But what if I want a faster horse?

I just hate so so so much the Netflix of nowadays, they manage to keep me because of a few good movies/series and releasing new seasons of shows that I watched previously.

But otherwise, this interface is so much bat shit! Incredible to me that anyone can pretend to Product manager of something so badly designed and unergonomic.

The most important thing is "continue watching", that should be almost the first line, but no it is randomly spread at different levels. Some times you can't even find it, sometimes it lacks the movie that you were just watching and that reappears later.

It is very hard to find something to watch because they still show you the hundred of things that you saw already, or that old crappy movie that anyone saw ten times on tv, or things that you are not interested anyway.

And there is absolutely no way to filter to not be a frustrating experience.

In addition you have the asshole dark patterns like showing multiple times the same movie/series in a given category when you scroll.

My hypothesis is that they used to have a lot of great content, so that was their strength, and no they have very little valuable and recent content and as they don't want to be upfront about that, they use a lot of dark patterns to confuse you to still give the impression that they have an impressive catalog.

But that has the consequence of the user being frustrated, impossible to find something proper to watch, but still having to spend hours browsing in the app as you might think that the good thing exist but it is just you that can't find it.

It feels to me like they poached some high-level product executive from an intrusive ad company, trained in the art of dark patterns, and pointed them at their paying customers. It's a truly offensive way of looking at your user base, as solely engagement metrics to be optimized. It's what happens when an entire business is built around gamifying one KPI.

Same. I gave up on netflix and just use Plex. Usually, I use this app on Android TV to play my plex library https://www.quasitv.app.

Sooo much better.

I spent my last 3 months using Amazon Prime on my smart TV, opening the app, scrolling for 15 minutes through the same stuff as last time, turning off the TV and reading a book. I cancelled and now have 15 extra minutes reading time, though I do miss the cheap delivery it got me.

> The most important thing is "continue watching", that should be almost the first line, but no it is randomly spread at different levels

This seems to be common among the streaming services. I can't imagine any reason other than they want to force people to see their other content.

I really don't think bad Product Manager's is a good explanation for the UI. Any big company like Netflix is going to heavily A/B test any and every change to the UI. They will only ever add things that boost metrics like engagement. You may not like the UI; it may annoy you, but you should have some appreciation for the fact that they are using sophisticated techniques to optimize for what they care about.

Why should I appreciate a company's exploitative and extractive experimentation on its customers?

The cost of maximizing "value" for the company to the nth degree degrades the customer experience once it exceeds a certain threshold.

It's greedy tunnel vision that makes the world worse for everyone in the long term.

Some people have turned to downloading qBittorrent[0] and use 1337x.to or thepiratebay.org (to start).

At some point these apps are so user hostile that it's simply isn't worth subscribing to. Their margins on content are so low on an individual—effectively zero since a flat fee means ~infinite content—that the effect on their business is incredibly small. Especially for people who have subscribed for months but don't watch consistently.

For movies that are 5+ years old, some would say that the companies have made the vast majority of what they will and copyright is so out of control, bought by those same companies, that it's not bad faith to counter-balance it.

Not sure. These are arguments.

[0]: https://www.qbittorrent.org/

For real, what the parent is suggesting is like appreciating that the burglar who robbed me cared enough about stealing from me to spend a week parked on my street learning my schedule.