

Ask HN: Why is Netflix becoming anti-social? - foomarks

I feel like Netflix is not giving us a straight answer on why they completely removed the Friends features from their service. It was half the reason I even use their service. One commenter left one good theory, but I'm curious if there are other good theories:<p>"Here's why I think NF is killing the friends features. The company is buying fewer DVDs because it's moving towards total streaming. The 'recommendations' the site pushes are only those that are 'available now' or on Instant Watch so the company doesn't have to buy more inventory. If customers no longer have the friend features it makes it harder to find 'unique, classic, independent, etc movies N-F doesn't want to buy anyway."<p>http://blog.netflix.com/2010/03/friends-update.html#Blog1_cmt-4755499758062243309
======
puredemo
Why would you want Netflix to be social? Fuck, let me watch a movie in peace.

~~~
brk
I kind of agree, and as a long-term Netflix user, I never really used the
"Friends" feature on Netflix. I may have a really strong friendship with
someone, but that doesn't mean we have similar tastes in movies.

I _am_ good friends with someone, we'll talk about movies in meatspace, or
maybe on Facebook.

The Netflix "Friends" thing seems to be caught in a bit of a void. Your
stronger friendships for casual movies discussions are likely to be maintained
on Facebook or Twitter. While the hyper movie aficionados seem to be on imdb
or other highly specialized movie discussion boards.

I like the recommendations engine on Netflix, the streaming, the ease of
finding movies to watch, but I don't see it as a social hub.

~~~
puredemo
I think the one thing I might use a friends feature for on Netflix is
friending people I didn't already know who had extremely similar taste in
films to me, solely for the purpose of seeing what they think about new
releases. That would somewhat interesting.

------
thesethings
Maybe if folks like Netflix are so bad at the social part, we should separate
the place where we _talk_ about movies, from the place where we _consume_
them.

Kind of like how Good Reads + Library Thing are better than Amazon for
discovery/listing/reviewing books (I partially take that back, Amazon is
pretty good at discovery of "similar.")

Anyway, what this incident makes me think about is: We just need a good social
site where the social object is movies.

Is there already a GoodReads.com of movies?

~~~
adora
perhaps <http://www.flixster.com/> (and its Movies Facebook app) is the
closest analogous site.

------
waterlesscloud
Inventory costs aren't the factor here. The cost of making films available
isn't going to change a lot with streaming. The physical cost of a DVD is very
low, it's the content that costs, and streaming vs physical isn't going to
dent that.

Now, Netflix's delivery costs are something else. Obviously that's a much
bigger factor in the dvd vs streaming debate.

------
mos1
To quote NetFlix: "Friends is a feature on the Netflix Web site that’s been
used by less than two percent of all subscribers since we added the feature in
2004."

That strikes me as a wholly adequate explanation.

~~~
thesethings
If you read the (unfortunately unthreaded and super-hard to browse) comment
thread, there were a lot of users questioning that.

I guess I'd like to know more about "active" users, and social features.

Also... in 2010 it's just super surreal in a domain as vast as "movies," to
not have deep social features to help people manage and discover.

I'm buying the OP's suggestion that Friends was turning up tons of
recommendations that you can't stream (that part is the studios' fault, not
Netflix's), and it was leading to a lot of dead-end experiences.

But I just really don't buy that Netflix's longterm strategy is to get _less_
social. They are too ahead of the curve, and too smart to think/do that.

My personal theory is that they are overhauling Friends and social in general,
behind the scenes.

~~~
drivingmenuts
But how many people were questioning as a percentage of their entire userbase?

