houses and seen how different the things netflix shows them are.

It seems like all netflix ever shows you is what they want you to see. My guess is that they intentionally hide certain older content to try and drive viewers to newer content so that they can collect metrics. Newer things end up being pushed over and over again in category after category.

I'm not interested in giving them metrics showing how well people like whatever their newest releases are though. I want to watch whatever I want to watch whenever I want to watch it. That was the promise of streaming that netflix never quite delivered on, but for a little while it was pretty close. Now it seems like netflix wants to turn into cable TV. They don't even always release entire seasons to let you binge anymore (they can control the conversation on social media and keep the ad hype up longer if they don't give users the freedom to watch shows on their own schedule)

It really sucks to see so clearly what cable TV always should have been, to come so close to having that, and then have it slowly killed off in front of you.

>It seems like all netflix ever shows you is what they want you to see. My guess is that they intentionally hide certain older content to try and drive viewers to newer content so that they can collect metrics.

The other reason might be the way they distribute stuff: from what I've read, they have equipment set up in various locations to cache content to reduce overall network load. So they want you to watch stuff that's cached on a server at your ISP, rather than something in the archives they have to serve from their main location.

I’m inclined to think the reason for that is that location is a major factor in people’s content preferences, not purely because stuff is cached in one area, that seems extreme.

Local/regional preferences surely have a lot to do with what's cached near any particular person. So I'm guessing the Netflix tries to push people to watch stuff that's more popular in their area?

I'm not sure if Netflix displays the total number of movies anymore. Imagine opening Netflix, selecting the Adventure 2023 tab, only to see 3 third-tier movies there. That's why there's no Adventure tab and there is no 2023 tab. Instead users play a slot machine: they press a button and Netflix dumps a pile of randomly chosen movies. No way I'm paying for this.

I wish Netflix had a way to filter out Netflix Originals, because 90% of the time, they are just 'filler', stretched-out garbage.

if the best way to find stuff on a platform is google + title search, something ain't right

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