It is also done in part to hide just how thin most catalogs are. Notice how Netflix does not allow hiding any of their offerings. Imagine you had the ability to never see particular movies / shows / genres / movies you'd seen paraded before you again — when you cut out all the junk and things you'd never watch, you see the 10 choices left you might, depending on how bored you are, actually watch. Once you're there, you go for the cancel button and that is not what they want to see happen. Yes, they're seeking to guide consumers (that term is chosen purposefully) along predetermined paths, but that is only part of what's going on.

Yes. And Google. There are so many domains I want to never have show up in my search results. Think of one of the domains you hate, the ones that are never truthful, like oann.com is to me. Or all of the zillions of low-quality content farms that are generally ruining all Google results. I would be happy to just keep manually blocking all of them from ever showing up in my results. Google knows that a lot of people would want to do that, and will NEVER allow it. Google wants to steer me.

One of the most insightful comments I've ever read here (lost the link to it, sadly) pointed out that search engines don't have to give you the best result to your query, they only have provide you with a result that you accept as a valid, good enough result.

In fact, it probably benefits them to avoid giving you the best result immediately, because once you found what you're looking for you stop searching, and if you keep searching they get to show you more ads.

(this insight generalizes to market places of all kinds, but one domain where I feel this particularly rings true is dating apps)

Luckily, the web is still open enough that you can do that yourself: https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist

It goes beyond that.

Google hides the things that are not low quality content farms, forcing high quality content to mimic low quality content to survive.

It is worse than no search engine at all.

I would love to see all my statistics.

Netflix know what I watch, how long, what time of day etc. These are statistics about me, so I should have full access to it.

Preferably with additional option to get JSON, so I could parse them as I want.

GDPR mandates it, but it's not happening.

I think Paternalism best describes the practice in this context. It is fairly annoying to not have options in most facets of software, and especially vexing that I can't own something I pay for wrt to subscriptions.

However, I'm fairly young and despite thinking that my fellow cohort would be "digital natives" and interested in controlling the preferences in their hard/software, the vast majority do not care.

If there is a step to change something for their stated benefit that requires more than a button press and some siping gestures, I've seen people just giving up and living with it. This is worrying to me, because that apathy will be the herald to something of far greater import in the years to come, whether that's politically, economically, or just a microcosm of society. And it does not bode well to me.

I believe the practice is called grooming and it makes me feel gaslit and controlled by my own technology.

Corporations are authoritarian by default.

I think the trend becomes visible when the people who use the service are no longer customers - they don't get the quite so friendly face of the corporation.

When we users are just free users, we don't pay, and we are the product - we are the audience for ads or other systems, we see this more "authoritarian" face.

Paternalism is the term that comes to mind