I have a strong suspicion the reason the interface is set up like this is to prevent you from realizing how small their catalog actually is.
There are thousands of television series and movies available to Americans on Netflix (less so in other countries, but the point still stands). Cable television doesn't offer a fraction of what's available on Netflix. I'm not aware of another streaming service that offers more titles.
What is Netflix's library "small" relative to? Again, just curious because I've seen this mentioned plenty of times, and I personally find there's an overwhelming amount of content on there.
One of my pet peeves is that they don't indicate that a show is in a foreign language with English subtitles. Why is there no way to set a flag to just show English-language content?
Others are fine with Netflix if it can offer them something to watch that meets their standards. It doesn’t matter if it was one of two or two hundred viable options. Netflix is able to do this for very high standards as well as middling tastes.
This is also known as maximizing vs satisficing^. Both ways of treating media are valid but there’s some friction when the collectors try to make the watchers feel bad (or when the watchers make the collectors look a bit irrational, as I’m admittedly trying to do with this comment.)
^ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/20150...
Most recently, there is the response to their removal of user reviews. That I regret; I've found them useful, and even a bit more so with the removal of the "star" ratings for this overly simplistic and opaque thumbs up/down mechanism.
But what I haven't seen mentioned, but am now noticing, is that at some point they removed the year of release from at least their hover/pop-up descriptions. At the moment, and not in the right place to check, I'm not sure whether they are gone from their more details listings -- whose UI to access is an unwieldy pain in the ass, itself.
They just want you to see an interesting looking tile, that you haven't seen before, and click on it.
Never mind that the content behind it is most likely the same "minimally acceptable" c-list, maybe b-list, content they've been increasingly shoveling up for these past some years. Except for some of their headliner "original content". And, a lot of their original content listings are becoming similar stuff they slap their brand on, often acquired -- likely on the cheap -- from non-U.S. productions. (There's nothing wrong with non-U.S. productions, but there's a lot of inexpensive, second-if-that tier stuff in the rest of the world. And the good stuff is increasingly captured by other outlets maximizing returns and control over what Netflix will pay and offer.)
At least, that's the way I've come to interpret what I'm experiencing with them.