Netflix's stupid UX and recommendation engine, will be the end of it!
Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
21–30 of 180 posts
Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
#22It may also be the case that negative reviews of movies, TV shows, and stand-up specials did more to dissuade potential viewers than positive reviews did them to draw in; ...
Netflix's bigger problem is that much of its content looks good on the surface, but on closer inspection is not worth the time. A lot of this stuff is produced by Netflix itself. Bill Nye's most recent show comes to mind, but there's a lot more.
Netflix shouldn't have deleted those reviews. It should be using them to clean the junk out of its lineup.
Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
#23I've noticed for a while that Netflix seems to be making it a lot harder to rate content and find high quality content. It's like they want you to watch junk. Maybe junk has lower licensing fees so it increases their margins. I've found some amazing gems digging through Netflix and relying on user ratings. They were films I probably never would have found otherwise. A few somewhat recent examples that come to mind ar…
If you like Enter the Void, have you seen Irreversible?
[Edit: typo]
Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
#24It may also be the case that negative reviews of movies, TV shows, and stand-up specials did more to dissuade potential viewers than positive reviews did them to draw in; ... Netflix's bigger problem is that much of its content looks good on the surface, but on closer inspection is not worth the time. A lot of this stuff is produced by Netflix itself. Bill Nye's most recent show comes to mind, but there's a lot more.…
Hah, wouldn't you love it if the junk was removed and one day you log on and you just get a message telling you that you've watched all the stuff the algorithm thinks you'll like and you might as well go do something else?
Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
#25> Netflix said in a statement that “the reviews and our redesigned ratings system (thumbs up/down) never contributed to how we approach personalizing recommendations for members and writing a ‘bad’ review never had any bearing to whether a title was recommended to another viewer or not.” THAT explains why Netflix keeps recommending me garbage quality content! I had a suspicion this was true, but couldn’t imagine anyo…
How in the world does this make sense? The entire competitive advantage of having the scale and user information that Netflix has is to be able to do personal recommendations by recommending shows based on what others with similar taste like. Heck, I know very little about big data and even I have walked through a simple sentiment analysis proof of concept demo to rate comments as positive or negative.
Why take someone's word for what they like or don't like when you know what they actually watch?
Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
#26Offtopic: there's nothing more hilarious than to read the reviews after having watched a bad movie. However, I use IMDB for that.
IMDB also got rid of their forums. Such gold in there
Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it a shame if nobody uses the reviews and they're basically useless? Sounds like they're just deleting an unmaintained and unused feature.
"Declining use" is a result of Netflix's own decisions to downplay reviews because they were helping people decide not to watch movies they wouldn't like.
Why should Netflix care if you watch or don’t watch a given movie? What they should care about is whether you stay a subscriber or not. If they try to push too much garbage, and not provide good tools to filter out the crappy content, they’re just wasting people’s time. Users will get frustrated and leave. I did!
Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used the reviews. Sometimes a movie would be polarizing and I’d read the good ones and the bad ones to see if I’d like it myself. It’s not a hugely valuable feature (I can do the same on eg Rotten Tomatoes), but it wasn’t unused.
Maybe you used it, but overall few people were using it. That's why they got rid of it.
Maybe few people were using it because they made it hard / impossible to use?
70% of Netflix's viewing happens on TV. You couldn't even access user reviews on tv.
15% of Netflix's viewing happens on smart phones and tablets. You couldn't even access user reviews on mobile.
So 85% of Netflix's viewers (TV, phones, tablets) couldn't even access the reviews from their viewing-devices.
You could only access reviews on desktop/laptop... Which accounts for only 15% of Netflix's viewers.
Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
#29It's hard for me to get too upset. Personally, it seems a bit conspiracy theory to think it's people might read negative reviews. Seems more likely it was a poorly used resource and Netflix didn't see the value in continue to support, maintain, and screen it.
That aside, it points to a couple of issues.
There is a lot of bad content on Netflix. It never had a good film catalog and their TV strategy has clearly evolved from at least a supposed "mine data to create great shows" (which always seemed a bit unlikely create all sorts of content, including niche content, throw it at the wall, see what sticks, and plump up the catalog in any case.
Second. No one has come close to solving recommendation. If Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc. can't (and Facebook ads are a form of recommendation too), I think it's fair to conclude it's a really hard problem that no one knows how to solve well at scale. There are a few people whose taste in movies are very well aligned with mine. But that's not a general solution.
Re: Netflix Has Deleted Every User Review Ever Posted to Its Website
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
How in the world does this make sense? The entire competitive advantage of having the scale and user information that Netflix has is to be able to do personal recommendations by recommending shows based on what others with similar taste like. Heck, I know very little about big data and even I have walked through a simple sentiment analysis proof of concept demo to rate comments as positive or negative.
Why take someone's word for what they like or don't like when you know what they actually watch?
How do you know a user liked a movie or TV show after watching it? I think a movie has to be really really bad for people to actually stop halfway through. For TV shows it might be more likely that people drop out after a couple episodes but if it's just "meh" or the show's finale was disappointing, how do your algorithms know?