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Comment by jimmar | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people are complaining about terrible content on Netflix. Years ago, Netflix was praised for its "long tail"--basically it could have content that appealed to people with diverse interests. But it seems like people now see the long tail as useless junk and would prefer a shorter tail with more concentrated quality.

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Netflix had a long tail, when it was a DVD rental service. Netflix streaming has never had a long tail and definitely don't now. They presently have less than 4000 movies, including all their 'originals' (which should probably be called 'derivatives'.) This is scarcely a long tail as far as I'm concerned. I cancelled my account years ago because there was nothing I wanted to watch. I realized I spent two or three times as much time browsing the catalogue as actually watching something, and half the time I was settling for something I'd already seen. Nothing I've seen or heard even remotely tempts me to come back.

If Netflix would make it more obvious what is junk vs not I think it would be a more enjoyable experience. Right now I have to keep switching from their app to cast and IMDB/Google/Rotten Tomatoes to figure out if something just has a rough start or is just bad.

Long tail works as long as the people in the tail can find the content relevant to them. If browsing and search is bad enough that it doesn't seem to be there, it might as well not be.

Their UI, or the service itself, is also flaky. It's fairly common for us to start watching a series and the next day Netflix will show us as having already watched all of the episodes, despite our changing to a complex password and also not enough hours passing for us to have watched them all. I wonder if they are juicing the numbers for some reason or if it's just an error.

> It's fairly common for us to start watching a series and the next day Netflix will show us as having already watched all of the episodes

Wildly off-topic but perhaps you’re turning off a TV without the streaming device itself shutting down?

I suppose it's possible that their auto-play feature is doing it. Most of our Netflix use is on a laptop so if the browser tab isn't closed maybe it keeps streaming the auto-play, although I haven't checked for that.

Netflix lost a lot of good long tail content when networks pulled their old content to form the foundations of their own streaming platforms. For example, The Office.

The long tail I want: movies/shows made in the 80s, your friends might recognize the name. The long tail netflix has: made last year in Romania, nobody has ever heard of it.

Apple TV seems to do this well. Too many choices appears to be just as bad as no choices. I don’t go to Netflix because there’s just too much. It literally makes my anxiety rise just being in there.

> But it seems like people now see the long tail as useless junk

Hum... It's not that. It's just that it's impossible to access the long tail of Netflix content.

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