Remember when it was annoying pop-ups that auto-played video and sound? Now it's a feature to extract as many watch-time minutes from users as possible. I guarantee it's all A/B testing looking for a few points of uptick in watch time.
I've had it re-enable itself a few times. I'm sure it's due to the extra add-ons and such I use that's messing with it. A few of my friends don't use the same add-ons I use, or they don't use any and have had it happen enough times for them to complain to me about it.
My friend first found out his auto-play was re-enabled after youtube ate up most of his monthly bandwidth cap in one night.
So we're definitely in the minority, but it does seem to happen to different people with very different configurations.
Sure they have some stellar content but they also have a lot of crap.
I get that Netflix is a different beast than Hulu in many ways. But for cord cutters Hulu feels more like the total package.
Their horror is an awful text heavy interface with 5 inch size font on my TV.
I remember even further back when the internet put users in control.
Too late to edit unfortunately
I personally like having the ability to preview content rapidly—I can glean a lot about a show/movie in just a few seconds of video (title/thumbnail alone is low-info). The old pattern was ~5 clicks + buffer time to watch a preview (if one was even available). Also, opening Netflix signals an intention to receive audio+video—this isn’t nearly so bad as e.g. ESPN’s site randomly blasting you with a video as I’m trying to read an article.
Anyways, I agree that software should be as user-configurable as is reasonable, and it seems that these days apps like Netflix are completely bereft of meaningful options. Also much of the content that Netflix pumps out feels like the output of a generative algorithm designed to cover market segments vs. anything guided by a sort of original artistic vision.
(PS—can we collectively pump the brakes on the “X minor annoyance is cancer” lingo?)
But it's easy for me to not get upset about auto-playing trailers because my primary client never got updated to support them.
Users get the products they "want", not what they need — or deserve:
Make Something People Need
> We are surrounded by well engineered — and increasingly addictive — technology that shapes what we do and how we think. Especially when you work at a large tech company, how do you trade giving users what they want and your own business’s profitability, with the negative effects that this leads to?
https://www.nemil.com/musings/make-something-people-need.htm...
Or some director/executive who insists a pet personal preference be added to the product despite protestations from the entire team.
I suspect it's a result of poorly done UX research.
If you frame the question as "How can we increase engagement with the homescreen", adding noise does increase engagement.
Basically the % of people interacting with the home screen increases, but the number of people viewing the home screen decreases.
Ironically this means less time spent exploring...
Netflix often generates some interesting micro-genres and I used to scroll through a bit looking for things to add to my list - now if I don't have a specific title in mind I don't open Netflix at all.
Though I'm not sure I should complain - less mindless watching has lead to me reading more research papers and news. Being more productive.
I actually disagree. I think Netflix has several massive troves. For example I recently worked my way through Frasier, then Cheers. There's a lot of hit shows like Star Trek, Friends, Buffy etc.
I agree the selection is not perfect, but for me, there's a lot of stuff that I wanted to check out in the 90s but was too lazy to monitor a VCR for. There's also a decent enough amount of original content - Black Miror, Bojack for example, that make me feel I get my money's worth.
Maybe it's a generational thing... Netflix has so much more than any Blockbuster.
If not Netflix, what service? Who has better selection? Who is their rival.
IMHO Netflix is getting better at creating great content - Bojack Horseman for example is superb. They have the name brand recognition. And at the end of the day, the price is right - people can justify 12 bucks a month.
IMHO Netflix's rival is not Hulu or Prime Video - it's the local library. Many library systems nowadays offer DVDs and BluRays. Why pay a monthly fee when you can get the same titles from the library as fast as you could. Basically, people may be willing to trade cost for speed. (Heck sometimes I can get things faster from the library than I can from my DVD plan)
So why do they do it? What's the business case? I know they aren't idiots over there. What do they know that the rest of us don't?
Are the content producers actually paying them to force-feed those previews?
They are probably right and have data to back it up but I find that “feature” to be extremely anti-user. It shows utter contempt for user preference.
Of course, many of Netflix's UI features have historically been engineered to make it hard to tell just how limited their selection really is, so autoplay does fit that pattern, at least.
The best Netflix interface is the one Apple designed for them on the Apple TV 1-3. I’m considering dusting it up just for Netflix.
Ps. Agree with everything you and parent said!
They will never expose an outside review system.
But somehow Hulu is worse so there’s no impetus to clean up.
You'd be better off getting rid of Netflix altogether. The acceleration of addictiveness[1] caused by tech companies making their platforms ever more sticky is anti-human.
If there is a film/series you really need to watch, there's always Bit Torrent.
It's so obnoxious that I would consider paying extra to 1) shut this off, and 2) have a sane implementation of some sort of helpful/powerful search filter.
At the very least, it shouldn’t auto-play the audio, only the video.