> It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service

I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.

> They are hampering discoverability.

At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.

> At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.

I believe Netflix had a big catalog when people signing their rights thought it was not going to work. Once the model was proven everyone created their platform and stopped licensing to Netflix. Then Netflix had to get closer to making their own shows, and their "discoverability" features centered around hiding how few movies they have.

I’m sure this is the majority of it but it’s an incomplete analysis. Netflix is hampering discovery of even what they do have. I can go to a friends and they can pull up their Netflix with things I had no idea were currently on offer.

How many movie cards can they put on a screen at once...10, at most. How are they supposed to show you what is "on offer"? If their catalog were 10x smaller or 100x larger, they can only show so much.

I supposed they could email customers an excel document. But short of that, they have to make choices about what to do with the pixels on their page, and those choices represent filtering what they show you. How is "hampering discovery" different than what they are physically forced to do?

Sure. That’s not what I mean though. I mean that every time I go to my page it’s roughly the same and only changes based on what’s new that they’ve decided I’ll like. Years ago when they were doing the long tail business model they had an idea what I like. The t feels like they now have an idea of what they’d like me to like.

If I scroll down far enough I’ll loop around and if I scroll through the categories given they’ll overlap. But if I go to someone with different enough taste I’ll see there are things I’d like to be aware of which I don’t k ow how to engage without already knowing about them. We expect this for languages foreign to us but why is it also true for anything the least bit challenging to one’s usual taste?

My complaint is that the repeat the same titles in multiple rows on the same screen.

Oh right, that’s bad.