I was completely out of stuff to watch about a month ago. No matter what I did I could only get the same ~100 shows and movies that I'd either already watched or had no interest in.

On a whim I switched over to my step father's profile - holy shit! There were at least 15 movies I wanted to watch that I absolutely could not get to show up on my profile without searching by name. I found a handful more on other family member's as well.

If we weren't on a 5 person family plan I would have cancelled long ago because from what they will show me there isn't any to watch.

And herein lies the issue with filtering/tailoring based on what you've watched/liked before: it can never 'escape' and give you something different that you might actually really like.

I don't know how many good titles I discovered browsing random titles in video stores back in the day.

And it would be so simple to solve. Prepare a tailored list. Instead of using it on all available space, fill only 90% of the space with items from the list. Fill remaining 10% with random items that do not belong to that list.

Yep this is how you’re supposed to escape from a local maximum. But maybe Netflix’s usual customer doesn’t stick around long enough to have this problem so it’s not worth fixing. I can’t imagine none of their machine learning engineers know how to fix this.

Yeah, I bet they know. Question is, do their managers want them to fix this?

There is this hypothesis that I've seen floating on HN at times, that Netflix does this to hide the fact that their selection is very small. I'm not totally convinced, but a lot of their UI choices feel like good evidence in favour of this hypothesis.

Thankfully there are alternative interfaces to browse the Netflix catalog:

https://www.coollector.com/index.html#netflix

I think that could be solved by having a button to mark something as watched, removing it from recommendations and the catalog other than the list of things you watched.

You could hide episodes you've seen or entire seasons up to entire shows. Would fix a lot of the issues I'm having.

And it's not just the subpar discovery features. It's the combination of awful discovery and their abysmal recommendation engine that renders exploration impossible. When will those engines understand that I'm not interested in every mediocre drug/crime/sports/[any other broad topic] documentary just because I watched this one exceptionally good documentary that happened to deal with the topic Netflix now decides to push down my throat?

I want outstanding content regardless of topic and these days Netflix seems to be delivering less of that or at the very least makes it incredibly hard to find in a sea of mediocre content.

Try one of the standalone discovery sites. These improve this aspect a lot. I'm using Flixboss (https://flixboss.com).

Does this deal with Netflix in other countries?

I'd just like a big table of everything available with meta-data in columns and the ability to hide rows

Flixbox is USA only, but there are some websites like unogs.com who can handle more countries. In addition to a more convenient browsing of the catalog, if you also want an alternative recommendation system (with really accurate and unbiased predicted ratings), there's the Windows/Mac app Coollector Movie Database: https://www.coollector.com/

Discovery is pretty much impossible for anything with a lot of products, I think mainly because there's no way to account for someone's personal taste, a pretty intangible concept.

Trying to find actual hidden gems on Steam or iOS is a nightmare, to the point where I waste the time I set aside to play games because I'm looking for one instead. Same with Amazon, the best it can do is "people who bought this product also bought this other sort of related product."

I also agree that UI like Netflix currently has -- big giant vaguely descriptive rectangles that only fit a handful on screen at once -- make discovery super discouraging, since it becomes tedious to scroll through everything and find more info about it.