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Comment by rogerbinns | Hacker News Reader

I've been getting increasingly frustrated at Netflix, because it keeps recommended things I have already seen, or definitely do not want to see. Having to keep scrolling through unwanted content like that really reinforces just how dumb it is, despite all these claims about their intelligence.

Eventually I did figure out that on the website you can say you aren't interested in particular items, but Android/Roku etc do not have that option. Of course those Netflix employees who work on this stuff deal with the PC/web based interface all the time, but apparently don't realise that not everyone does that.

Android/Roku etc do let you set ratings on items, but to me there is a big difference between "I am not interested in this item" and "I have watched it and give it one star".

View on HN

Netflix: "I see you liked a couple scifi anime movies. Perhaps you'd like to watch our entire catalog of big breast anime aimed at a completely different audience."

Exactly. I wish I could do something like...

Movies.objects.filter(tags__in=['anime', 'sci-fi', 'robots', 'cyberpunk']).exclude(tags__in=['nuns', 'schoolgirls', 'demons', 'demon-hunting-nun-schoolgirls'])

or even just see all of the tags that they tag things with, and allow searching by those.

Of course, I also would love to be able to blacklist films that I know I'm never going to watch (some horror films, some of aforementioned anime :)), and have them hidden from browsing or search results (or even just sequester them at the end of the list, or dim them out?).

"Things I've already seen" is the worst part of it for me, and is making me more and more likely to cancel the service out of (possibly misplaced) anger at feeling like Netflix is just regurgitating the same content at me to hide lack of a fuller back catalog.

On the other hand, rewatching is probably 90% of my usage and that's very helpful. I suspect that's why they leave it there: a lot of the audience uses Netflix like TV and they just want something familiar on in the background.

>a lot of the audience uses Netflix like TV and they just want something familiar on in the background

That's exactly how I use it and their "Watch it again" section is very helpful.

I am getting really annoyed at this too. It almost seems like an intentional thing to get me to not choose something. The ratings are usually pretty accurate, but then it shows me something with a half a star in "Top picks for me". Also, often if i watch one documentary, next time i log in, 90% documentaries shown. For some reason it is designed to show me the same things as what i just watched.

> Eventually I did figure out that on the website you can say you aren't interested in particular items

I didn't know you could do this. Looking forward to telling Netflix that no, I do not want to watch The Interview.

I haven't looked into in a while, but from what I remember it lets you say whether you are interested in categories of content and not specific content.

You can say not interested specific content as well (on the web interface at least). It doesn't always seem to get the message straight away though.

FWIW, I thought The Interview was way better than I expected it to be. It is very, very silly, and it does not take itself seriously, but it wasn't particularly predictable either. Maybe you'd be pleasantly surprised?

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