Maybe it's just me but my experience is that except for the actual streaming (after you started to watch a movie), the Netflix UI is super bad. It recommends movies which I hate, it shows series which have been on Netflix for years under "New on Netflix", it doesn't provide any usable sorting, the searching is crap and so on. I would put zero faith in a statement by Netflix saying that something is "useless". The actual streaming experience is super good but when it comes to everything else they seem clueless to me.
I'm miss the old days of reviews and Genre grouping on the home page. I used to get great indie film recommendations and could occasionally go "dumpster diving" for lower rated movies and find some gems.
Honestly, I think Netflix has become full of themselves. They pretend to have discovered some universal truths in how to create the best UI experience and suggestion system, and yet they have A/B tested tge interface over the years to this pile of garbage. It even hangs Edge frequently when I first open it there; the only browser that will play 1080p for me!
I find it interesting that there isn't yet a sort of "streaming-service library discovery/manager" app that doesn't do any streaming of its own, but rather just offers a good discovery UI for the streaming services you connect it to, where clicking "watch" in the service deep-links to the individual content item in the respective streaming app.
This has been done to death in other content areas (I think there are more emulated-game library browsers than there are emulators!) so why not for streaming services? Is it that the streaming services don't expose the deep-linking ability?
"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!
You'd think, but the people running Netflix are human. They do not always put business success first. There have been a number of highly political things produced by Netflix that were heavily promoted. People slammed them hard in the reviews and comments.
I am not a Netflix user, so this is just a guess, not an analysis. But could it be because user reviews used to be featured more prominently, but they were de-emphasized into oblivion over multiple years and UI updates?
I know a news organization I visit frequently did this to their comment section. After their last UI design, they might as well have been put them the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
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.
I can believe that's all true. So people now primarily consume the content through interfaces that inherently would make it difficult to interact with reviews. (And I suspect if they did pop up a box asking you to add a review after you watched something that would really annoy everyone.)
In a lot of ways, the user reviews are mostly a vestige of when people used them while adding DVDs to their queue.
They didn’t have it in the UI. There is nothing inherently difficult about browsing reviews on a mobile device. Millions do it every time they’re about to download an app. There is no option to read reviews given to effectively 85% of their viewers. That was their design decision. And now they’re citing review usage numbers when their design decisions promoted low review usage numbers. They’re providing a circular argument which implies that it is not the main reason.
